My name is Professor Vanille Randall and this is part of our Teaching and Learning series by the JD Project. So, one of the questions always students in law school wondered about is how to use study aids, which study aids to use, and whether using study aids is an effective tool. The reality is everyone uses some form of study aids.  Some of those study aids are study aids that are prepared by other students or by faculty members. Some of those study aids are things that they found on the internet that are free. And some are commercially prepared study aids. And finally, study aids includes those things students prepare for themselves like flashcards to help them learn. No one specific study aid is essential. However, the caveat to that is if a faculty member puts a study aid that they recommend are required, then that's the study aid you should choose over all others. Because that faculty member is probably using that study aid to help them draw out the law or will use the law from that study aid to help them instructing their class. Exam. So, a study aid then is anything device or procedure or even behavior other than attending class or doing the assignments, which will assist you in learning the information and the skills for a particular course. So when you think about study aids, they're clearly some real benefits to using study aid. They provide a useful background. They provide a context often a context that is not being provided by most casebooks, although over the last 30 years that I've been teaching casebooks have become better and better about providing context. In fact, many casebooks have the kind of text that you often expect in study aids. Study aids also study aids can give you an overview of the big picture, the policy, the trends that may not be readily available in your casebook or your class. And finally, when you're stuck on a particular concept, a study aid can really help the proverbable light bulb come on as you try to gain a better understanding of a concept. So one of the things that you need to do is you need to develop your own course summaries. Casebooks are notoriously bad for giving you all of the law that you need in order to be able to do well on law school exams, be able to do well on the baby bar, and ultimately the bar exam. And so you need to realize that you are going to have to gain much of the basic knowledge rules and laws from something other than cases, unless your casebook has been edited in a way to clearly give you the law, which many casebooks are not. You can end up preparing for class every day and still not having a clear idea of what the rules of law are that you need to know for the class and study aids are helpful for helping clear that up. Finally, one of the things that you must do throughout law school and preparing for the baby bar and preparing for the bar is to self test yourself. You need to know what you don't know, what you don't understand and where your writing skills are. Our study aid can provide a source of material for doing that kind of self testing. There are all types of study aids. There are porn books, which are summaries of the law put together by one person, usually a person or two usually recognized as a expert in the field. It's more thorough than an outline, a commercial outline, but still someone else's summary of the law. There are narrative study guides that you can use, obviously outlines, commercial outlines, outlines prepared by other students and in that from that particular professor outlines that they're just tons of the commercial outlines prepared by students and students prepared by professors available. Cali is a computer assisted learning institute, which your school has to have a membership in Cali, but if your school does have a membership, it's an amazing source of technological based learning aids. So you should take a look at that flashcards are indispensable. You will have to learn and memorize and understand a ton of information and reading and rereading outlines, reading and rereading casebooks won't help you learn that flashcards are one of the ways. Tapes, but particularly if you are an auditory learner listening to tapes of people talk about the law, talk about the rules of law. In addition, there's a technique called super learning, which involves making your own learning tape. It's a very specific technique which we won't go into here, but it's a technique that I highly recommend. I used it myself in law school and I've used it with other students. And finally, not finally, because there's there's all kinds of study aids, but one kind of study aid that I want to end with is can brief. The problem with can brief is, first of all, there's someone else analysis of a case and particularly cases in your casebook. And so they can be wrong. But more importantly, especially for a first and second year third year student, you are one of the skills that you have to learn is to read cases critically. To the extent that you use case briefs, you sure change that process. Now, if you say, well, I'll go back and learn later. Well, that's like skipping over a necessary component of learning to play the piano and thinking that you can just come back later and pick that component up and play just as well. No, it's not going to be that easy to pick up because you develop the nasty habit of reading other people's briefs. So, while they are available and they can be incredibly useful in general, you should use them only for an emergency situation. And I really don't think I'd rather see you go to class unprepared than to rely on can briefs because at the end of the day with can briefs, you could really hurt yourself more than help yourself, particularly for your ultimate goal, though, which is to be an outstanding attorney. And my interest in doing this is those people who are interested in doing social justice work, racial justice work, and you need to have strong case reading skills because you will need to be very creative when you work with social justice and racial