Okay, we're back in San Francisco at the big EMC v-spec event, and this is a special services angle interview with Barbara Speedtech, who is with Brocade, vice president of channels for Brocade, no stranger to the channel business. This is an event that's all about the channels, about the services, about the services angle, and you can go to servicesangle.com as our reference point for all the innovations in the services business. Service providers, web services, application services, customer service, and channel services, channel support, very disruptive. Barbara, welcome back. Thank you. To theCUBE. So we just had Arrow on, you and I were talking to those guys, and they're distributed, they've seen it all. They're huge. They've been a monster, and they have a huge size, they have a lot of customers. And we didn't get a chance to talk about some of the things that you and I were talking about prior to going on, so I want to have a special spotlight on the economics of the channel. Channels changed. And in uplift markets, IPO markets growing, opening up, companies are growing, opportunities are there. So you had some ideas that you wanted to share about the profitability and the economics on the channel. What's your thoughts on this? Well, I wanted to go a little bit deeper, and we talked a little bit about the whole channel transformation, what the clouds and the IT deconstruction actually mean to the channel are. They're all changing models. And I think there's a couple of things that are happening. One is clearly the buying behavior we talked about, CAPEX versus OPEX. So when we talk services, I also talk about financial offerings. And I think most vendors are nowadays trying to also add financial offering as a part of what I call channel partner business model awareness. What do you mean by financial offering? Well, there's anything from the, there used to be the classical lease options, but for example, Procade Institute last year, what is called Procade Network Subscription Offer, which is actually port and subscription basis. But it's subscription. It's actually, it's completely not owned anymore. It's complete transformation from CAPEX to OPEX. On the lease, you still own the asset. On the subscription service, you don't own the asset anymore. So that really takes the entire financial burden off the customer as well as the channel partner. So it's really, really disruptive models. And the benefit to go that way is what, for the customer to go? For the customers, obviously, as I said, immediate transfer to OPEX versus CAPEX cost. And that is part of the change in model they're looking for. The buying behavior is one. The other one we've seen is, and this is really all about services, right? It's the, it's the need for expertise and skill sets as these infrastructures are grown so complex, as it's all changing, as it's been re-architected. We heard in several interviews before, the customer as well as the channel partners under huge pressure to, to have the right level of skill sets. There is a shortage of savvy as ease, right? The certifications you need to hold when you do end to end. They can't hire fast enough. No, they can't. In areas that are most critical, data, cloud, architects. Exactly. And when you look at this, this is again where, as vendors, and I think Brocade and EMC teaming up, what do you have to be? You have to be very much investment aware, because it's costing the channel partner a lot of money, you know, to set up these army of, of as ease. Explain what you mean by investment aware, because that's, it's drilled down. Yeah, and that's placed right into the, into the profitable model, because as they are changing the model, as they need more skill set investments, they look in at vendors to either have very compelling certification programs, which are actually self-funded, which is what I think both ourselves and EMC invest a lot on. So it saves them cost. They're looking at as much web-based, you know, and more online and e-based training models, rather than as e-timeout, it's critical. And then they're looking at these things like what we offer with EMC, support service packages, you know, that they can just take to the customer, architectures they can take, they are pre-tested, pre-validated. So it doesn't require their skills. That's what I meant by push button. I mean, essentially turn key. It is, it is turn key. And then on top of that, things like the, the joint lab we're actually talking about, where they don't have to do and do proof of concept and demo investment. This is what I call investment aware. All of these, you know, are driven to improve the bottom line at the, at the reseller base. What he's, with all these new dynamics changing, obviously that changes some of the tactical things involved in the channel business. Like the old days, like Jeremy Burton. So I would just throw money at it and the old model co-op and then see you later. Yeah. Yeah. The channel has always been kind of a fickle beast in the sense that you got to kind of give them some love, but not too much love. Let them do their thing, no conflict, throw some dollars to support them. And then listen, if you don't listen, you're dead. Yes. And that's why you, that's such a good point because that's why you got to be, I think channel programs are like you say is really fickle. It's always like you have your usual set of tools, right? You have the deal registrations, the back end rebates, the co-ops. As I said, training funding, you have your usual, you know, set of tools. The table stakes, you know. But the, I think the big question is really, you know, how much of those you use and how you use them. And I think one of the key things that as a, as a smart vendor and a vendor that wants to invest in channel partners that provide value is really, you know, to tie those things into skill sets and specializations. And I always call out in our program and so does EMC. It's a pay-for performance, right? Rather than pay to participate. And I think that's very important as you try to drive profitability. You have to make sure if they invest, if they, if they get better, right? They should be paid on. And one of the things I wanted to highlight as well, within V-specs, that is a, such a fantastic example of a meet in the channel. We really did like a 360 package around it. Not only do we have the compelling technology offer. 360 package mean 360 view of all the stakeholders. All around, all around for the channel. I'm specifically saying, channel stakeholders. Because not only do we have a compelling offer that empowers them, right? To be that point of integration for the customer. Both EMC and brocade teed up and tied a whole bunch of components around it. We, we teamed up in deal registration. We joined up in obviously the lab. We're gonna do actually some direct even, even rewards at the sales basis of the resellers. So we really tied a package together that we send. Not only do we have the most compelling offer, but we also have a whole bunch of benefits. And then I think is, is, as we, as we call our earlier smart, smart use of your channel components. Well, we'll, we'll wait and see on how that results is.  And, you know, we noticed that with the VNX launch in January was, packaging's fine, you know, as long as it works, right? And customers will vote with their wallets and we'll see what happens. And obviously the market dynamics. But I got to say, I'm impressed with the approach. I think it's totally channel friendly. Again, you know, we talked before we came on, the channel, you know, needs certain things, but there's a new model going on. So with that in mind, what new things are you seeing in the channel marketing business? So channel marketing today and then going forward. What do you see as new things that will emerge? Maybe something out of the V-spec's launch or something else. What's your vision around channel marketing? So like you're saying, the channel is really a heavy set of tools, right? The new things are really always, always difficult. I think one of the new things for me, and I keep on mentioning it, is really that you have to be aware that these guys are changing business model. And that goes to distribution where there's still vendors, I think, that's just pick, pack, and chip, right? And they do logistics and financing. But I think as we heard of some of the other interviews before, these guys are all changing their model. They're adding a lot of value. They're putting integration centers in place and so on. At the same time, the resellers are all looking for, why do I play my role in the cloud, right? Do I just resell, do I do services? I think as a vendor, one of the big things I see is you have to be aware of those changes and you have to make your program more modular, more flexible. So that's, for me, that's one of the key drivers because we will, the channel model and the way that they go to market today will not be the way that they go tomorrow. Yeah, and I think Pete Culliopoulos from Arrow really underscores that point where he said, just kind of off the cuff, and I'm really glad we kind of stumbled in that area. Is that relative to your point about changing business models is Arrow essentially said, hey, we've always had data that we've collected through our distribution business, but now they're taking the big data approach to build new products to change their business model. And it's not just a me too, it's actually they're using big data and using existing legacy data. So to me, that is an example of what I see as good channel market. And at the end of the day, he just underscores it and somewhere says, hey, it's about sales. I can go and get better sales leads in my salespeople. Well, and this is the classical thing like what does a channel partner look for, which is PPP, product profit and push, which means leads. It's still the same thing all over, right? But the push, and I think that's also what Pete mentioned, every winner talks about lead generation, right? But ultimately, that's always one of the most difficult things. Do you give unqualified leads and the way that Pete described it, using solid end user data, I think is also something that you can really bring to the channel partners? You know, this is a complex business that we're in. It's getting easier thanks to these kinds of respect solutions. And, you know, it's always going to be challenging to abstract away the complexities and make things simple and efficient, which I like that messaging from EMC. But it's still going to be challenging. It's still complicated. So you have a global view. You handle global channels. So, you know, multi-tenancy in the cloud in the US might mean something completely different in the European community. So, what's the global flair for you? What's the perspective there? And that's actually a great point. That's also a great point as it comes to services, because, I mean, we're in the United States here. So we're talking about services where most vendors have like a complete broad layer of support infrastructure in country. Some of the regions I'm dealing with, you know, wouldn't even define an SME as an SME. That's like the large top enterprise customers in these countries. And the channel partners do everything from soup to