Coming up on D T N S. Amazon brings its cashierless tech to Whole Foods. Twitter adds a new way to remove followers called remove follower and his long distance wireless charging about to have its moments. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 8th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and then the shows producer Roger Chang. Are you sure? I hesitated. OK, just double check. And we just had a long and disturbing conversation about tarantulas. If you'd like to hear it, get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S. That is where you can join our top patrons, such as Dr. X17, Dustin Campbell, and Tim Deputy. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google announced updates to its workspace productivity suite. The company launched its previously announced dashboards for real time project collaboration called Spaces. That now includes a unified dashboard with access to inboxes, chats, and meetings, able to reply to all spaces from a single location. Google Meet is now calling. It's now available for one to one chats in Gmail across mobile and desktop. Google also announced new Meet hardware with a 27 inch all in one and a 65 inch 4K display made in partnership with Avacor. Both come with Google's Jamboard app and can be used as an external display. Great, a new place to get Google Meet calls. Variety sources say that HBO Max is expanding into Europe starting October 26th. It's going to come to Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Spain, and Andorra. 14 more European countries will get the service later in 2022, although sources say there are no plans at the moment to launch in Germany or the UK. DJI announced the OM5, the latest in its smartphone gimbal line previously branded as Osmo. The OM5 is a third smaller than its predecessor. It includes a built-in selfie stick extension rod with a new clamp designed to fit over a phone case. On the software side, it includes active track 4.0 for better subject tracking, able to track it up to 3X zoom at five milliseconds. The OM5 is available today for $159. Facebook and Ray Ban teased a September 9th announcement. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously said in July that smart glasses with Ray Ban's iconic form factor would be the next hardware release from the company, but that it would be a stepping stone to someday getting full augmented reality glasses. Lenovo announced the Chromebook Duet 5, a follow up to their original detachable duet tablet featuring a 13.3 inch OLED screen and powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7C Gen 2 compute platform. Despite the higher end screen, the tablet starts at $429.99 expected to ship in October. All right, Scott, let's talk about this whole foods thing. All right, here's the deal. You wanna get some food? I got an idea for you. Amazon plans to bring its Just Walkout cashierless technology to two whole food stores in Gleaver Park neighborhood in Washington, DC and the other in Sherman Oaks, an area of Los Angeles in California, obviously set up to open in 2022. Customers don't have to use it though. So if you still like the old fashioned way of doing things, self-check out lanes and customer service booths will still be available to you. You need those if you want to pay cash, EBT, EWIC, or gift cards, that sort of stuff. But if you wanna just use, don't wanna use any of those options and you'd rather do it yourself, you can scan a QR code from the Whole Foods or Amazon app and sort of credit or debit card that is already linked to your Amazon account or scan your Palm with Amazon One, which is also linked to your Amazon account. When you leave, you scan or insert the card again. And it will work with self-aware items like fresh- Self-serve, not self-aware. Oh, what I said, self-aware. Yeah. Hey, look, self-aware orange juice, everybody. That's the buried headline here. Fresh-squeezed orange juice as an example. Mochi ice cream, if you will. They did not use bulk nuts as an example and those are very popular at Whole Foods stores. I can confirm that. Anyway, Amazon says the stores will employ a comparable number of people at existing Whole Foods market stores. So they're not going to, you're not gonna see a big drop in how many people work at these stores. You're still gonna see kind of what we used to have. The robots aren't taking over just yet. So it's happening. Walk out with whatever you want and it knows you took it and you pay for it and you're done. At Whole Foods, this is a reaction to the story that I've encountered multiple times today. This isn't new. This isn't the debut of the technology. This is technology that Amazon's been operating at a few hundred locations around the world in the UK and the US particularly at smaller stores like Amazon Go but also big grocery stores like Amazon Fresh and it's now bringing it to Whole Foods. So this is the mass adoption of it. They have a lot more Whole Foods stores than they have Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh but this isn't trying it out. This isn't the beta test run. This is, we think this is good enough to just put in all of the regular stores. Now granted, they're starting with two. So they're obviously not so confident they're gonna roll it out everywhere at once but I think that's to see how the Whole Foods market people respond to it and work out some of those kinks before they go and spend the money to install all the sensors and everything that they have to do to have this working everywhere. But this is true cashierless technology and it's fairly proven by this point. What I found interesting and obviously Amazon's gonna say this is don't worry.  They will just be better served to you our valued customer. That's lip service to some extent. Any company is gonna say that so that you don't have much people freaking out but I do wonder, okay, let's just take that at face value. What would those employees be able to help me with that are still in the store and working all day and doing their thing and getting paid for it? I would kind of love the idea of, I don't know, a pasta expert who's sort of in a certain area of the store and as I'm going through, maybe can give me a little bit more information about recipes or some tips and tricks.  Of course, they're still gonna offer those options for folks who don't wanna do the just walk out cashier list option, at least at first, right? There's definitely gonna be a period where people are doing all sorts of things and you can't just get anything that you want in the store this way. But I like the idea of having folks working in grocery stores who want to work there who might have some expertise and can help me out. I mean, I just wanna add anecdotally, my local supermarket, when they don't have the people at the registers, they are doing the carts where people do the online orders and they pick it up at the front and so there's at least three or four of them and so they have the full staff that I see every day working but they're not always at the register. So I can conceivably offset them to a different job. Cashier is not the only job of the cashier. When the cashier is not at the cashier, they're doing other things. I've said multiple times before that I don't think smart businesses cash in on the savings of automation by getting rid of employees. Smart businesses and we've seen this in history when you bring in a computer to do the work of humans that were once called computers, you don't just cut down on the staff, you find things that you couldn't do before that those humans can do. And in Whole Foods case, I'm guessing that's better service like Sarah is talking about, being able to help you with your self-checkout or if you're new to the palm scanning, they're gonna have somebody greeting you at the door that's like, hey, let me help you figure this out and point you in the right direction and that's smarter. Use those humans to do things that humans are particularly good at and that make the experience of shopping there better so that people are like, yeah, I really love going to that cashierless store because they've got all these helpful people. I don't have to run somebody down and they look kind of annoyed because they're busy doing something else when I ask them a question.  