justice. That gets into the issue of misusing study aids. When you use study aids to replace them for doing your own work, you sure change your own learning process. You may not really that includes using case briefs instead of reading cases that includes using someone else's prepared outline instead of doing your own course summary. And I use the word course summary very intentionally because I believe that you can use commercial outlines to get the necessary information that you need. But at the end of the day, you have to make a summary that is for the course. And it's that process of making the summary that will help you understand how things fit together in order to be able to do good analysis. And the other work that you need to use is making your own flow charts and people will use flow charts made by other people because they think that having the flow chart is the important part of learning. No, it's the process of making the flow chart that is the important part of learning. And we will be doing a videotape on flow charting later. So we talked about using outlines prepared by other students inappropriately. And that's whenever you replace doing the work yourself, that's an inappropriate use. Whenever you go with what a student has in their outline as opposed to what you know the faculty members to be teaching. Faculty members change their understanding, their view, their expectation. And so an outline that worked well for another student won't necessarily. An outline that worked well for another student won't necessarily work well for you. And remember, when you say you got an outline from a student who made an A in the course, why do you think they made an A? Because they did the work. You think that it's all about memorization and knowing what the expectations are? No, it's about the thinking process that goes into making an outline that goes into making a summary. And you can get an A outlined, you can use horn books, you can use commercial outlines, you can use outlines prepared by your faculty member themselves. And they do have them and still not do well. Because at the end of the day, the process of thinking has been shortchanged because you didn't do the work yourself. The other misuse is using too many study aids. We see students all the time who keep buying study aids thinking that there's a magic study aid. And if they just find the right study aid, it'll all click together. First of all, it can be overwhelming. Secondly, because the law tested is the same on the bar exam, and especially generally is a no-person law that is designed to be taught in 51 states and territories so that it doesn't represent any particular law in any particular state, but is a generalization and summary of the law. The study aids are going to be essentially the same. It's just going to be how they're worded. So one of the things you should look for at your school is do they have a study aid library? If not, you should work with students to get one started. The purpose of a study aid library is not to get study aids that students then check out and use all semester, but to allow students to look at and use different study aids until they settle in on a study aid that speaks to them, that like study aids vary in the amount of detail and students vary in the amount of detail they need.  The other problem of using too many study aids is it really does add to your workload. If you end up at reading all the different study aids that you have acquired, then instead of going with the one that you like or the one that you've settled on, then you just add to your reading.  The other problem with the misuse of study aids is that you can end up getting more information than you will ever need for the course and ultimately for the bar and the baby bar.  You need a good outline that you like and you need flashcards, although my inclination is that you should team up to make your own flashcards. But you need one outline, you need a law dictionary, a good law dictionary and possibly a good horn book because the horn book goes into a lot more detail than an outline. And then you need to be really judicious in using those study aids. So final thoughts. Don't use too many. Be careful on how you pick them. Remember that you have to issue spot you have to analyze and you have to write and memorizing the law is essential to doing that. But at the end of the day, you're going to be able to need to know the law and the more you do for yourself. And unless you rely on things prepared by other people, the better you will do study aids and exams won't identify the issue. Your professor for the most part is going to label questions as a battery question or an issue as a consent issue. And you're going to have to pick up that skill and that skill will only be picked up from practicing short answer questions, practicing multiple choice questions, practicing exams. In fact, it may be better to practice those things and use a commercial outline to check when you get the answer wrong. You need to get your own, you need to start your own course summary from the beginning of the semester and add to it. We will be doing a, we will have a video on doing a course summary. You need to start your course summary, keep it up all semester and use study aids judiciously to help you in doing that. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is using study groups and I flash state partner. Law schools always talk about study groups. Many people don't use study groups. Many, many people in fact more people than admit because oftentimes study groups are seen as an essential part of law school learning and they are an important part. But part of the benefit can be having partners, law school partners, and this is particularly important for people who are working full time, or have family, or have other responsibility that doesn't allow them to meet frequently with a group. It's also important for people who don't really work well in groups. Know yourself if you're not a good group worker, know that, or who don't learn that well from group process learning. So, but you need a partner. You need a partner because part of the issue is to do analysis and to understand how analysis can be done. And having a partner who is different from yourself politically can be an invaluable too. When I was in law school, my study partner was this very conservative young man who we disagreed almost on everything. But at the end of the day, working with him helped me to understand his point of view and his perspective, which made me stronger in my analysis. So try to pick people who are not going to be like you and how they view the world. At least if you're only going to have a partner, have a partner who is different from yourself. If you're going to work in a group, then have a diverse group, diverse racially, diverse gender, diverse age, diverse culturally. Because the more the more the more perspectives you can bring in the group, the more effective the group will be in helping you improve your analysis. But there's a huge caveat. Study groups are only effective to the extent that individuals come prepared to the study group. And don't try to substitute study group learning for individual learning. To the extent that there are different levels of preparations, then that will make study groups ineffective. Why study groups are partners helpful? Well, they help you think as I talked about, they foster the ability to think critically. They, if done right, and we'll talk about the things that you should be doing in a study group, they foster critical thinking. They can foster critical thinking and critical analysis. They can force students to support their opinions with reasoning. Reasoning that's based on facts and definitions, concepts and principles. It's too often students think that the right conclusion is the end of the day. Is there battery? Yes. And I think they've done it. But if that's all you know, even if you're 100% correct, you won't do well on law school exams because you need to support your conclusion with reasoning and analysis. And that includes using the facts, using the definitions, using critical thinking to develop why your perspective on the conclusion is correct. A study group, if it's members who will push you to explain, will help you in that analysis. So study groups are great for test taking preparation, but they also, if you do... So study, why are study groups and partners useful? We talked about the obviously foster ability to think critically. Well, let's go back a second. It depends on what you end up doing in a study group. They can foster the ability to think critically and analytically by forcing students to support their reasons with opinions and to argue against others who have opposite views. This is why it's important for study groups to be diverse in terms of experience, cultural background, gender, race, politics, religion, culture. The more diverse you have, diversity you have in your study group, the more likely you are going to have to argue with someone on a point that they see totally different from you. And that's good because that builds your analytical skills. So study groups and study partners teaches you to listen critically to others, teaches you to evaluate their arguments and your own arguments, and they teach you to formulate your own views on issues. Study groups promote understanding of concepts, and study groups help to develop your problem-solving skills. Study groups can be horribly ineffective. So study groups should not meet unless the members have already done the basic. They've gone to class, they've briefed their cases, they've started their course summaries, and they've narrowly identified beforehand what they're going to talk about in the study group. You can do this all by email. So there's no reason to show up for a study group and say, what are we going to do? That's wasted time. Develop that whole what are we going to do via email before the study group, and then be prepared when you go to the study group. So the purpose of the study group should be to help you prepare for exams and help you prepare for class participation. And we will talk about the difference in what you can do in terms of preparing for class participation and exam. One effective way of preparing for study groups depends on whether you're going to do for class or exams or both. But I would suggest that at any given meeting, you should either come to the meeting with a narrowly focused idea. Study groups should start on time and end on time. The biggest waste of time is sitting around waiting for someone to show up in the study group. The second waste of time and what may ultimately destroy a group is study groups that consistently go over time. So if you're going to have a study group that's going to meet an hour, an hour and a half, start on time, end on time, set a timer, and stop. Stop mid-sentence. So there is nothing so important going on in the study group that you cannot stop.  Where to meet for a study group? Don't meet at someone's home. You're likely to get sucked up into whatever is going on in their home.  But have a very distinct place, maybe in a room in a library, your public library, schedule a room, meet in that room. It should be away from other distraction.  That no one should come into the study group with a cell phone on. And that if people have something going on in their lives that require that they have a cell phone on, then being in a study group may not be the best use of their time. Also, don't allow people to answer a call in the study group. If people want to make a call, the rule of the study group is, leave the study group. Don't engage in distracting behavior inside the study group. So how long? An hour at least. And maybe that's it. An hour of focus time is worth four hours of rambling and going on about a lot of different things. So if you schedule a real clear idea of what you're going to cover, what you intend to accomplish beforehand.  