nuts, right? You don't even have to tell them to do, to try to bring you revenues and services, because a lot of these guys act as support partners, professional service partners, and single stops, you know, in country, distribution, reseller. So I would say the interesting thing is from a global perspective, it's usually the more you go out of the, from the core markets, the model gets very, I would say, self-sufficient. And channel partners do almost everything, you know, from distribution through reseller, through support and service provider. Yeah, and having a global footprint means a lot now differently than it did a while ago. I mean, now, with the web and the internet being global, and with mobile being global, it means something differently. It actually means something now. And business can be global faster now than it used to be. In the old days, it used to be hard to be global pretty fast. My final question to you is kind of more of a philosophical question around kind of the state of the channel. If I would say the statement that Cloud Mobile and Social is the disruptive three major trends driving this change with data being the disruptive enabler underneath all those, if that's a true statement, what happens to the channel evolution from this perspective of where are we today? So, meaning this, because this VSpec launch underscores to me like, okay, a mindset shift in thinking around cataloging and how products are gonna be packaged with the notion of providing big scale support, almost like a massively scaled system. Where's the channel? Are they in kindergarten? Are they in elementary school? Are they in college? I mean, where's the channel business? Is it too early on a scale of one to 10, 10 being highly mature, one being born? I think in various stages. And again, first of all, from a global perspective, it's obviously dependent on the marketplace because the United States, Germany, UK, France will be in very different position than Eastern Europe is a part of Asia, right? This is, I mean, that level of maturity. It's sort of US. Geographic, yeah. Let's say US and the big international. Yeah, if we talk West, when I talked earlier, I think about the whole channel transformation where I see, as I said, I call it identity search. They're all trying to position where am I going. The reality is, though, I think the analyst and also myself and things like V-specs are designed for enabling channel partners to build out private clouds primarily, of course, hybrid and public. But the analysts still say that the next couple of years will be a lot of private cloud build-out. Private cloud build-out is a lot of classic data center build-out. So I think most channel partners. Yeah, with a cloud twist. It's not cloud washing. It's just cloud one data. Yeah, but the thing is, that means I think there still is a lot of hardware build-out, infrastructure build-out opportunity, which V-specs enables them to do even better. In terms of maturity, I tell my channel partners, though, adapt or vanish. You've got to think now about what happens in the next four or five years, because some of them might even further think about different business models. Like I said, some are doing their own application hosting or backup services or managed services. Some are really thinking, concentrating on cloud resale. But I would say maturity, probably 10%, 15% are adopting. I think the rest are still thinking about it. Yeah, and if you think about it too, what you just said is kind of interesting, because I look at SAP, for example, I just came back from their press conference, I've been covering them and EMC. I mean, this is cutting-edge stuff. I mean, what we're doing is really making infrastructure decoupled from essentially application-like environments with some middleware glue in between. And that's hard stuff, right? And to roll that out into a channel, an indirect channel offering is really, really compelling. So I think it's early, but it's really going to be a differentiator. I was just, even SAP, they're having a huge uptake, but that's just their cutting-edge. So the channel is quickly there with a product. So I'm excited by it. We'll see if the channel can suck it up and absorb it, if they can get trained on it and get all the tools integrated into this kind of formula, because it's essentially rolling out infrastructure at larger scale. There's, and I keep on telling them, it's if you don't see it as a threat, it's a huge opportunity, but they got to adapt. And as we said earlier, there's margin in the mystery, there's margin in the cloud. I think the cloud's the real deal. And Barbara, thank you very much. That's a services angle special, channel economics breakdown in the V-spec launch, very complex product package, simply and elegantly for the channel. If that's truly going to pan out, it should be a home run for EMC. Barbara, thanks for your commentary and analysis. We'll be right back with our next interview right after this. Thank you. Code ciphers and code breakers have been around since the beginning of time. Julius Caesar used ciphers to communicate with his armies. Secret coded messages were brought as evidence of treachery in the trial against Mary, Queen of Scots. She lost her case and her head. The German military believed their World War II enigma machine generated an unbreakable code, which was soon cracked and exploited by the Allies. But today's digital society poses even greater opportunities for code breakers, criminals, hackers, and nation states who wish to shatter encrypted websites and systems to access, steal, and sometimes destroy what's inside. More than 21,000 people attended the most recent RSA security conference in San Francisco entitled, The Great Cipher is Mightier Than the Sword to learn from the best cryptographers and internet security experts, what they can do to keep themselves and their businesses safe from attack. From the Expo Hall at the RSA conference in beautiful San Francisco. The industry has succeeded in making the internet with all its weaknesses and idiosyncrasies safe enough to transform the world. With increased speed, agility, and cunning, attackers are taking advantage of gaps in security resulting from the openness in today's hyper-connected infrastructures. We can ensure that the balance of control of our digital world remains in the hands of security practitioners. We can give them the tools they need to identify threats quickly and eradicate them. We can give our industry the structures it needs to share intelligence so that we can all be in this fight together. And that knowledge gained by any one of us can become power for all of us. Energy, there's games being I can get into. Actually, I did the talk on firewalls. I think it was RSA one or RSA two and it was down in the basement of the Fairmont back when it was just this little bitty conference. Here is our advanced red expert and do discover your introset alter ego on the other side of that wall. I wonder about these designations though because would you really want to go talk to someone who's a troll? Courtney just did. I know. You seem like a pretty nice guy too. Yeah, trolls get a bad name. All right, all right, so sorry. I apologize to all the trolls out there. I'm sure you're all lovely people.


Progress is an uncontested good. Theoretically, that means scientific and technological progress is assumed to be positive irrespective of any evidence to the contrary. Practically though, it means that the moment technological or scientific progress is questioned, it will often elicit silence, or ridicule, or in the worst case, abuse. Questioning progress picks up an unhealed sore, our severance from nature, which all those enmeshed in industrial society must endure. For over 40 years, one person who has consistently picked at the contradictions between the purpose and the reality of human progress is John Zersen. Published 20 years ago, his collections of essays and interviews, running on emptiness, is a milestone not only in his examination of the folly of technological progress, but also his promotion of anarcho-primitivism as the lens through which to view that idea, as Zersen states near the end of the first essay. Massive, unfulfilling consumption within the dictates of production and social control reigns as a chief everyday consolation for this absence of meaning. More of what has failed for so long can hardly be the answer. Culture has led us to betray our own Aboriginal spirit and wholeness into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverished estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures without which we would lose our humanness, but as our plight deepens, we glimps just how much must be erased for our redemption. Posing questions like this has a long history, going back to the ancient Greeks, and Zersen is not alone in this today, but too often, when people consider the issue of technology and well-being, they focus on the hardware, on machines. Likewise, they look at the inevitable detritus created by modern technology in the form of intractable pollutants which nature cannot ameliorate and decry the fortlessness of their creation. Zersen, though, goes further, looking at how it was the abstract, intellectual basis of modernity, the human duality of body and mind, which was, and continues to be, the basis for our severance from the natural world. As he says in the second essay, Just what is time, empirically, we have gone along with the substantiation of time so that it seems a fact of nature, a power existing in its own right. The growth of a sense of time, the acceptance of time, is a process of adaptation to an ever more rarefied world. It is a constructed dimension, the most elemental aspect of culture. Time's inexorable nature provides the ultimate model of domination. Other thinkers, such as E.P. Thompson, have outlined how the core of industrial society is time discipline. It forces us to coordinate our actions through an increasingly small divisions of existence that are imperceptible to our natural being. Days and lunar months are natural. Minutes and seconds are, for most people, abstract. Over the next few essays, Zersen discusses how it is the abstract nature of technology, not simply the mechanics of living with technology, which orders people's lives to allow their domination and exploitation. As he says, There have been analyses by people who have been pretty worried about the whole development. If technology is not neutral, as Hawkeimer and Adorno argue very forcefully, reason isn't a neutral thing either when you think about it. They raise a critique of what they call instrumental reason. Reason, under the sign of civilisation and technology, is fundamentally biased towards distancing and control. In my last review, I noted how David Graber makes the argument that being realistic first requires someone to define what realism is. Zersen is making the same point, that rationalism in industrial society has a particular meaning skewed towards the maintenance of industrial technology. But more importantly, the systems of control and domination which flow from that are all framed by industrial rationalism, not natural human perceptions. Zersen develops this idea in the things we do. Technology is the knack