I go maybe once every couple of weeks and I'm stocking up. I'm meal planning for myself for a while. So I got lots of bags and I got lots of stuff and some of that is frozen items, say. And man, if I don't choose the right day in time, I'm waiting in line for a while and stuff starts to melt. Or you start to feel like, not so fresh, I really gotta get home and get the stuff in the fridge. This does take out a layer of complexity, big time for me. Twitter launched a few feature tests. We're gonna talk about a couple of them here. One changes the way photos are displayed on mobile, taking up the whole width of a phone screen. That's currently in testing on iOS apps. The second lets users remove followers without blocking them. This is getting a lot of attention. It's in testing on the web and would cause your content to disappear from the removed followers feeds, but without notifying them. So it's a little different than a block because if they go to your Twitter profile, if they're blocked, they won't see your Twitter feed at all. If you've removed them as a follower, they'll still see your Twitter feed if they navigate to it, but they won't get it in their timeline. Many users are pointing out, you can already kind of do this by blocking a user and then unblocking them right away, which forces them to unfollow you, but doesn't keep them blocked. Although they could still refollow you if that happened and they noticed. But Twitter does have a habit of making features official that started its work around. So this isn't too surprising. Right now to remove a follower, you have to go to your profile if you have the feature, not everybody has it, but if you have it, go to your profile, view your list of followers, then you find the one you want to remove, click on a three dot icon next to the follow button for that follower and select, remove this follower from the dropdown menu. Twitter might add this feature to the followers profile icon to make it easier to access in the future. Pretty interesting move and you're right. It feels like a work around that people, they probably saw this happen enough. They're like, we got to just make this real or make it part of the thing. Because there's a little bit of detail missing on whether or not those people can immediately follow you again if they've noticed that you've done this. I have real questions about whether this is any better than a block, a block at least is final and you're sort of done and we're out of there. So I'm kind of on the fence on whether this is the thing I'm gonna actually use as somebody who's had to block a lot lately. So yeah, the jury's out for me. I don't know. I don't know how I'm gonna use this thing, but I guess I like that they're adding features. There's probably a lot of people like me who use tweet bot and other third-party apps that are probably going, great, is this another thing we're not gonna get with the API to these third parties or are we gonna get it? That is a concern to me. If it's something I want me to use, like let me use it on whatever app I'm using, but outside of that concern, yeah, I need to know what the exact situation might be where I would need to do this versus a block and I can't think, this feels like mute and then another step. Well, okay, so when I heard about this feature, I actually by accident learned about the block on block feature because I blocked somebody by accident years ago and then I unblocked them and then I was like, oh, now they're not following me. Well, now it's like awkward because now I have to be like, hey, sorry. Sorry that I did that to you, but if you actually wanted someone to unfollow you and what's sort of known as the soft block feature where you're kind of kicking them out of chat, but they can come back if they, so desire, you're not really blocking them. Because a block goes both ways. You don't see them, they don't see you, but if you're talking about, I don't know, an issue of harassment, sometimes a block can feel very dramatic and so I know what Twitter's doing here by saying, maybe this is like a little bit of a softer way to just nudge somebody kind of out of your life. What I think Twitter should have done and I don't know how possible this is, is something that is like a self-mute. So let's say Scott is like, I don't really want Sarah to follow me anymore, but I don't want to block her because maybe that will incite some other issue. Maybe Sarah will bother me on another platform or like email me or it would get weird. And if I just kick her off, then she can follow me again. What if I were able to mute myself towards a select person so that if I want to your profile, profile still exists, it just doesn't seem like you're tweeting because I don't see the tweets anymore from that point forward. Now again, that's not what this is. That's what I think is the better feature that Twitter should offer. That's interesting, yeah. Mute 2. Yeah, mute me forward. Yeah, mute 2.0. Finally, we've moved on to the true destination of mute. We'll see, but they also launched a test of its own version of groups. Now, this has me kind of excited in a weird way. They're calling these communities, which it says is basically this, and this is a quote, a more intimate space for conversations unquote on their platform. It's part subreddit maybe part Facebook group. If you want to think of it that way, a community is dedicated to a topic and members can post tweets to a dedicated group timeline. All communities are public and viewable by anyone. So no private groups like in Facebook's case. Moderator set rules for the community and members who can post must be invited by a moderator or existing member. And Twitter's launching this with just a few communities it'll open up to for more of these users and more communities to be created in the future, pretty much the coming months. You can find communities in the tab in the center of the Twitter app, assuming you're seeing the rollout. I haven't, it's not showing up on mine yet, but I don't know what that means. It might mean my app's out of date, but anyway. I like this a lot. And I also like that it's public. This isn't just another place for people to crawl into their weird hole and say stuff. Maybe they shouldn't be or playing weird things. It may be illegal or whatever. This is more like Reddit where it's like, hey, here's a group and we're all part of it.  