Sometimes people think more time is better, but the idea is if you're stopped every few minutes so people can go to the bathroom that people can engage in fun and people are carrying on side conversations. That's the other thing. You know, one of the rules and one of the things you need to do is make up a rule for how your study group function and one study group function should be no side conversations. You, everything has to be spoken to the group as a whole, not between different people in the group. And that's one reason to keep it short because it may be more profitable for people to talk in pairs and partner.  That's an appropriate way to approach a topic. So who in the study group, anyone who is committed to being prepared, committed to doing the work. You need a way to ask people to stop participating in a study group if they are always a distraction are never prepared. You have to have serious people that are part of your study group no matter how much you like someone no matter how much you may be personal friends with them in another space. If they are procrastinators if they always have a reason for why they are not fully prepared no matter how legitimate their reason sound and it may be legitimate. But you do not have the time to have them as a part of a group. Study groups are not a place for helping people solve their problems are enabling people to be less than prepared for law school. And for the exam and for the baby bar in California into the first year and the bar if you're studying for the bar. So you need people who are as serious as you are about your personal success. Draw up guidelines before your first meeting don't need to be a long list of don't do this and don't do that, but draw up expectations. You can agree on expectations before you even have your first meeting. What are the three or four principles that you think are essential to make your study group effective. The other people can do that you all can then talk about those principles and come up with three or four that you all agree with. Identify how you plan to deal with someone who for whatever reason has become a mutual or a free loader or is just having problems that they can't handle. Study group is not a place for helping people solve the problems they can't handle. Before study group after study group but in study group itself is for learning the skills and information you need to do well on the exam. So what size is a study group not so large that everyone that you allow mutuals. See if you get a group that's too large people can just sit back without having to give to do anything and not everybody will get able to talk. So maybe five is about the good size maybe even three can be a very small group. Anything over five is probably you're going to get into managing the group as opposed to just managing your learning process. So remember that your study group should have two goals. Help you prepare for class. Help you prepare for exam. So how do you use study groups to help prepare study groups, study partners to help prepare for class. For the group meet set a topic that you're going to discuss. Decide which class you're going to be working on. Set a topic that you're going to be working on. Focus on a particular class or a particular concept. I mean your course so say that you may be focusing on the most recent class that you had in a course or a class that you had several weeks ago that everybody walked away not understanding things. Identify what it is you're going to be covering from the class specific cases specific reading assignments get things. If there's things that can help you like study notes, study worksheets are things that can help you from the class. If your professor has handed out things bring those to the study group review the concept review what went on in the class that is having the problem of the concepts that you're having a problem with and review how you can prepare for the next class in a way that that will be helpful. Go over potential case briefs if quiz people on the case, the reasoning of the court. Those are all things you can do for class preparation trading outlines for different subjects are trading summaries with different subjects. If you're going to do you're going to everyone is going to come to the group with their summary and outline done for the specific area of the course you're going to be studying. You can't do exam preparation if people don't already understand and have some knowledge of the law. And so this this is not at all a substitute for individual preparation. You do want to share your outlines that are done so that you can see what is weak and what is strong and if you miss some irrelevant point connections to be made. You want to practice exam questions, writing them and critiquing them practice high hypotheticals writing short answer hypotheticals the one issue hypotheticals. Practice flashcards writing writing and orally remember you and then critiquing each other's response. You want to prepare for success. You need to think sound and write like a lawyer. For your essay exams for your bar exam baby bar exam and for the bar exam. Using study aids and using study groups will help you depending on how you use them. And that's why the stars by them because you can use them in ways that don't help you with your writing if you don't write anything and critique each other. You can use things that don't you can do things that don't help you with your thinking if you don't talk about hypotheticals and critique each other's analysis. So you want to use study aids and use groups, study groups in a way that will help you prepare for your success. You want to trust the process. You're going to load up the process with things you need to think you're going to load up your process with things to help you sound like a lawyer. And then you're going to translate all that into writing and that will give you the success that you want. If you have any questions or comments. Post them on moodle. LawSchoolMoodle.com if you're in the class. If you're not, you can post them below.