of soaring range in the world that we need not experience it. We are expected to deny what is living and natural within us in order to acquiesce in the domination of non-human nature. Technology has unmistakably become the great vehicle of rarefication, not forgetting that it is embedded and embodied in an ever-expanding, global field of capital, rarefication subordinates us to our own objectified creations. Rarefication, the act of treating something abstract as if it were a real thing, is the core of how society is able to be dominated by a very few people, using the power of systems, be that a measure of time, an ideology, or the mechanized 24-hour noise of the mass media. Though I've tried to summarise the framework of its arguments, I've barely gotten halfway through this book. I'll deal with Zersen's advocacy of anarcho-primitism at length in a future review. But for now, what's important to understand is that it's the displacement of our natural experience by technological systems to the point where it overrides our perceptions of the real world, which permits our domination by technology. Zersen has an easily readable, discursive style, but the true substance of what he writes can't be easily gained directly from the text. If many people criticise John Zersen's work, it is precisely because, as they are so buried in the abstract reasonings of technological society, they cannot understand what he says. Likewise, those who appreciate his work are often those who feel the greatest alienation from that industrial process. Zersen is raising arguments which have plagued modernism for well over 2,000 years. What makes this a pressing matter today is that resolving this may be our only means of saving future generations from impending ecological catastrophe. After thoughts, I'm running on emptiness. As I bend open my old copy of Running on Emptiness to write this review, the brittle glue in the spine cracks. It is getting rather old and has been well used over the years. Nothing lasts, and the more highly engineered human society becomes, the more resources it takes simply to maintain it at its particular point of development, let alone expanding or improving it. That, ultimately, is the lesson of progress, running faster to stand still. That is not a new idea. As Lewis Carroll said in Alice in Wonderland, my dear, here we run as fast as we can just to stay in place, and if you wish to go anywhere, you must run twice as fast as that. If we go back over 2,000 years, Greek philosophers, such as Epicurus, were warning the wealth required by nature is limited and easy to procure, but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity. This will be the last thing I write for a couple of weeks. I'm about to carry out a major overhaul of my computer system, necessitating disconnecting my work from the rest of the world for a short while. Perhaps the anticipation of that process made me think of writing a review of one of Zersen's books. I do computers. As I often say to people, I could have been a serious hacker, but I did far too much backpacking. It is that chasm I bestride between being deeply involved in the world of computers and the internet since the 1980s, while simultaneously being deeply involved in spending time outdoors in natural pursuits, which gives me a perspective, a frame, to contrast the ideas of people like Zersen with the experience of what it means to live in industrial society. As the years have passed and the evidence accumulates why industrial society is the root of many human ills, from endemic violence to global ecological crisis, I find that my knowledge of science and technology both becomes more valuable, and yet at the same time, more than welcome to many of those I try and share it with. As society becomes more complex, as individuals and communities we have less control, as the economic and political chaos of recent years demonstrates, greater technology and affluence does not create satisfaction, it creates a reactionary insecurity, and with that, less control, except in the conditions of ever harsher repression, which is arguably one of the drivers of the drift to the right in the UK over recent years. People dismiss Zersen because they perceive what he says is extreme, nonsensical, or to use the phrase I remarked on earlier, unrealistic. The fact is, these ideas are presented to us routinely within our everyday culture, from news articles about nonsensical computer glitches to dystopian stories, but because this noise does not directly challenge the foundation of modern culture, these eventually pass without reflection. A brilliant example of this are the Matrix films. For example, there's a wonderful scene in Matrix Reloaded which seemingly passes without note and makes the crescendo of action and violence across the arc of the storyline, near accompanies a council member down to the engineering level. Almost no one comes down here, unless of course there's a problem. That's how it is with people. Nobody cares how it works, as long as it works. I like it down here. I like to be reminded that this city survives because of these machines.  Interesting isn't it? The power to give life and the power to end it. Of course, the power of science fiction is that it can poke ridicule at the everyday frustrations of technological life there in creating a compelling narrative, because it speaks to our inner lived experience. Neo then remarks, but we control these machines, they don't control us. If we wanted to we could shut these machines down. To which the councillor replies, that's control. If we wanted we could smash them to bits, although if we did we'd have to consider what would happen to our lights, our heat, our air. He then continues. There is so much in this world that I do not understand. Seeing that machine, it has something to do with recycling our water supply. I have absolutely no idea how it works, but I do understand the reason for it to work. I have absolutely no idea how you are able to do some of the things you do, but I believe there's a reason for that as well. I only hope we can understand that reason before it's too late. To parody Churchill, never in human history, have so many understood so little about the things which influence so much in the course of their everyday lives. This is a cognitive dissonance which traps the residents of technological society. In one sense, most people are aware that modern existence is increasingly irrational and unsustainable, and yet at the same moment they know that without these processes everything they know to be certain would disappear. And in any case, even if it felt a need to enact change, their lack of understanding makes anything other than a catastrophic smash-them-to-bits response impossible. If the modern environmental movement has failed, it is because it cannot offer a convincing alternative to that system, merely a different form of consumerism, which is arguably why people will not change. To enact change implies control, and as outlined throughout the Matrix films, control is often an illusion based on factors we cannot in reality control. The reality of the modern technological world is that very few people actually have enough knowledge or economic power to control and so change the world around them, and those that do, like tech billionaires, are not necessarily guarding our interests. My work as a computer activist peaked in the 1990s and then drifted away. I refused to accept certain elements of what the modern technological system, in particular mobile communications and social media, required me to do. For example, the debate over the creation of web browser cookies in the 1990s elicited a large campaign from digital freedom activists. It was generally ignored by a society and media who just didn't understand the reality of this issue, and yet today those cookies are the basis for the panopticon of digital surveillance that pervades people's lives, creating its own fears and controlling outcomes. Zerzen is not a novel thinker. His skill has been to assimilate thousands of years of commentary on technology and society, and express that succinctly within the framework of today's peak of human material existence. For example, take the statement quoted earlier, as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption. 2300 years ago, D'Argenies of Synope is reputed to us said, Self-taught poverty is a help towards philosophy, for the things which philosophy attempts to teach by reasoning poverty forces us to practice. Even in ancient Greece, the gap between the then height of urban existence and what was perceived as a natural state of being was already enough to perceptibly lower the living standards of those wanted to make such a transition. Now consider that reality today. People know that to create real change, to solve the climate crisis, ecological destruction, or economic inequality, the result would be to live in a society which is not like this. Given today's reactionary responses from people driven seemingly mad by the pressures modern life puts upon them, it is no surprise they wish to cling on to what little they perceive they have. What Zerzen and other primitivists are calling for is the right to secede from technological society. Given how comparatively disempowering that choice would appear to render them, why should society feel so threatened by this? It is threatening precisely because it highlights. It picks at the common saw of modern society's instability and meaninglessness. Since the Enlightenment swept across Europe, modern thinkers have always looked upon the less developed societies as noble savages, when in fact there is now ample evidence from archaeology and anthropology to demonstrate precisely the opposite. To call for the freedom to return to a more primitive way of living is to attack the core of modernity, or rather the unequal and destructive set of economic relations which hold people trapped within the confines of industrial society. In that sense, Zerzen's call for a return to a less intensive, non-consumerist, and less developed mode of living is doubly offensive. Not only because it appears to attack people's access to the modern lifestyle, but also by highlighting the abstract, demonstrably make-believe ideas at its heart, it debases the value of that lifestyle. All religions have problems with unbelievers, but that response is insignificant compared to their visceral hatred of apostates.


The study investigates the characterization of different biomass from Washingtonia plant, including leaf stalk, WLS, trunk core, WTC, and trunk spine, WTS, fibers, through scanning electron microscopy, SEM, chemical and elemental composition analysis, x-ray diffraction, XRD, analysis, and thermogravimetry, TGA, analysis. The results show that WTS fiber has the highest crystallinity and thermal stability properties, while WLS fiber has the lowest crystallinity and thermal stability properties. All fibers possess great thermal resistance with tonset in the range of 307.4 to 328.1 degrees Celsius and peak in the range of 352.4 to 347.9 degrees Celsius, indicating their potential to be applied as a biomaterial for versatile applications in the future. This article was authored by Mohamed Jawaid, Laokia Kean, H. Fawad, and others.