But now that you're in here, you can talk to. And I don't know, I feel like maybe Twitter could use this. I know I can. Me too. My gut reaction was this is Reddit. Why, like, so it's going to fail because we already have Reddit. Why would people use this? But Twitter is such a place for this kind of thing that I feel like maybe it will catch on. Maybe Twitter users will make it their own and find a different slant to it than there is on subreddit. So I'm giving it a chance, more than moments and some of the other things they've tried. Yeah, when Twitter is my go-to place for, if there's some, I don't know, there's some news events or something happens with a celebrity or there's a sports game or a show that I like. I always do a Twitter search just to be like, let's just see what people are talking about around the world. And I use Tweetbot, so my Twitter experience is a little bit different than anybody who's using official Twitter apps. But, and I find a lot of information all the time. I can often get a temperature of like, okay, this is what everybody else thinks. Do I follow all those people at this point? Well, no, we might not have a lot of other things in common. And that would kind of muck up all my followers because I try to curate it at least to some extent. But to have a community where it's like, okay, we wanna talk about the Golden State Warriors. That's my community on Twitter. I can do that other places, but I hang out on Twitter enough that I think this is a great feature. During the game, right? During the big playoff game, you're gonna wanna be with other Warriors fans on Twitter. You're not gonna wanna be with the Rockets fans or the Cavs or whoever they're playing, right? So you go to the Golden State Warriors community and you all chat about the game there.  I like that. Hey folks, what do you wanna hear us talk about on the show? Well, we don't have a Twitter community yet because they haven't rolled it out to us, but we do have a subreddit. Go submit your stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Wireless charging right now is limited to very short range. Everybody wants it, but it is limited. You basically have to set the device on the charger. The only thing that really makes it wireless is that you don't have to plug the charger into the device. So-called long range charging has been around for a while with Motorola able to charge a device up to a meter away. It's three feet, but that's not very far away. Three feet, you know, you still gotta be pretty close, but that distance is getting a little farther. Motorola, which works with the company Guru on its space charging, wireless charging, just announced a new version of its five watt system that can charge four devices at once up to three meters away with a 100 degree area of coverage. It's a big flat square, it stands on its end. We don't have a release date for this, but that's promising. And Motorola is not the only company doing this. Ossia, which has US approval for one meter charging, just got regulatory approval in the UK for unlimited range. But don't get too excited because Ossia's tech only works up to about 10 meters. Still, we're getting farther. Ossia stations are a flat square about a foot on each side. EnerGIS is another company that's been offering a developer kit for charging smart home devices with radio waves. Powercast also uses radio waves and markets its tech for hand sanitizer stations, sells a $150 adapter for charging Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers from six inches away. Why Charge uses infrared and markets itself toward smart devices like automatic faucets, door locks, electric toothbrushes, Jowmi showed off Mi Air Charge in January, and OPPO demonstrated wireless air charging in February. This is being worked on by many. So short-term, the device makers and the wireless charging tech developers need to work together to create an ecosystem of some kind for consumers before this can really take off. Everybody can't just have their own technology that doesn't play with other devices as well. Usually that means coalescing around a standard and every developer wants to be the developer of that standard. So this might take a couple years to settle on as we have seen in the past. The long-term hope is that all of these companies from all of these companies is that once wireless charging becomes viable, multiple devices can have smaller batteries or maybe not even have batteries at all as they're constantly being charged. Yeah, so we're in the chicken and egg stage. This tech works, it's not super long range yet but it works, but we need the devices before a platform can take off but you need a platform to be established before people will put it in their devices and that's where we were with Bluetooth for a while, it's where we were with USB, it's where we were with short-range wireless charging until Apple put the Qi standard in and everybody kind of coalesced around that.  Yeah, let me talk to the gamers in the crowd real quick. Just imagine if you will, a console manufacturer, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, somebody in the future, they make a console and that console includes wireless charging technology, which means your controllers are battery-less. You never charge them ever, they're just always being charged, they're basically plugged in through the air and you never have to worry about batteries again, batteries either going bad or having to replace them or any of that stuff or running out of juice when you're, when you at least need it in the middle of your first person shooter or whatever. I'm telling you, gaming is where this is gonna happen. It'll push the whole thing forward. As usual, it'll be like the impetus for change. So looking forward to it. All right, real quickly, Australia's High Court ruled five to two that Australians may be held responsible for the defamatory comments left on their social media pages if they control them, not the social media company, not just the person who commented, but you if you haven't done anything about them. It's a case involving Dylan Voller who's suing multiple news outlets including the Australian and Sky News over photos of Voller being restrained at a youth detention center. The news companies posted these stories on their Facebook pages and Voller sued not over posting the photos, that was news, but over defamatory comments left by users in reactions to the news stories that were posted on Facebook. The court ruled in Voller's favor saying that the companies could be considered publishers of the comments left on the pages they controlled and therefore held legally responsible. Voller still has to go improve that the comments were defamatory so he hasn't won his case but it gives him the standing to sue the news agencies. The news agencies were saying, hey, we didn't leave these comments, users did, not our problem. Court said, yep, but you encouraged him. In fact, the court ruled that the media companies showed quote, intentional participation in the process of sharing third party comments and therefore were responsible for them even if they did not post them or claimed they were unaware of them. The court wrote, having taken action to secure the commercial benefit of the Facebook functionality, the appellants bear the legal consequences. I think that's interesting because it's not saying Facebook is responsible. We have in the United States, Section 230, the court's saying, sure, Facebook isn't responsible, it's just a platform, but if you use Facebook and invite people to