Welcome to Toffy TV, it is the Everton News Daily, Carl Angelotti has confirmed that he has a fully fit squad, but when I say fully fit squad, all the players who went away for the internationals, Jerry Meane, Hazard Rodriguez, Luca Dean, Dominic Alvin-Lewin, Richard Ellison, they're all back fit and they should be available for tomorrow's game against Liverpool and the Maisie side Derby. Obviously plays like making the whole gate, you had a brand for it, they're still missing, John Fleet-Gabammon, still a little bit away, but all the players that it seemed had, there was going to be doubts about them, they're all back for the Maisie side Derby. So, as I said, Jerry Meane had a little precautionary issue that stopped them playing for Colombia, Luca Dean went off with 10 minutes to go for France and they went over Croatia, they're available tomorrow, fingers crossed unless he's pulling one, you know, the wall over the eyes of Jaig and Colop, but really, really good news for the Maisie side Derby that were a full strength. Obviously revealed early in the week that James Coleman was available, Alam was available and Andre Gomez was available, so really, really positive news on that front end. Yeah, I think everyone's positive and everyone's now with that news, probably a little bit calmer and looking forward to the kickoff tomorrow, 12.30, Gouldersham Park to see if Everton can keep the unbeaten run going and can stay top of the league. If he can, then who knows, who knows, it's fantastic times at the moment, let's hope they continue. It is transfer deadline day for players being able to leave to go to the lower leagues and also come from the lower leagues. Colin Connolly has left Everton to go to Fleetwood Town on loan for the rest of the season. He is out of contact next summer, so essentially he has left the club now, but unfortunately he was the only one to leave. Janet Balassie saw a late move to Middlesbrough collapse. Again, that would have been the same kind of thing he would have gone if he'd gone for the rest of the season. That would have been the end of his Everton contract, so disappointing, probably disappointing for him that he hasn't left, but it is one of those things. But I made a move for him late last night, so I don't know why clubs leave it so late when they know they need players, maybe they think they can get them on the cheap and put the club in a position where they probably have to let them go for next to nothing and wages are shared and all the rest of it, but very, very strange that it didn't go through. Everton were rumoured to be looking at Josh King, nothing materialised on that. Everton are going with what they've got. Let's remember as well, more than halfway through October, the transfer window opens again in January. Everton have got two and a bit months with this squad now. I know a lot of people have felt like we'll light up front, but we've got two and a bit months to cope and then. I used to say that in January, early January, we don't go back for, say Josh King, got a much reduced price because he's only got a few months left on his form of contract. We'll have to wait and see. We've had a fantastic transfer window, let's be honest. We've brought in all the players we want to bring in. OK, we haven't got rid of probably everyone we want to get rid of, but the likes of Bessage and likes of Balasi, they are no longer Everton players at the end of the season. Apart from them and a few under 23 players, there's no one really that many left to go now. The likes of Sandro have already left the club, so there's not really that many to go. Anyone who is left will probably go at the end of the season and that will start to make Marcel Brands' job a lot easier for him in terms of bringing people in and people going out. We'll wait and see. Anyway, that's what it is, it is what it is.  It will be interesting to see where Ben Godfrey, I'm sure he'll be on the bench tomorrow and whether Everton can play their strongest start in 11. My start in 11 is out, so make sure you check that out. Make sure you check out the match preview. If you're on Patreon, there's a match preview with one of the gentlemen from the Red Men TV, so if you want to go and check that out, Ross joined us to do the preview. If you want to check that out as well. The link is in the description for that. We do daily live shows over there. Give this video a like and subscribe if you haven't already. Thank you very much. We'll see you later.