Welcome you all back to Human Humane Architecture, the show here from Honolulu, Hawaii that looks into the so desirable compliance between a natural and a built environment. And if we can get the first picture up here, this is actually my first show here in what we call the 3.0 version of think the Kauai here in our new tropical brutalist building in downtown Honolulu on Bishop Street. And the last show, De Soto is here with me and he's actually in his archives in the museum as one of the new features here that were present at different places on the island and in the world potentially here. And our last show De Soto, we basically did when I was still back in Germany and you were sitting here and looking back we feel a little bad because we had to report on a high end luxury exclusive retail store which we usually try to shy away but we're sorry that's the best we can find as of now as new architecture on the island. So that being said, I'm still a little jet laggy here. So the first picture is sort of alluding to that and giving a little bit of a background on what I was doing there besides visiting family and friends at the firm. And at the top right is a reference from our last show when our boys and their ladies were with me to a little sightseeing in downtown Berlin, our capital city in Germany. And as architects, again, as everyone else, the new year shouldn't just be about commerce and consumption, about retail but it should be about reflection of the values we share and the people we look up to. And as architects do that particularly, we want to encourage our emerging generation to have heroes, people you look up to. And our Franklin Lindgren shared with us that one of the guys he looks up to is a British architect named John Parson and this is a recent book spectrum that he just purchased for himself as a Christmas gift. And the person I look up to is a fellow British man, sort of David Chipperfield at the top left. I'm privileged to call him an informal mentor of mine for the last two decades. So I and my boys and girls were checking out some of his recent projects in Berlin. At the bottom left you see his new just completed entrance building on the museum island and at the bottom right you see Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery that he is remodeling. And at the middle on the right you see a New York Times feature of him that says he wants no Chipperfield footprint on the building of his master and mentor Mies. So that being said the National Gallery was actually one of Mies's last projects built in 1968 and that gets us to the next page slowly but surely getting back to the United States but not yet here to our very west but sort of on the other side, a little bit west of the other side here in Chicago, Illinois, where they don't have the Pacific Ocean but the Lake Michigan. And they also have a Lake Shore Drive and the building you see at the very left is actually two protégés of Mies van der Rohe, Heinrich and Chipperade. In the same year of the National Gallery in Berlin they built this in 1968. This is Lake Point Tower. It was at that time the tallest residential structure in the world out of concrete and it's sharing that sort of world record with the building here in town which is the Illinois Hotel built in the early 70s. That was the tallest structure as a hotel in concrete and you see in the middle you see Mies van der Rohe quite some years later at a project that he's mostly known for. This is high-rise residential downtown living Lake Shore Drive apartments.  So would you have imagined that you could call Mies a sustainable architect because he was recognizing you don't have to go into your multi-story underground parking garage and drive to the next big box store you get your food. So the bottom are details from Lake Point Tower. They have this really opaque plinth and then this very sort of impressive hole cut in that you enter through a mouse hole and then you look up at the tower and get the dramatic view that you see at the very bottom left. So getting us to the next slide and slowly but surely back to our islands here. The top one is a panoramic view that wants to take us on this little cruise on our Sunset Boulevard starting at the Gold Coast to the very right and then cruising along. And at the bottom you can see that the buildings we admire the most are all from the later mid-century. You see at the very right Edwin Bauer's Lagoon Tower from 1967. Next to it, John Graham's Ilikai 1964 and next to that is prior project the Alamona office building as part of the mall from 61 at that time the tallest office building in town. And then comes where thanks to Alexei and his family that hosted our P.I. mobile for the last three weeks this is a 1315 Alamona Boulevard by Yamazaki. And next slide we allow ourselves to say that everything that has happened in between really can't basically compete as far as integrity with these sort of classical masterpieces. At the bottom here you can see how isolated and pioneering the outstate of 1350 was and at the top left you see a recent development diamondhead side of that that is called Park Lane. And then on the top right you can see what has happened ever side of 1315 Alamona Boulevard which are all pretty hermetic invasive glass boxes so not what the others were as being very exotic, as exotically tropical buildings. And next slide gets us to the next neighborhood this is Kakaako and we've been waiting this you know they had this is where what warehouse was it got torn down then they pulled the Richard Meyer twin towers to make it into a park and we were and we were reporting about the second row Ginny gang ambitious building and we were thinking okay when do they tell us what grade is building they will put there and you made this a Christmas grift for me of sort of a bittersweet kind and next slide and you please tell me and show us what that Christmas gift looked like. Well while you were in Germany there was a big newspaper ad and I took photos of it and sent them to you because it was announcing the construction of yet another condo as part of the Howard Hughes development and this is called Victoria Place and it is going to occupy what had been the diamond head end of the ward warehouse property and I'm not looking at the slides right now so I apologize for not being able to say things in the correct order but one of the things that really struck us as we always are talking about and you can change the slide if it's necessary is that this building again is a large glass box and what we are lacking are the lawn eyes that we should have on tropical buildings and we're here in the tropics and that's what we should be having and in fact this building does not apparently have them and is this where we see the picture also of Joey and Clara? Well that's the next one let's finish this picture because it doesn't look yes it doesn't look anything like the reference to the show with Richard Lowe who had sort of reflected on these wonderful skinny tropical exotic stacked lawn eye buildings that Steve Lowe was proposing for that area and next slide is in fact the one that looks deeper into the building here and yeah talk about what struck you with a picture of Joey and Clara in Berlin Yeah well you sent me a photograph last night in fact of your son Joey and his girlfriend Clara on their lawn eye in their apartment building in Berlin and this is a picture taken in December and it's cold but yet they are sitting in this protected space with a low afternoon sun and they're just wearing t-shirts so if that can happen in Berlin it certainly should be happening here in Honolulu Yeah and that's what you see at the top right and then you also see two pictures from your museum disorder of Victoria Oh yes and her mansion and then they claim on their website that that has something to do with the project that we see on all the other pictures and I have to say at the bottom right you see the building and then another building in the back and both buildings are by the same architect that gets us back to Chicago there about Courtwall Solomon Buens out of Chicago and they already did design this sort of intestine you know including project in the back that has known Nolan eyes and then they do it again and we get a little impatient and angry and we said hey city officials built this into code into law that every building has to have a significantly deep and decent deny if you can do it in Berlin that's your point you should be able to do it where you can use it year round right Exactly and next slide here is us renting one more time here because these are pictures off top left of the exterior of that one and it has this vertical slabs that when I was back in the Howard Hughes headquarters spying there I saw this book on the bottom left that is the brochure of the genie game project and they they were basically promoting and branding it as an exoskeleton and again as we already indicating he's a reference to the top right this is Edward Bowers Lagoon tower that was doing it way more effectively efficiently and poetically half a century ago so you guys we got to do better because in your favorite terms of the evolution on the tradition of innovations if you if you build something new here it got to be better than anything that was the mid-century stuff was pretty good right that's our point Yes absolutely so next slide here is the next parcel is pretty much where word Plaza was that got torn down and we don't know what's happening there the time being we're bold enough to place a primitive here at the top top left which we think is most along the lines of show reference to here there are up and running stronger than ever Mr. Richard Low and Steve Owl so next slide we basically now get to the Kamehameha school art of Kakaako here is a robot odor showing us his projects the very one on the left the Vita by Architonica got pulled but the one in front of him at the very right is the collection and we while we were thinking okay they're not using a Hawaiian washing name but again it's called collection and what is it collected collects a lot of money and a lot of solar gain that we don't need so what what the hell is that right next slide right and the next part of town is this one and where is that and what is that is so well we're looking at downtown Honolulu and this is our aerial view correct yeah and this is a postcard that you purchased fairly recently and obviously if we were to go back in time to the early 1970s a bunch of those high rises wouldn't be there but yet in this very scenic and very important historically important business center there are some different towers that are different from everybody else that you can see on the far right of the cluster of high rises those are different because they are not office buildings but they are residences they are two condo towers in downtown Honolulu they were pioneering at the time they were built because they weren't on any other buildings like that in downtown and that's what we're going to be looking at from here on exactly that's what we see so we were desperately looking even your archives didn't have an early 1970s we wouldn't see than most of these but the one on the very right that's basically nearing and bordering the governmental center of downtown correct so now we're at this building which is a pioneer because as you said this is like almost every downtown in the United States a very monofunctional just working city yes but someone had basically pioneered that and brought a downtown horizontal dwelling into that and that gets us to the next slide because at this point we would wish we would have someone other than us because we know a little to nothing about it but we wish we would have someone who knows about it and this brings back to my memory our friend Ron and why don't the two of us materialize Ron to be with us now and share with us can we do this? Ron speak up your powers have worked because here I am I'm so happy to be back with you again and I'm here to talk as a representative of my boss mentor and friend Ed Killingsworth who designed in 1971 the Harbor Square apartments that you're seeing in that slide and this was really one of the largest urban developments in downtown