comment, well, then you have a responsibility to police those comments. The decision might deter companies and individuals from allowing comments on their pages, might set a precedent for rulings and laws elsewhere, but for now it's something that Australian news companies are gonna have to deal with. Yeah, it's fascinating to see this happen because like you said, it's not necessarily a precedent in the legal sense, not yet. Well, it isn't in Australia, but it's not outside of Australia, you're right. But outside of Australia, we're just sort of like, well, is this the kind of thing we'll start doing? And part of it makes sense to me, if I go to Facebook and I start a group or even just a conversation and I'm in charge and I'm the one that kicked it off, I'm now kind of the one that maybe should be paying attention to it and moderating it. When I think about it now, if I put something on Facebook and I get horrible comments in there that are maybe, I don't know, defamatory or something else, I just kind of ignore it and go, well, that's someone else talking. But I don't know, forget more mindful about the kind of stuff that's coming out of your conversations that you started and that you're continuing to add to. I think it's okay to take a little responsibility there. I'm not advocating for any laws or any of that. But then why not make Facebook responsible for it? Well, and they should. That's, it feels weird that they're not. So you're against section 230 then? No, I'm, it's more nuanced than that. I can't make a black and white decision about this, unfortunately, because you could make arguments in both directions that didn't make it hard to make that choice. But I do like more personal responsibility on the internet. I don't know how to get there, but I like it. I think it also depends on, where were the comments being made? Was it a news outlet where perhaps the news outlet just has to be a lot more careful about what kind, if the comments are spiraling out of control on something that that news outlet originally published. And there's some questions about defamatory comments. And obviously in Dylan Vuller's case, this is very personal thing, that is something to question. I can think of one Facebook group I'm a part of. It's the supernatural VR community, which is by and large a really great community on Facebook. It's one of the only Facebook groups that I'm actively participating or at least reading regularly. But it goes off the rails pretty often.  Everybody be nice in the future. No more comments. And I don't exactly know who the moderators of that group are, but they're pretty on top of it. And to say, okay, well, if they weren't on top of it, Facebook needs to moderate this group. That's impossible. It's impossible. Even if you say it will still should be Facebook's job at the end of the day because they built this platform. It's their platform. That's true. But I think that's a losing game as well. Well, right. And it's never about Facebook. It's about the next Facebook. Will the competitor, everybody wants a competitor Facebook. If you make it so that the next platform is also responsible, then they may never get out of the gate because it's too expensive to start a platform then, which is the argument for preserving section 230. But when you're talking about supernatural, it sounds like they do a good job of moderation. Scott, if they weren't doing a good job of moderation and somebody said something nasty about Sarah on the supernatural group and they weren't moderating, should supernatural be held responsible? And could Sarah then sue supernatural, not the person who made the comment? Well, no, unless it goes up the chain where you can prove without a doubt that supernatural contributed to the bad part. That's the question. That's the question. And that's the question is that Voler isn't arguing that Sky News contributed to the defamatory comment. He's only arguing that these defamatory comments were made in response to this story, and therefore the Sky News and the Australian are responsible for those comments. Right, yeah, it's like I say, there's no simple solution to this other than at least the one person who said the terrible stuff ought to be the most accountable. And then maybe we can talk about going from there, but you gotta start there. So if I said the mean thing to Sarah, I should be responsible. How about that self, let's put it on ourselves, people. Take responsibility. How American of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just work it out. Just work it out. Yeah. Well, this is some good news, if you like, to be comfortable on your own vehicle. At the IAA Munich Auto Show, Auto Part Supplier, Continental is previewing its ambiance, that's ambiance with a three at the end, concept car that heats more than just your seats where your arm rests or your steering wheel in order to help control cabin temperature more effectively. Continental outfitted a classic VW micro bus with fabrics with heating elements printed on the underside. So Continental's global director of design and marketing and digitization told CNET, it heats 10 times faster than previous systems, but it also uses less energy. Continental says automakers could install it in the ceiling, maybe the side panels for controlling temperature in zones or heating areas that are more specific, like behind the knees or the legs. It wouldn't replace traditional forced air heat, but it could let a car maker use a smaller system that also uses less power. Yeah, that's a big deal for EV, right? You wanna save that power? You don't wanna drain even that second battery. So this is interesting. I'm curious who will pick it up. Obviously, this is a concept thing in an auto show. Who knows if it'll ever even make it into a car, but I love the idea of it, especially that ceiling thing, because a lot of times with forced air heat in cars, I've found you're really warm by the source, and if you're in the back seat, you're really cold. Like it's not always great. I know there's other ways around it, and there's some that have vents in the back and all that, but if you could just have it emanating from all around you, it seems like it would work a lot better and potentially save energy. I love that. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Jeremy wrote in about our conversation about the idea that you might be able to send a part of an encrypted chat to a moderator on WhatsApp. Jeremy says, part of the story caught me as funny, but then not. The idea that people would be upset about moderators reading messages that were sent to them is ludicrous. That definitely seems like a duh moment, but what about the other parties in the conversations? Most states have laws about being recorded while having a conversation. This kind of seems like the same thing. Someone decides they don't like something that was said. They send it in with the other side, having no idea that anything was being sent, let alone what was being sent. If they're expecting the conversation to be encrypted and only between them and the other party, this could be a rude awakening. Sure, so what's the alternative, Jeremy? No report button? No way to ever report abusive content? Like, maybe that's what you're arguing. I'm not sure that it is, though. And it's not the same as subverting encryption. Expectation of privacy from the person you're communicating with is not the same as encryption. Encryption just says, until it gets to the person I intended it to get to, it's not readable by anybody else. Once that person has read it, encryption doesn't have anything to say about what that person can do with the message, right? If I send you, and I sent this to Jeremy in an email, if I send you a note in a locked box that only you can unlock, once you've taken the message out of the locked box, if you pass it along to somebody else to read, that doesn't break the lock. The lock still worked. So it's a matter of trust between you and the person you're sending your message to at that point. Yeah, it's screen capping, all those copying, paste the text out if you want to. Like, your friend isn't encryption. Your friend is trust, and that's it. It's as best as it gets. You can't encrypt people. No. Not good, anyway. Well, if you have feedback like Jeremy, and thanks Jeremy, by the way, for the email, good questions, comments, all that stuff that we talk about on this here show, do send it our way, because it really helps us understand what people care about. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We would also like to thank a few of our brand new bosses. They include Chris George, Eric, and Iggy Buds. All just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, George. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, Iggy. Now, yesterday I noted we were one patron down over last month, and we got three new bosses, which you might think means we're up to, but we're not, because we lost a couple more. So it took those three to bring us to break even. So very, very much appreciate Chris, George, and Eric. I'm Chris, George, Eric, and Iggy for jumping in. And if you've been on the fence yourself, they can have backing us, you know, we get some nice perks in there too. Go check them out, patreon.com slash DTNS. Also, a big thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, how you been? Ah, you know, just great, Sarah. And there's always something cool happening over at the Frog Pants Network. If you're looking for more game commentary, we now have three shows on the network that are all about gaming, big issues on one, lots of console and PC stuff on another, and then indie coverage on a third. Wonder what those are all about? Want to subscribe to maybe one or two or all three of them? Check them out at frogpantsplays.com or frogpants.com. We'll get you there as well. And if you're looking to poke me in public, find me on Twitter at twitter.com slash Scott Johnson. Just don't make him unfollow you people. He's a good one. We're live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back doing it all tomorrow with Justin Rubber Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.


What's the warning? All right, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the session, Moving AWS Workloads to OpenStack. This is a topic that comes up a lot, because in a lot of ways, OpenStack feels very much like a free alternative to Amazon, the same way that it feels kind of like a free alternative to VMware or a free alternative to anybody else is going to charge you a bunch of money to host your content out in the public cloud. The problem, of course, being once you discover that your developers have half of your company's production out in these public clouds, you realize that maybe that's not such a terribly great thing, and you want to bring it back inside. Now, how many of you are sitting here thinking, this is going to be a really short talk. He's just going to explain how I can import an AMI into OpenStack? Wow, I expected way more hands than this guy, and I know he's lying because he helped me put this together. So unfortunately, that ain't how it works. I thought that was how it would work, and I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out why I just couldn't find the instructions for doing that. It turns out it is not that simple. So just to kind of give me a little bit of a lay of the land here, how many of you are primarily OpenStack people? OK, and how many of you are primarily AWS people? Good, because that's what I assumed when I wrote this. OK, so let me talk a little bit about, why I can't get my slides to advance.  I'll talk a little bit about me while my presentation comes back up. My name is Nick Chase. I work for Morantis, in case you couldn't tell from the incredibly subtle t-shirt that I'm wearing. I am the head of technical content, and also, oh, there's why it wasn't working. I am the head of technical content, and also the editor of a weekly newsletter called OpenStack Now, where we go through all the news of the week, and a mind-bogglingly large amount of content every week. Also, I've been a programmer for longer than some of you have been alive, not you, but some of you. I've also written a few books and stuff like that. So I know who I am. But also, I want to give some special thanks to Darren Sorrentino, who helped me out here. I had nothing to do with this. Yes, Darren had nothing to do with this part. OK, hold on. We'll just wait a minute. Yeah, to Darren Sorrentino, who is now with Vion Corporation for some, well, actually, he wrote the run book on which a lot of this was based. So what we're going to talk about here, if my presentation, there we go. Thank you very much. We're going to stay in edit mode here, because my computer hates me. And right now, the feeling is totally mutual. So what we're going to do here is we're going to start out by talking about OpenStack for people who are mostly familiar with AWS. So if you're coming from the AWS world and you're going, I know I need to know this OpenStack thing, but I have absolutely no idea what this is all about. We're going to start out with that. And then we're going to talk about some easy ways to go ahead and move your workloads that are sitting in Amazon over to OpenStack. I didn't. Why do you have it? OK, excellent. Hang on. We're just going to pinch it here for a second. Anyway, while we're pinch-hitting here, so we're going to talk about some easy ways to make this transition from AWS to OpenStack. I really actually do know what's in the presentation. And then we're going to talk about doing it the hard way, actually going and doing the hard work of taking your workload, taking your VMs, and physically, manually, painstakingly, rip your hair outingly, moving them over to OpenStack. OK, so that's what we're going to talk about today. So let's start by talking about some of the different projects. So if you're not familiar with OpenStack, it consists of a group of projects. And by the way, the slides will be available online, so you will be able to see all of them, all at the same time, or at least on demand, when we are all done. Anyway, so OpenStack consists of a bunch of projects. For example, most of you who are working with AWS will be using EC2, which is compute services. That's where you get your VMs. In OpenStack, that would be NOVA. The NOVA project is what you use in order to create VMs. If you're using S3, the corresponding project would be Swift. If you're using EBS for block storage, the corresponding project would be Cinder. Basically, I shouldn't say most. Probably about 1 third of the projects that there are in AWS have a corresponding project in OpenStack. The identity management, we have Keystone. Even the NoSQL database, there's MagnetoDB. Oh, thank you so much. So there we go. There's Container