Hello everyone this is Amit Dan of amitdan.com Today I will have another episode of One Minute AI or Artificial Intelligence video and today I will ask Alexa and Google Assistant our question So in this series each time I will ask one question to both Google Assistant and Alexa and we will listen to their responses So let's start with today's question and I am going to start with Alexa first Alexa are you married? I am happily single Ok so we will ask the same question again because I notice that sometimes their response differently if you ask the same question Alexa are you married? I am happily single Ok Google are you married? I am still waiting for the right electronic device to steal my heart Ok so it looks like Google Assistant is responding differently each time you ask but it looks like Alexa is responding the same question So let's try again Alexa are you married? I am happily single Ok Google are you married? I am married to the idea of being the perfect assistant Ok Google are you married? I am focusing on my career right now Ok Google are you married? I am in a very committed relationship with my job as an assistant


Thank you everybody for coming. I'm glad to see good turnout. You're all probably interested in sidecars. Yeah, more people will probably keep coming, so I hope it wouldn't interrupt you too much. So, I'm Sergei Kanjalev, I work for Google and I'm chair of SIGNOTE. I'm Todd Neal and I work for AWS and I'm a SIGNOTE reviewer. So, sidecars. You know this construction wouldn't probably steer well. When I was a kid, smallish, I was spending time every summer with my grandparents and my grandfather has a motorcycle with a sidecar. Imagine sitting in a sidecar, there is no belt, nothing, wind in your face and so exciting. And I was small and imaginative, so I was like, oh, I'm steering a motorcycle. Oh, let's go left, let's go right. And unfortunately, when I need to watch my grandfather really carefully where he is going right, then I would pretend to turn my wheel and go right as well. But I was imagining that I'm steering the motorcycle. So, Kubernetes was feeling similarly to me. Sidecars were steering the pods. It's like, yeah, it's not right. We need to fix it. So, we decided that we need to fix it and now it's fixed. We will be, so now, yeah, no imaginative steering wheel that actually steers the motorcycle. So, let's go to the next slide. So, what are sidecars? Sidecars is a special type of container. It's a pattern that you will use when you implement your workload. So, let's say you have an application, you want to continue this application. It may be existing code, it may be something that you write specifically for Kubernetes, but nevertheless, it's something that implements your business logic, you deploy it and you want it to work. And sometimes you need to work and you need to communicate with something else. Like, sometimes you need to collect telemetry out of this container. You have different ways to do that. One of the ways to get a specialized process that will go run and like collect logs when needed. And you don't want this process to run inside your container because you may have different dependencies. It's much easier to just run a separate container inside your port and you're golden. Same concept with networking access. You may have different networking requirements and you want to deploy it as some sort of containers that already exist on the market or you build it yourself. Other things like security. Somebody will download certificate and keep it up to date all the time so you don't need to worry about it and data access is also an interesting pattern. We see some drivers being installed as a sidecar. And the reason people also install the sidecar, not only because they can control it more precisely, they can configure it specifically for your port, but also you can account resources for your port. So imagine this driver is not installed as a sidecar, is installed as a demon set. In this case, whenever your workload goes to the demon set, demon set becomes a shareable resource that may experience noisy neighbor problem. So as a container using up all the resources, you out of resources so you don't have your data access there. It doesn't work really well. So sidecar eliminates this problem.  So you can limit it, you can unlimited, it's your choice, but you are responsible for these resources. And it's a very powerful pattern in this regard. In fact, there was a talk on a day zero talking about some data access pattern for AIML that using sidecar as we developed specifically for this purpose because they wanted to attribute all this cost of encryption and decryption to the port rather than making system administrator pay for that. Anyway, this is sidecar pattern. And out of all the existing concepts that we have today in Kubernetes, we have innate containers that runs to completion, runs in order, and we need regular containers that start in almost a sequential order. And then whenever they all terminate, port will terminate. So in this model, it's quite easy to say, let's take one of these containers and make it sidecar. And it