Honolulu and the largest that Ed ever completed a 26 story condo office development that covers an entire block and there were 360 condo units all one and two bedrooms in the towers and then the podiums themselves contained parking offices a one time busy restaurant and of course the elevator lobbies to reach the condo towers and the offices and in the next slide but before we do that Ron why don't you point out a little side plan at the bottom right in reference I'm so sorry that's the bottom plan is two residential towers at round floor plan that Mies van der Rohe designed in Chicago and I'm actually making the case that when you look to the left of the photograph of the two towers that created Harbor Square and in some respects there's even an improvement in plan because no tower looks directly at themselves as it does in the Mies paired towers they look past each other the views slide past each other's elevations and that's the project we were referenced to at the beginning of the show so here again you know Mies might have been sort of an inspiration for Ed as well and as you always point out that Ed was a classicist and sure Mies was with Shinkle being his great master so here we can say at two decades after a lake show drive apartments he was basically homaging to that and maybe even optimizing improving that right yeah and notice of course there are all in eyes everywhere as we'll talk about in greater detail later and as we talked before and as we will continue to talk about because it should be law here right and here it was go to the next slide and share more with us Ron and here you are yes I'm I was there in Honolulu recently as one of the featured speakers at the Okomomo's National Symposium and Martin was so kind to drive me around in his beautiful car and I have a close relationship with Harbor Square Ed took some of his profits from designing Harbor Square and bought a one bedroom apartment facing east towards Waikiki and it had a wonderful 180 degree view from the mountains to the ocean and if you move to the next slide I Harbor Square for me was a home away from home I often stayed there by myself sometimes with coworkers sometimes with Ed Killingsworth himself in this 865 square foot one bedroom and very spacious unit if you look at the next slide Harbor Square before we look at it in its in its immensity and that is that up early well actually in the later 19th century there used to be a free standard building on the site called the Honolulu Sailors Home and as a result of the zoning requirements in history that Sailors Home had to be incorporated into the design of the Harbor Square at grade and if you go to the next slide I seem to be gazing wonderingly up into a tree but what I'm showing here is this is such an urban project the buildings of the podium buildings go right out to the sidewalks there's only really one garden space it's this lovely rather semi secluded space which also provides access to elevators and to office spaces and to the one of the condo towers and in the next slide I believe Martin you had some comments. Yeah if you go back to the previous slide one more time here at the top right we're referencing to our most emerging practitioner on the island Bandit Kanista Khan at Yudhisoto we're you know quizzing him on his Molulilov project here and he particularly names this place and space as one of the most beautiful ones with really very contemplative character again in a very buzzy vibrant you know urban fabric there is this almost you know this zen and this you were zenning it there Ron and really indulging in that quality in the back of that you see this sort of under the the arcades and under the you see these office spaces because it's a mixed use project that actually up to six stories is basically offices and then the residential is above it and next slide you're right Ron we were looking up and just like Bandit is a representative of the next generation that see and value the legacy of Killingsworth and here's a tenant in there that basically started to basically strip everything off from these sort of ugly suspended you know ceilings and all that stuff and really purified the space just like again in Ed's philosophy and we I started this discussion to ask you why different the Mies van der Rohe who actually had started his very first residential high rise in Chicago was the Promontory Apartments that was actually a concrete building but the concrete was left untreated and not painted and so we got into this discussion about if you had ever asked Ed why all the concrete had always been painted and what were the thoughts about that Ron you know a lot of a lot of some of the painting coatings that were being developed at the time in the 70s began to really protect concrete a great deal from the deterioration that can happen over time especially the sea salt exposure right exactly and I think that's perhaps the main reason for this photograph of that ceiling I'm reminded that Ed Killingsworth hated suspended ceilings and so for example in almost all of his wooden buildings the underside of a very thin wood roof would be exposed as a beautiful wood ceiling and in concrete buildings as much as possible never a suspended ceiling that meant having to work sometimes with the electrician to get lighting fixtures passed into the concrete but that was his druthers great so he would have been very happy to see this here and let's move on to the next slide here and tell us about the plan of the tower this tower here we're going to be talking about both towers the harbour tower which is a bit larger and the town tower but the harbour tower has all one and two bedroom units they range in size from about 865 square feet for a one bedroom to 1200 square feet and you notice in plan that all of them are provided with lanais in fact the two bedroom units mark units 5 and 10 have 25 foot wide lanais which not only do they soften and invigorate the elevations but they provided great sun protection especially for the living room that is at the center of that particular plan and these units were thought of as being for businessmen who maybe had established themselves in Honolulu for some time and would appreciate actually being able to walk to work provided one parking stall included with each of their condos in the harbour tower and a little sort of intel sort of nickname secret you shared with me made me at that picture at the very top right where you see these kind of tenants and because you said the nickname of the tower was actually the principles tower these principles as they looked back in the days and they probably look the same these days although then the lower shirt came it became sort of socially correct right you just had a couple of exhibits about it let's move on to the next slide and look at these units and here at the lanais and share with us what you think is all marvellous this happens to be a lanai of one of the two bedroom corner units and you're not seeing it furnished although a little later we'll see some pictures of just how much furniture you could put out there so that it was an outdoor room but you're up high looking over the city as you see in this particular picture towards the mountains so this shows the ambiance and the character of what your view would have been like living in a corner unit of the harbour tower and the little references to previous shows on the top right once again to the 1350 in alamona boulevard that was built only three years before that and you before the show reminded me also should have thrown in a picture of the kahala hotel because while the killings worth over and body of work was very rectilinear these are a few examples where you guys got to see what was happening and in the next slide you'll see that same corner unit but now you're inside the living room you see how spacious those were just imagine what that view at night would be with all the office lights across the streets and in the next slide down you're seeing another unit this time rather sparsely furnished but look at that line I a table two chairs around the table two additional chairs and all looking out gloriously out over the harbour to the to the open ocean that's right and it and in the next slide I this is my favorite unit I visited friend who had one though I was staying in one bedroom this is the clearest expression of a two bedroom unit where there are bedrooms flanking each side of a living room that line I is twenty five feet long and it is another room it's almost if you actually figured out the area though the night it's almost the same square footage as that of the interior living room that is very grander and in the in the next slide you see just how large that line I is in this case it looks like our principles not have retired because they have some rocking chairs on their lineup but here again is the view over the city because you're up high enough to the mountains and you're looking down in fact on the recreation deck of harbour square which was the seventh floor and talking about comfort Ron it reminds me of your Waikiki Park hotel recently converted into the Halapuna where I was critical about that they had been taking away what I call side ventilation and that's not an official term but what I mean is that if you open the sliding doors that you see here on both ends of the lanai you get some nice breeze through although it's not a corner unit in the corner units it works even better right so it's a very biochlamatic proposition right yes very much so and when we joined together again next week really interested in showing people the second tower called the town tower because as we called the harbour tower the place maybe that the principles might live you know maybe the bankers they had accountants the people that were consultants for years those who were established a little bit older the idea that Ed had for the second tower the town tower was to have smaller units still one and two bedroom but less expensive and more for people who maybe are new to Honolulu and just starting out their business career so we'll be looking at the plans of the town tower next week and talking through that which also has lanai's provided for every unit which covers the living rooms and the bedrooms yeah and to get you guys even more excited which after what you said I believe it's already enough exciting but I'm chipping in another I'm chipping in the nickname of what you gave that tower to get people even more crazy about it so what's what's your nickname for that tower to come well this was whereas the harbour tower was the principles towers there had to be a place for a secretaries tower on that note I think everyone will return next week no doubt on that and until then thank you both so much for having you know try to shed a light on this in the in the body of work of killingsworth still rather mysterious project because that's one of the projects where you have the lease documentation but we try to work away through the project and there is lots of very exciting stuff to come so until then thank you very much thank you Bishop Museum the Soto thank you Long Beach Ron and see you next week for the volume two of killingsworth Honolulu harbour square bye bye


If you want to send a message to someone on WhatsApp then it is necessary to save the contact first then you will be able to send the messages to that particular person. But honestly that could be frustrating because you may not want every random person to be saved in your contact list. Worry not, there is a way and in this video we will show you how you can send a message on WhatsApp without saving the number. For this you can use the message to unknown number app. It is available for both Android and iOS and super easy to use. To use this go to the play store and download the app. You can also use the link given in the description below. Once you launch the app along with country code enter the phone number wherein you wish to send the text. Then tap on send message. Now you will be redirected to the chat room of the number on WhatsApp. And there you go. Now you can send your message to the unknown number. Isn't it super easy? Hope you found this video helpful. If yes don't forget to like, share and subscribe.