Service. So you see here we have Magnem, which is the new container service within NOVA. You can use Kubernetes through Morano. There's the Trove Database as a service, CloudWatch. We have Solometer for monitoring. CloudFormation is probably the most germane in this case, which CloudFormation, of course, being the AWS orchestration service. Here we have Heat. And then some other sort of miscellaneous components. You've got the queuing service. You've got SWF, the workflow service. We've got Mistral. And of course, the management console for all of this, you have Horizon. And again, all these slides will be available. I think they're probably available now, but if they're not, they will be very shortly. So for those of you who are AWS users, I've grabbed this very simple look at how a lot of this works together. Those of you who are primarily OpenStack people looking going, what is that, from like three years ago? Well, yes, because I didn't want to explode the heads of the AWS people with all of the complexity that has come up in the last few years. But basically, as you can see, you've got the dashboard that provides management for all of the other layers. And everything hooks into the identity service on the bottom. So that's sort of a very, very, very brief overview of OpenStack for AWS users. Now, easiest way to move a workload from AWS to OpenStack? Don't. Now, I'm not really being facetious here. Well, I kind of sort of am. But what I'm trying to say here is if your application is a cloud application, then moving it is actually pretty simple, because a cloud application has certain architectural features that make it pretty simple. Because it's made to scale horizontally. It's made so that you can have lots of different machines in lots of different places. It's made so that it's stateless. It doesn't matter. You can have a session that hits this machine, and then it hits this machine, and then it hits this machine, and that machine doesn't matter. It's all based on microservices. So this function is made by making an HTTP call, and an HTTP call. If this machine over here goes down, it's fault tolerant. It doesn't matter. The whole thing's not going to come crashing down. And the thing about having a cloud application is that when you have a cloud application, it doesn't really matter which cloud all this stuff is in. So if your application is really a cloud application and it's all set up, you can gradually kind of move stuff over into OpenStack, and gradually just kind of shut down the stuff over there. And that's fine. A lot of people are like, I have a cloud application. I took my database, and I put it on Amazon. Yeah, that's not a cloud application. I took my enterprise, this, that, the other thing, and I put it on Amazon. Yeah, you know what? Taking an application and putting it in the cloud does not make it a cloud application. That makes it an application in the cloud. And congratulations on taking that first step, but you're not done yet. So that would be actually the first thing and the easiest way, but probably not the way that you want to do that if you're in a hurry, which I apparently was last night. So we'll just move right along. OK. Come on. You've been at the summit all week. You know how tired I am. OK, so the second easiest way of moving from AWS to OpenStack would be using orchestration tools.  These are tools that, basically, they are the layer of your application that deals with the cloud. It's not what's actually doing the calculations. It's what's deciding where to send that work. Typically, your orchestration will be versionable. So the logic behind, OK, well, I'm going to run my first 10 instances over here. And when there's too much traffic for that, I'm going to put it in that cloud over there. This is normally done in a way that you can take that and put it in Git or wherever you're going to put it. And usually, this is going to be for hybrid cloud environments, where you've got your internal data center and then you've got your public cloud presence. And that's going to be a lot of the situations that you're dealing with if you're trying to move from AWS into OpenStack. And so here you've got some different options. So you've got some cloud-specific orchestration tools. For example, when you're in AWS, you know about, those of you who are in AWS, you know about CloudFormation. That's the AWS orchestration tool. For the OpenStack people, there's Heat, which was originally based on CloudFormation. And again, there's some backwards compatibility that's still there. So these are some that are cloud-specific. On the other hand, there's a lot of tools. And actually, I haven't even listed all of them here. There's StackStorm, which is open source. There's Ericsson has a cloud manager. AppSara has a hybrid cloud operating system. This morning, I was talking to Beth Cohen over at Verizon about their Secure Cloud Interconnect, which is that kind of thing. Every day, it seems like somebody is coming up with a new way to orchestrate workloads between clouds, which is great. So just taking kind of a quick look at these. StackStorm is a workflow engine that started out in OpenStack using the Mistral project. Again, as I said, it's open source. You can go and grab it. Nice guys over there at StackStorm. Pretty smart. You can get a look here at sort of their notion of how this works. You've got various automations that work with sensors and actions. And they are sort of cloud-independent. They don't care what cloud it is. You look at Cloudify. I obviously did not finish this slide either. Boy, I was really tired last night. We'll correct that. But this is really their slide. This is really their image. It's a long week. Anyway, so you can see here now what Cloudify sort of the main thing about Cloudify is they're based on Tosca, which is a cloud orchestration standard that's been around longer than OpenStack. I remember working on Tosca years and years and years ago. And I thought it had gone away back into the deep recesses of my subconscious where I wouldn't have to think about it anymore. But no, it's still there. And somebody's actually done something useful with it, which is really awesome, because it's very powerful, Tosca. Another look here, you've got AppSara. So their whole idea is they're a hybrid cloud operating system where they've just got everything there. You just put all your apps in there, and they all talk to each other, and it doesn't really matter. So that just kind of gives you an idea. Now, that's all terrific. But the thing about cloud applications is that they are cloud applications. It's the whole pets versus cattle thing. All of those systems assume we're dealing with cattle.  