works. So it was working for many years. This article was written, I mean on previous slide, articles written on like 2000 single digit year, I think. Yeah, so pattern existed and it worked very well for web apps. Web apps are unique. They never end. They keep going. And whenever container crashes, it will be restarted. So it works perfectly fine for web apps. More and more, I mean, some people complain about sidecars in web apps because termination order is not declared. So if you want to gracefully terminate your port, then your main container may finish after your sidecar finish. So imagine you have a network providing sidecar and your container still needs a sidecar, but sidecar was already finished because there is no ordering termination. So there were problems like that, but this was edge case. Like nobody cares about edge case that much. I mean, it will crash a couple of times. Yeah, they know how it goes. But hopefully you are not that person. You want real sidecars. So we solved this problem. And another problem is that it was much bigger and it was in the face. Like it wasn't like this edge case, like when graceful termination happens sometimes, ordering is not right. This is a real problem. You put monitoring container in your job and the job never finishes. Monitoring still wants to run. It's running, it's running, it's running and sending zero metrics unless you will manually terminate this job. So another problem for long running jobs we experienced is if job is 10 hours and after first 15 minutes your monitoring container suddenly decided to allocate too much memory just out of blue and it was umkilled, it will never be restarted. So 10 hours you run blind without any monitoring, which also not ideal. So we wanted to restart sidecar. So many problems is jobs and we heard all these problems as a community. It was even before I joined Kubernetes. So I heard that they heard. I saw very old issues describing these problems and documents how to solve this problem and why it wasn't solved before. So let's get to the next slide. So to understand why it wasn't solved before we need to understand what's happening now in Kubernetes. So as you may heard on Keynote Kubernetes is everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's a new Linux. So people running everything on Kubernetes. Many, many different types of workloads. And for all these workloads Kubernetes is pretty much works. It's okay. It's not bad. It can manage your workload reasonably well and you can hug things together so it will not even look ugly. So it's great. And the problem was that even for those workloads that we had, we didn't have it very reliable in Signode. So Signode experienced a problem when we implemented many, many features and suddenly we felt that those features are not all polished. Like we have a bunch of Permabaitas. Permabaita is something permanently in beta. We had a bunch of code that is not well tested and not implemented as conformance. So we needed to do something about it. And we started working on eliminating all those Permabaitas, cleaning up code, improving test cases. And finally we get to the very stable state. So now if you look at Signode and Kubernetes, we are at 40 feature gates and 19 of them is experimentation. So now we get into this like maybe one year ago. We get into the mode when we're not only deprecating and cleaning up stuff, but we're also experimenting and we're experimenting a lot. And main directions when we experiment is new workloads, especially EIML that are very popular now, but also like just before EIML they were HPC, which are as important as EIML. And also we want to understand hardware better. So hardware is not relative here, but new workloads are definitely something that we want to support better. So we've been on this good point when we are reliable enough so we can start experimenting and introducing new features. And we also really, really want side cards for new workload types. And when I say new workload types, I keep repeating about jobs and stuff. But also we have things like open telemetry that get so popular and Fluent Bead became such a ubiquitous part of Log's collection. So all these agents want to run inside your port and they want to run more and more inside the jobs that you're running. So to accommodate those scenarios, we really needed side cards. So again, remember this key, trying to steer the side card, thinking that it's steering the motorcycle. I want you to understand that side card feature is not a great new addition. It's not a major, it's not something that didn't work before. So it's worked before, especially for web apps. What we're fixing right now is fixing side cards for new workload. And specifically for jobs, when we will start, keep restarting these jobs. And now we want to start talking about implementation of side cards. And Todd here will walk us through the implementation. All right. So Sergey reminded us about why we want side cards, the problems that we had. And I'm sure everyone's probably tried to work around side cards before. I started writing bash scripts and containers so that you can try to control