The Uganda People's Defense Force, or UPDF, supplies the majority of soldiers to the African Union mission in Somalia. Today, UPDF soldiers here are exchanging practices with U.S. Marines on combat medical skills, which are essential to saving lives in the field. Having the Marines here sharing our skill sets, our experiences in other parts of the world that we've obviously had in the last 10 years, we come and give that to the Ugannans, which have their own problem with a counterinsurgency that's going on in Somalia. We thank our instructors there, our partners there, that they have enabled us to get those capabilities to stand up to the challenge very, very successfully. Reporting from Singo, Uganda, I'm U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Ashley Sidedeff.


One of the key tenets of permaculture is that in order to get some sense of how to meet our needs in the landscape and still care for the land, we need to know what the land needs. Observation really is the foundation upon which everything we do in permaculture is based and that's a continual process. It's not a case of going out and saying we've looked at it and then we understand it because the landscape changes and there's always something new to see. The more I learn and more I apply, the more I realise how important observation is and at every stage, not just at the beginning, we think observation is something you do at the start of a design cycle but actually it's all the way through. To be able to understand the situation you're in and what you need and your constraints and your resources are on one side and then what the land is telling you in terms of the site that you're on if it's a land-based design, I think you can never do too much observing. What I love about observation is that I'm still learning how to do it and I've been doing it for nearly 20 years and everywhere new that I go I learn something about different landscapes and that's for me it's exciting but it means that there's still a lot for me to learn. With Applewood here we've got 20 acres of huge variety of places, lots of microclimates, lots of slope, lots of different habitats and there's so much to observe. It's one thing to read it in a book and say we just do this but actually to go through the process with somebody and see that it's not that scary and if you make a map and it's not that great so what you learn by doing it. One of the key outputs of observation is one of the ways of recording it is on maps and so it seems sensible to have an observation with a mapping course to look at increasing those two skills in particular. Tape measures are useful because they can give us some real accuracy when things matter on smaller spaces but actually when you get out into the larger landscape even simple things like measuring things with paces is incredibly accurate. And then the simple tools like the A-frame that you can literally just go into the woods and cut a few bits of hazel or whatever you have, get a string or a vine if you don't have string and tie a rock on the end. And with a few moments calibration, which is again something that people often don't understand but it's quite simple to teach, you've got yourself a tool that will show you the level in the landscape and that's a really important thing because once you know what's level you can then work out where water flows but it's also useful to know how to use some kind of more high tech tools and I'm particularly, I like some of the apps I have on my phone, in fact I don't really use it much as a phone. It's more as a surveying little computer including things like we're here now in October but we can very quickly dial up what's the sun's path in the middle of December. And that can tell us when we go somewhere for the first time particularly if we're thinking of buying somewhere, what's it going to be like in the middle of winter? It looks great now but how will it be when the sun is lower in the sky and so those are particularly useful tools as well I find. Mapping is also a really useful skill to have and a lot of people have a blockage about making maps. It's interesting there's many levels of making maps, very simple ones that you can use hand tools or just pacing, you can use your own body to make maps and there's then higher tech stuff using apps and using drones. Drones are great in that they only require enough power to take a camera up in the air.  And much better detail than for instance your Google or your Bing maps that only have a certain resolution. Now we've been here over a year so we have been through the seasons and now we're looking at observation plus ideas of things that could happen and still finding new places on the land and thinking oh well now I need to start the year from now for this place. The views, the views for you can go down to the pool at the bottom, there's lots of wildlife as you can hear in the background, beautiful trees, lots of great facilities. Yes who's the course for? Well essentially anybody who's interested in making maps whether they have no idea what permaculture is or they're wanting to polish their map making skills, maybe they started a bit on their permaculture design course or people who are doing their diploma and really wanting to get a clearer idea of some of the finer details of things. Essentially it's going to be all of those things and we're working to whatever level that people are at at the moment.


Hello guys, let me introduce Fabio Alessandro Locati and he will be giving a talk about automating your infrastructure with Ansible. Hello, so I'm Fabio Locati and I work in Red Hat as a consultant and I mainly do consultancy on Ansible. So hopefully my clicker does work. Yes, so let's start with a very quick introduction. So I started to work in IT in 2004 that is 13 years ago now and since 2013 I started to use Ansible. Why I'm saying this? Because what we have seen in the last 15 years is that actually the IT needs have changed a lot and I think that this is critical to understand why we are using Ansible and why we want to use Ansible and maybe not other options. So surely we have reasons for having a configuration management system. So the first one is auditability. If you have a configuration management system obviously you can actually look at any given time what is your configuration on the server. This is obviously assuming the fact that you have not manually changed the configuration on the specific server. But if you have not done that actually you have the whole recipe to create that server and therefore you can say that service work like that because this is how we built it. Then we have another problem that is job-hoping. So people tend to change job more quickly. 20 years ago people usually tend to stay longer on the same job. Now it's more rare. So you have a big problem of lost knowledge when someone leaves the team. So if you have something like a configuration management system you actually have the full documentation of your infrastructure as code. This also has other advantages as we will see. Another advantage is speed. 10 years ago it was pretty common to actually design a new infrastructure, a new service and then buy new boxes from some vendor, Dell or HP or whatever and then wait a couple of weeks that they can be delivered and then cable them. So another weeks and then install all the software and then do all the other stuff. So it was like in one month process maybe more. And then it arrived VMs which is far quicker. You want a new machine, you just provision it. And then we are now on the cloud age where we have cloud loads that change the number of machines they are running on based on the load and other factors. So they actually change the number of nodes that you are managing in a matter of minutes or hours. So here we arrived to the scalability problem. How can you actually scale to that level? How can you configure 100 machines in 10 minutes? Because if you have a very small website that at a certain point get referenced in some big newspaper or paper, sorry, news website, obviously you want to scale very quickly to meet the demand. So you have a scalability problem. And also in the cloud you scale horizontally. So before if you wanted to scale you just thought you know more RAM or CPU and that was it. Today you add more boxes so you have more boxes actually to manage. So this one also became a big problem that is also known as you know the number of hosts that a manager can manage which is a few years back when you had like five mainframes and your whole business were running on that. You were actually managing five hosts. Today you are managing thousand of hosts but you cannot have the same ratio of technical people to hosts. And today there is a quality of services of service which is expected. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, well it was 10 years ago when I was 18 actually I had my first credit card and my credit card company did not allow me to do any transactions from midnight to six o'clock in the morning because you know the system were doing stuff. And today that kind of you know the downtime is not possible because business would not allow it. So automation is clearly the answer. So automation has infrastructure as code or data as we will see. This means that it's very easy to read for humans and to read for machines. And also the big advantage of this is that the code itself is the documentation of the infrastructure. We always had documentation for the infrastructure we did obviously because you want to have documentation of that. The big problem is that very often those documentation were like five, ten years out of date because no one bothered to actually update it when they changed the infrastructure. So that was not very useful. If you are using the part of infrastructure as code, since your infrastructure is the result of your code running, that means that that code is exactly what your infrastructure is. This obviously simplifies the auditability problem a lot. And in theory you could achieve a point where you have no users, you know, no real people actually accessing those machines as root. And this would grant you, you know, that no one has connected to the machine and effectively changed the configuration in it. And also this grants you that everything that happens on those machines is actually logged. Because we have a big problem that if you have a single user on a system that is root, he will actually be able to evade any kind of logging or, you know, it will be very hard to actually have some kind of logging that he cannot evade. But if we don't have any root users, well, that problem goes away. And obviously it's pretty easy to scale out. You just reapply the same code to every new machine you create and, you know, you have more machines that are equals to the one you already have in the clusters. So there are a few concepts that I want to go through before going forward. The first one is the idea of agent. Mainly we can divide the configuration management system in two big families, the with agent and the without agent ones. So the agent pool, like puppet, for instance, have this demon that is running on every single box. And this demon simply checks in every end time and asks to the master, do you have anything new for me? And if yes, they apply it, if not, you know, they wait for the next check-in.  