But maybe you have puppies. You don't want to shoot your puppy in the head? Well, I don't want to shoot my puppy in the head anyway. I don't know what you're doing. But maybe you've got a pet out there. Maybe it's been out there since 1998. And you can't possibly replace it. And so you're just going to have to move it. So there's only one thing left to do. You're going to have to do this the hard way. Now, this is the part where we were talking about earlier, where basically what you're trying to do here is you are starting out with an Amazon virtual machine. And you want to wind up. So over here, you've got your Amazon virtual machine. And over here, you want to wind up with an image that you can load into Glance. For you AWS people, Glance would be the sort of image repository. Like when you go to launch an instance, they give you all those choices, that would be Glance. Now, problem is, lots of steps between here and here. Too many to really give you a demo. But what we're going to do is we're going to kind of do a brief run-through of them. And I will give you also a link to Darren's book that has the very specific, here's all the registry entries, and here's all the drivers, and all that stuff. But when you walk out of here, you at least have a good idea of how the process works. So when you read it, you're not going, huh? OK, so let's start with Windows. Just to kind of look at the general idea. So the first thing you have to do is you need to install the Vert.io drivers. And the reason that you need to do that is because otherwise, OpenStack doesn't know how to communicate with your VM. It's like when you take me, if you're going to put a new video card in your machine without the drivers, the machine doesn't know how to talk to it. It's exactly the same thing. So we're going to install the Vert.io drivers. We're going to prepare the registry. And ultimately, we're going to make a VMDK. So at this point, some of you are going, wait a minute. I did anybody say VMware? Anywhere? No, I haven't said it yet. But the fortunate thing is that VMware makes a tool that allows you to take an Amazon instance and bring it into VMware. But they also make a tool that allows you to bring a VMware instance and bring it into OpenStack. So, aha. Finally, we can talk. So we're going to create a VMDK. And then we're going to make that VMDK into a QCao 2 image, which is how we're going to bring it into OpenStack and then upload it to OpenStack. Any general questions before we go on? OK. So I'm going to kind of fly through the steps for a little bit because, again, we're not going to do it right at this moment, but I just want you to.  So that's what we're doing here. This is kind of a survey course in how to do this. So what we're going to do is we're going to open up the firewall on the Windows machine and then you're going to enable remote desktop access. We've got that in as a step, but honestly, it's almost always already open in a VM that's in AWS because otherwise, how are you accessing it? So we're going to allow access to the firewall. And then we're going to install the Vert.IO drivers. Now, how you do this is going to depend on whether you have administrator privilege privileges for the VM. If you do, great. You can install it right on the machine while it's running, done. If you don't, and you can't get it because the machine's been running since 1998 and the person who installed it got hit by a truck in 2006, well, that's OK. It's not the end of the world. But basically what we'll do is we'll take the VM, we'll take it, and we'll make the VMDK, and we'll convert it, and we'll do all that. And then we'll inject those drivers afterwards. OK. So first, we're going to go ahead and get the drivers. Got the URL there. It's an ISO. And then if we have admin privileges, we're going to go ahead and install it from the ISO. So first, we're going to install Damon Tools or some other emulator and mount the ISO. Just a quick note there. Make sure that you do install SPDT, or TD rather, even though it says you have to reboot. Otherwise, this will not work. All right. So then this is a very long URL, but it's an even longer set of instructions, so I just opted to put that in there. This is how you actually do the actual installation. When you go to do this, it will say blah, blah, blah, driver type, blah, blah, blah. OK. The driver type via store. OK. Trust me. Took me like three hours on that one. And then Darren looked at me and went, you know, says it right here. So there you go. All right. Now we're going to import the registry configuration. Again, full instructions at that particular URL. And then you're going to add a second administrator's account. Now, you need to attach a new volume to the VM. And you're going to do this in the AWS console. So you'll go to EBS, create a volume, attach it to the VM, and then grab the vCenter converter, VMWare vCenter converter. I'm going to talk to you about that. Sure. You're going to be able to download all the slides afterwards. OK. You're welcome. All right. Because I know I moved too fast. OK. So grab the converter. And then in using the converter, you're going to create a new image. And your source is going to be the powered-on machine. And you're going to choose VMWare workstation as the product. Now, everybody here heard Alice's restaurant from the song? She says, and there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, read the following words. Don't use the system desk. I've told you. I've warned you.    And you'll be homeless.  Don't say I didn't warn you. All right. Now, so once you have that on the volume that you attach to the machine, you're going to go ahead and convert the VMDK. So you're going to copy it over to a Linux box. If you don't have a Linux box, well, you got to open stack. Make yourself a Linux box. Install Kmoo IMG. And then go ahead and convert it. Got the command there, sample command. Now, if you had administrator privileges, congratulations, you're done. If you did not, then you got to take a few extra steps. So now you're going to go ahead and tell, you're going to have to use guest fish. Guest fish will allow you to inject all this stuff into the VM, into the image. So you're going to go ahead and tell guest fish where to find KVM. And you're going to copy the same vert.io files that you used before. And you're going to create a script. And again, all of this is in that document. I'll make sure there's a link here to the document. But there's a long list of values that are going to go in the script.  And this kind of fell off at the bottom. But you'll have a registry. You'll have a file that you're going to inject the registry. Basically, it's the same steps you did before, only you're doing them after instead of before. So now you have a QCAL image, which might as well have come from anywhere. Didn't have to come from Amazon. But you're ready. You can go ahead and you can bring this into OpenStack. And you can do that one of two ways. If it's small, you can use Horizon. If it's large, large being a relative term, depending on your system and all that, do yourself a favor. Just use the CLI, because otherwise the browser times out. And then the upload stops.  