Now both approach have advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage of an agent is the high performance during the execution because all the execution is actually done locally. If you have like a DNF install or a YAM install, if in a case of agent full state, you actually have the agent asking to the master node what do I have to do? And the master node says, you know, you have to install Apache and locally the agent will install Apache. While obviously in the agent less model, we don't have this, but we have the master node that will contact the SSH usually the OD nodes and says you need to install Apache. And it's a there is an SSH connection that says alive for the whole length of the process. So obviously we have a speed advantage with agents. Second advantage is that the connection between all your hosts and your master hosts is client managed. So this is pretty standard, you know, HTTP was in the same way you have the server and then all clients connect to the server, which is, you know, normal, I would say in the industry. So it's a very well known concept. And if you go to, you know, a network administrator or a security administrator and say, I want to do this kind of thing, he knows exactly what you're talking about. But this model also has some disadvantages. The first one is that obviously, due to what we have just said, you need to put your master node in the least secure part of your network or you put holes in your firewalls, which is probably worse. But I mean, that node actually contains the whole configuration of your whole environment. And therefore you don't want it to be in your least secure part of the network, you would actually want it in the most secure part of the network. And also resources are used even if there is no updated to be done. So if you think about this, on average, you don't roll out one update every 30 minutes on your infrastructure. While Puppet, for instance, by default, checks in every 30 minutes. And this means that obviously, every 30 minutes, if you have 1000 hosts, you will have 1000 requests to the master host, you know, is there anything new or not? And the majority of times that answer will be no. So you're wasting resources there. And we have said that in the agentful case, we have the master in the least security secure natural segment. In the agentless case, we obviously have it in the most security, most secure segment, because the master will need to initiate the connections. So the connection that will be needed, you know, will be from the master to the saves. So the third big disadvantage I think that an agentful system has is that actually, if you have 1000 nodes, you have 1000 agents. If you have 1000 agents, that means that you have 1000 demons to take care of. That means that, you know, all those demons can crush. And therefore, your machine does not get any updates or that kind of stuff, because the demons is not up anymore. And also, we have a chicken and egg problem, because since someone had or somewhat, that demon has to land on that machine, or you install it manually, or you bake it into the image, or, you know, you need to do something weird. Actually, I have seen a code written by a consultant, an unsymbol code to deploy puppet agents, which is, I think, weird. But still, people do it, because if you want to have 1000 of puppet agents deployed, and you don't have an automation system, how can you do it? Surely not with puppet, but, for instance, with unsymbol, you can. So the other principle I want to talk with you about is edempotence. This is very important in automation. Now, you can do automation without edempotence, but it will be a mess. Now, the idea of edempotence is that in operation, after you have done it, there are some operations, sorry, that after you have done it one time, if you redo them a second time, they will actually have no effect. So, for instance, if we have a number, we multiply by one, it will have no effect, because that's how much work. And we can do here the same thing. So the idea is that we have some operations that can be actually edempotent. For instance, if you think about installing a software, as I install a software, that is not edempotent, but if I try to achieve a state, which is I want that software to be installed, that is actually edempotent, because the first time, you will need to install it. But from the second time, you will actually not do anything, because software is already there. So unsymbol push the idea of infrastructure as code a little bit further, because in fact, we speak about infrastructure as data more than as code, because does not really look like code. It's actually a YAML file. So one of the big advantages is that it's really easy to write. YAML code is like JSON, but easier because you don't have all the parentheses to match. It's even easier to read because it's not code. If we have like Puppet, where the majority of infrastructure is actually Ruby code, that is kind of not that easy if you don't know Ruby. If you know Ruby, everything is fine, but I mean, here we are speaking about a level of simplicity, where even a non-technical person like an external auditor can actually understand somehow what's happening there. And only the fact that we don't want to, you know, version everything. I have seen in the beginning of my career, someone that actually put the whole Etsy folder in SBN. I mean, that was a great idea, because you have everything version, but that was also a problem, because when you do an update, you know, you may have some changes there, but they are just trivial for you. And also the fact that Etsy is a pretty big folder, and like 99.9% of that stuff is completely useless for you. That makes that system not perfect. So this is an example of a YAML code, a working one. So this one is a playbook, an unseable playbook. So we declare which host we want to hit with this playbook. Become true means that we want to escalate to pseudo, sorry, to root as pseudo. Tasks are the actions we are going to perform. So the first one has a name. So that it makes even easier to read that ensures that my SQL is installed. So we use the module YAML, name my SQL, that's the name of the thing that we want to deal with, state present. So that's pretty straightforward. And again, if we want the user Tom to be present, same thing, ensure Tom is present. User, this is the module we are going to use now, name Tom, state present. So as you can see, this is pretty straightforward. I would say even a non-technical person with a five-minute training can actually understand what is going on. Provis will not be able to write YAML code or unseable code, but it will be able to understand it. So basically, unseable is written in Python, first of all, which can be an advantage or disadvantage. This is kind of a big advantage because it's flexible. It's not bash. And Python runs pretty much everywhere. We have Python running on Windows now. We have Python on pretty much all Linux systems. If you consider that, for instance, Anaconda is written in Python, the Fedora Red Hat Installer. So that is like, you have Python there. And all the other Linux systems have Python and a lot of other non-Linux unique systems also have Python. So that's good. It mainly works in push mode, so agentless. It can also work in pull mode. There is unseable pull, which is a weird thing, but it's not agentful. It's even there, but it's different. But I would say 99. something percent of the usage of unseable is actually in push mode. So big advantage is infrastructure as data, as we have seen YAML is very straightforward. And therefore the learning curve is very gentle. It's very easy to learn to write YAML code. You can actually, I was speaking with a customer a few weeks ago, and he was like, oh, yeah, I have started yesterday to look at this YAML unseable thing. And in less than one hour, I was actually running my first unseable playbook that was actually doing something useful. So that's, I think, a very good one. Very easy to set up. You just install on the master unseable, write your playbook and run it. You don't have to do anything weird. And also it's, I would say, a balance tool. It's like, it's not perfect, probably, in all scenarios, but it's very, very good in all scenarios and in many scenarios is, I think, very close to be perfect. So it's like from provisioning, like terraform kind of provisioning to stuff like chef kind of, you know, multi-thing. So it's like, you know, very balanced. So some disadvantages. No tool is perfect. The first one is that we don't have perfect introspection tools yet. There is a lot of effort here. So hopefully in few months we will have better introspection tools. And second one is the fact that the community is young. And I think this is a very big advantage because if they have been able to actually create this in few years, what will happen in five years time or, you know, that kind of thing. But yeah, it's kind of a problem because you find way more puppet documentation than unseable documentation simply because, you know, puppet has been around for more than double the time than unseable has. So I was speaking with a person a few days ago and he was like, yeah, but if I want to start to use unseable or if I want to use unseable in my infrastructure, what are the steps? What people usually do. So first one is usually write few actions in unseable playbooks.   And then many people start to roll out one machine completely based on unseable, you know, or one kind of machine. Usually it's the easiest one.  And I would say as far as I have seen, the majority of people come all the way down because they like unseable a lot in the first few steps so they go ahead. So I think that's very good. So yeah, let's go with the daemon. Hopefully it will work. So this is my Cloudflare account. I have one domain set up and this one is my DigitalOcean account. Now we are going to start from here. As you can see, there are three boxes here which none of them are .fire.beats and here we have a .fire.beats domain. So what we are going to do is actually I will run the code and then explain it mainly because it's a little bit long. The first execution, since we have the two provisioned couple of machines. So what we are going to do while it works is because suddenly I cannot see the same thing that you see. So okay. So this one is my unseable project we are seeing. I hope it's big enough. Okay, good. So we have a few files here. So mainly we have some folders. We have an unseable gfg file which is configuration for unseable. You can have it, not have it if the configuration by default is fine for you. Then you have an inventory folder in my case could be a file or whatever where is the place where you put inside it your host and the other things.  