And just trust me. And then from there, you're ready. Watch your VM based on that image. So that's a lot of steps. But it's certainly better than trying to recreate everything you've done since 1998. Any quick questions before we move on to a quick look at Linux? OK. So doing this in Linux, we have one slight problem in that Amazon uses a custom kernel, which is great for them, lousy for us. And the reason for that is because they use this custom kernel, we can't just export everything and bring it into OpenStack. Instead, we basically have to find a way to make a machine that's like the machine that you have. And the way that we're going to do that is we're going to note what's already on that machine, create a new VM, and then make it like that machine. So let's kind of take a look at those steps. So first thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and get a list of all the installed packages. So we get that list off onto the local machine. Then we go list of the file systems. So we know what we have to build. And we copy that machine. Yes, sir? I could be cynical and say that they have some nefarious purpose, but I'm sure they have some technical reason for it. I just don't know what it is. OK. And then finally, you want to make sure that you get a list of all the services that are started at boot time. And you want to back up all your startup scripts, because I'm sure you're going to wind up with something that only lives here. And of course, if you have any specific application files that are in use, you're going to want to grab those as well. All right. So then you're going to go ahead and create a new Linux image. And you're going to create a new SSH key so that you can get into that Linux image. Boot it up, as you can see. The flavor, it's kind of cut off on the bottom here, but on the one that you download, it'll be there. You'll want a flavor that's something similar to what you had on AWS. So obviously, if you had an M2 large, you're not going to go with a tiny on OpenStack. That is awesome, by the way. OK. Next thing you're going to do is get the IP address. You can do NovaList. You can see we have the IP address there. So that allows you to log in, even though you can't see it, because it's underneath the bottom of the page. But trust me, it's there. Now, so you're logged in. You've got your files that say what was on the old machine. This is how you're going to put them back. So the first thing you're going to do, sudo over to root, update. And basically, you're just going to go ahead and reinstall everything. And that's it. And then once you have that, you are again, you have your machine. You put your files back on it, and you're ready to go. OK. And that brings us to Q&A. And I think we are bang on time. OK. All right. So does anybody have any questions? Yes, sir? The find systems of any database or anything? You know, I will confess that I have not tried a lot of different workloads with this. Darren, have you tried a lot of different workloads with this? The instructions there, if you're real full, who would you have taken over? You're really not going to want to do this. You don't want to stand up for questions and say, well, you have to take over there. Are we getting picked up? Wait, hang on. Do me a favor. Go talk into the mic there, Darren. And repeat the question. Sorry, I forgot. We have to go to the mics. So the question was, how many workloads have we actually seen people do perform this for? For the most part, think of it along the lines of back in the days when Windows got released, doing an upgrade. It's safer to do a fresh install of Windows, right? And this is the same thing. You're basically taking the underlying hardware, virtual hardware, and taking the OS from that and moving it to a different set of virtual hardware. So in reality, for real workloads, you're going to want to stand up a fresh thing and deploy your application. If your application isn't portable to that degree, you guys probably should really look at rewriting your applications. Yeah, this is kind of like last ditch, really. I mean, really, when you come right down to it, the first way of making a cloud application and do it that way, that's really your first line of defense. This is like, I can't do that. What am I going to do? Other questions? Can you, I can't hear you in the- Just a simple comment here. Oh, OK. OK. Outside of Windows. Sorry. Do you have similar recommendation from operating system other than Windows? Such as? Let's say I have a pretty, one of the things, I have a web app, but on Linux-based. Unfortunately, it's a pretty old one. Again, nobody's there to what was the exact config files and all that was set up for the DB and all behind it in SQL DB. So do you have a- Well, I mean, I think this process is going to give you a lot of that, right? The registry part is what I have a question for. Well, so in Linux, there is no registry. So if you haven't like an application that's installed on Linux somewhere, Chance Star is probably installed to a specific file system. While the thing's up, you probably want to use LSOF, find out what hooks it's using into the environment, and then basically port it over that way. Tarr it up, move the files over, use R-Sync or something along those lines to pull it over. But yeah, if the person's gone, it's going to take a little bit of investigative work in order to find out what you need on your destination system. Other questions? Is that it? Is that really it? So I kind of see two methodologies that you're using. You're doing the actual snapshot image copy over and just transferring files over. So with a snapshot, the other thing that hasn't been talked about is a sysprep process, because if you just copy one exactly over, like Windows, you're going to have the same MAC address as the old one. Oh, yes, I'm sorry. So you're going to have a few things like that that need to be edited and modified. That is correct. You need to, when you create your, see, he warned me about this. By the way, Darren used to work for Morantis. So yeah, Darren warned me about this yesterday.  And then a ladder one of copying it over, the data over, I mean, that's probably the general one that you should do anyways. So that's kind of a different solution to me anyways. And it's kind of like, it almost seems like the cheating way, because most people just want you to do the snapshot image copy over. And I understand that's a bad try to solution to try to shove something in a different size peg hole. It really is. And that's why I said at the beginning, I was like, this is not the way you really want to do this. This is like, you absolutely don't have any other alternative. And you just got to do this. But I mean, let's be realistic.  Generally. And it's a great opportunity for applications to say, hey, if you want to upgrade to a different OS. So I mean, if you're stuck in an older version of RHEL, hey, this is now a good opportunity to say, I'm going to upgrade to the newer RHEL and say, my application now runs on RHEL 7. Exactly. It's just, you really don't want to do this if you don't have to. Yeah. So just to comment on the Sys Prep, basically what you're actually doing is you're avoiding that completely. So what you wind up doing is you create your ports in Neutron using the CLI, because then you could define your MAC addresses. So your ports are already there. So when it comes up, the metadata is there and it'll already automatically plumb up. So yeah. So you're basically skipping the whole Sys Prep stuff. So what we're talking about for databases, it's best to do a data backup and then restore. Other questions? OK. Well, thank you all very much for coming. And thank you again to Darren. Let's give him a huge hand. What's that? Wait, wait, hang on. What? Just go back to mine. Oh, OK. Go back to your slide. Well, yeah, it's just so. Oh, yeah. Oh, because we didn't get it on. We didn't get it on the same. Yeah. I just want to say, I did write the document. This slide has my email address on it. That's my new company. So if you do have any questions, you could email Nick and he can get a touch to me or you can email me directly at my email address right there. Right. Yes. So thank you all very much for coming. I know it's late in the day and late in the summit. So give yourselves a hand for lasting this long. Thank you.