Then some playbooks which sometimes can be thought as manual actions if that is a thing that you want to do. Other times can be you know the deployment of a single kind of host or a single host. You know it depends. I have for instance a provision for digital ocean and cloud form. A teardown for digital ocean and cloud form and a first run script because on the first run I want to clean some configuration that I don't agree with that are in the default one. For instance by default it arrives with a root account. I don't really want a root account. And then you know groups I will deploy two web server and one DB server. So we have one yaml file for DB group and one for web. And then we have well I read me guess what. And then roles roles are like playbooks but a little bit they allow you to to split things and usually the big difference between roles and playbooks is that roles you really want them to be them potent. Playbooks can be them potent can be naughty them potent that's really up to you. But roles if they are not even potent that will make problems for you. So I have three roles. One is common that will be deployed on all machines. One is DB which is only for databases and one is web which is only for web hosts. And then I have a vault.yaml file which is encrypted and contains my keys for digital ocean and cloud cloudflare API keys. So let's see. Yep it worked. So if we see what look what happened here. This one was my playbook provision the DOCF. So the one that will provision actually the machines. So it starts doing the setup so it gathers few data around the local machine in this case because it was running on local host as you can see here. And then it reads the file the vault file where I have the encryption keys sorry the tokens for the DOCF and then it ensures that my SSH key is already on digital ocean because I want to provision machines that do not has password login but directly SSH keys. And then I asked digital ocean to create three machines for me and it worked. And then I create the domains on cloudflare about those. Those are basically I want to have DB01.file.bits WS01.file.bits and so forth. And then I point up app app.app.file.bits to the two frontends. And then here I do a little bit of cheating which is I put the host resolution also on my PC because otherwise I should wait you know few minutes for the DNS to actually propagate. So if we look let's pick this one. So if I refresh the page we will see that you know the three the five totally new DNS appeared here so that was part of what we did and here the three new machines should appear as well. Yes here they are. So we have provision effectively an infrastructure which is not huge but still. And we can now go forward with the following step. So the following step will be the first run. What we are doing here is mainly connect to all machines and ensure that the user ansible exists and then make the user ansible actually accept our SSH key and then put ansible as sudoer. This because obviously if we are going to use the user ansible to install stuff we kind of need it. So the the following step will be about actually creating the whole infrastructure. Before doing it I would like to well let's kick it and then we see it. So what it will start to do let's see the file it's include two playbooks. This include playbook A and B will actually you know perform the first one and then the second one as you can expect. So if we pick the first one and look at it we'll see that for the host web we are going to connect to it with the user ansible and then apply the roles commons and web. While the other one the DB that was actually the second line of the previous file it's pretty much the same but it connects to the host DB and applies the roles common and DB. So what are those those roles? If we go in the roles folder as we have seen before we have the common DB and web. If we start from common tasks is the sub folder that contains actually the task files and the first one is you know ensure that NTP is present and then configured with a template and then NTP is running. So let's look a little bit about that template which I think if I remember correctly that is not actually a template. Yeah I don't it's not really a template because I don't have any variables into it but I could make some variables into it if it would make sense. My is on the web and it has unlimited access to the web so it does not really make any sense to me but it could help some people to have you know local NTP and maybe you have two different data centers which you know have different NTP servers one product center so you want to have a parameter there you don't want to our code and have two different modules there and as you can see the code is pretty straightforward and yeah I mean here we end after configuring NTP we install Farworld if it's not yet installed and we ensure that it's running which means that we enable it as system CTL enabled Farworld and we started so system CTL start Farworld and it's all done in here and then we ensure that SSH can actually pass through the Farworld that rule should be there by default but it's better to ensure that you know everything that you need to be there is actually there so here it ended it has already provisioned all the hosts as well so we have seen the common one which was the first part and then we have the web part and the DB part I'm not going to look in that files but those files are actually on github so you can go and inspect them as much as you want so basically now we have provisioned database and two web servers so how can we check if everything works all with seal obviously if we do a seal up dot file dot bits actually the one of the two web servers just replied to us and this one is ws0 if we ask again oh same one okay ws0 1 also replied and as you can see this one is a list of databases I have in the newly created database and you know they are the same they are speaking with the same backend database that's pretty much what you can use as you know a general recipe for the majority of websites out there you know with h8 kind of because the DB is not h8 but so I would like now to tear down the whole infrastructure which is pretty straightforward I have a tear drop here drop okay destroy script and I just run it and it will destroy everything for me now as you can see I copy and paste things from the read me file the reason for that is first of all because I know that I will surely put some typos in it and then try to fix them but second because the first and the last line were pretty long if you have noticed the provisioning one and the tear down one that because due to the fact that we are using ansible volt which is encrypted and by encrypted I mean that the vote file is this it's as 256 encrypted but since as is symmetric encryption you need the actual key so in in ansible we can specify a file that contains that key so that everything is key then everything you know everything is safe so if now we rerun this use after the tear down obviously it will fail probably in a little bit of time for a timeout but it will fail and if we look at here and update the page we'll see that all machines that we provision actually disappeared and in the configuration sorry cloud for cloud flare thing also everything we created disappeared so as you can see we have created an environment managed it and destroyed it in very few minutes so going back to the presentation if I can find it okay so some resources the first one is this ops sorry wrong link but it's the slide I think this one should actually work even if the date is wrong and then there is the demo code that the one I showed the whole ansible thing is there probably you will need to actually put your own keys there for digital ocean and cloud from cloud flare and official documentation of ansible that's very useful it's very complete it's not perfect but it's very complete some videos about ansible and things you can do some wait papers about ansible and ebooks as well so just last thing before going to the question part if you are going to go and grab the source what you will notice is that actually there are two vault files one is volt dot yaml which is encrypted and the other one is volt dot yaml dot example and in the volt volt dot yaml dot example there is actually the example of what your volt dot yaml should look like before encrypting it so thank you and if there are any questions yes okay so the question is how does ansible work in the back end since as we can as we have seen we enabled say forward and then we open the port so the answer is ansible runs one action per time the reason why that actually works is the fact that forward it does not cut the connections that when it starts does not cut the connections that were already live so ansible is using the same connection and therefore there is already the ssh connection there and so that connection extra actually does not get dropped yes so the question is ansible is python 2 mainly so are there any plans for python 3 since python 2 is going away i would say hopefully soon but yes there are plans and i think that i have seen a mailing in the mailing list a couple of days ago where there was toshu saying that all the main modules are actually working on python 3 as well python 3 is not yet supported for the whole infrastructure and everything mainly because we are supporting very old version of ansible side of python 2 and very old version of python 2 and python 3 do not really work very well together but yes it's expected to arrive soon i don't know why when even because i'm not actually on the development side of it i'm more on the usage side of ansible there is actually a module which is virtual environments the end that already manages a different version of python and so i guess it will be implemented in a similar way that's my guess yes sorry i have not heard you sorry about the the speed of agent in my disadvantage slide let's see so this slide or the ansible one the ansible one okay okay so the question is what do you mean okay so the the question is what does not very good introspection towards means basically when you get an error you get something like you know in that line there has to be an error kind of thing and then if you go on dash pvv which is see all the logs that comes from ssh you arrive to the opposite where you see every single problem of ssh and basically too much information there not enough there so it's like an effort trying to gap that bridge and try to have some useful errors without too much ssh stuff into it so the question is some modules actually require some libraries to be present python libraries to be present how can those libraries can be managed if not installed globally so basically i think it depends is the answer i would say generally you can use ansible to install the modules the libraries that you will need so you can target all only the hosts that are going to actually perform detection at the moment the fedora installation installer for instance of ansible actually does not require any of those libraries so if you install ansible i would say on the target yeah i mean you can write them in the playbook you can actually you know the step before using that modules you can put yum and then name whatever library state present and that works and for instance there was before the question about python shoe and fedora there is actually a piece of code that you can run in row mode from ansible to actually install python shoe on fedora course even before trying to reach python and that kind of thing so last question so the question is few years back reddit bought ansible and when that happened it was announced that ansible core and ansible tower which is the web interface would be open source are there any news so no i don't have any news i am not in a place where i can have that kind of news but ansible core actually was open source even before the reddit acquisition and is still open source and ansible tower i don't know i mean it will arrive i'm i'm sure about that and also there was ansible galaxy that was owned by ansible before joining reddit was closed source and it was open source couple of months ago so thank you so what you usually do is put if you have like a three-layer three-segment kind of design of your network where one is public one is like dmz kind of thing and one is private you usually put your ansible one in the private one so that from private to private it's fine from private to dmsz from private to public is fine so everything kind of works while if you do it with puppet you have to put it in the public one because otherwise the the machine on the public segment cannot access your puppet master if it's in the private network i mean you could put it in that dmsz if you want but even there you still are opening a fire a firewall hole between your public and your dmsz which is probably not nice yeah okay it's so helpful in the network yeah yeah


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