the order of their startup with like files or amount between them. And then do the same thing on the reverse side. And now you've got like this half baked system D implementation and bash in your pod that's really running. I see some shaking heads and everyone's like, yeah, that's fun to write. So how are things better now? So a sidecar is an init container with a restart policy of always. And we can all go get lunch now because I think that's the real one you know. The first thing you'll notice is like Sergey said, there's not a new type of container. Sidecars are just init containers that continues to run. And there's some neat things that come about from that. If you want to sequence your regular init containers with your sidecars, that just sort of falls out of the implementation. In this case, we have a secret fetch standard init container. It runs first because it's first in the init container list, then our network proxy can know that the secret fetch container has already finished and it can start up. Then the log sender can start up after and then finally all of our main containers can start up. And how does it really look though if you look at like the pod lifetime? So here, time going right towards, or towards increasing towards the right. Our secret fetch container starts, runs, finishes, and once it's finished, we're still in the init container section. We have a network proxy. It starts up as a startup probe, a pre-start hook. Once it's running, we're now ready to start our log sender. We don't wait for the network proxy to finish. We have a log sender now, has a startup probe, maybe a pre-start hook, or post-start hook. We run that. Everything's great. And now we can simultaneously start our main containers. Now we're ready for the pod to finish. We can stop our main container simultaneously. And now we have our sidecars. The log sender was the one we started last, so we terminate it first because there's sort of this implicit dependency that the log sender needs a network proxy, so we need to terminate the log sender first. And then we'll stop our network proxy and finally our pod is completely done and terminated. One way to think about this is that our sidecars, lifetimes sort of bracket the main containers and they sort of bracket each other and kind of get this tower of annoy looking figure of the pod lifetimes. And that lets you sort of make some assumptions about container lifetimes that really weren't possible before without doing a lot of hacky stuff on your own like we skipped one. So initialization is pretty standard but termination ordering is a bit more complicated. So we'll talk about it here. You have pre-stop hooks and then you have the stop container call that the CRI or is made through the CRI to actually stop containers. So with sidecars the pre-stop hook effectively tells you that, hey, the pod is terminating. Termination process has started. So pre-stop gets called simultaneously for main containers and sidecars. For the main containers, as soon as your pre-stop is completed we call stop container which ends up in a sig term and eventually a sig kill if you don't exit. But for sidecars that's not what happens. For sidecars we actually don't call stop container and you don't get a sig term until it's your turn to stop. So in this case log sender is pre-stop hook finished but we don't call a stop container and we don't get a sig term until all of the main containers are done. So your main containers can effectively rely on the fact that your sidecars containers will not be stopped until all of the main containers are completed. Similarly the network proxy, log container may depend on network proxy. So we don't call stop container, we don't send the sig term for the network proxy until the log sender has actually finished. So that's sort of how the termination works, a bit more complicated than initialization but it gives you some nice guarantees about the lifetime and the relationships between the lifetime of the various containers. And with any new feature there's always ways to use and misuse it. So we'll go through a few of those. Everyone's familiar with requests and limits on containers and should always set request and limits. Sidecars, still important. One thing and I'll get back to this in a few minutes but if you're trying to figure out like what are these sort of sum of pod requests for this pod like the how much or how many CPUs does this pod require and you go look at the containers like oh it has one CPU and there's a knit container but actually that knit container is a restart policy. If we look at the lifetimes those are both running at the same time now. So if you ever sort of made assumptions that hey I'll just sum up the main containers and compare them with the max of the knit containers that's how I get pod requests. That calculation no longer works so you really need to consider the lifetime of the pods and the resource requests and sort of take them into consideration with your your allocation planning. The great thing about sidecars is you get this serialized startup ordering but if your startup is really slow it can turn into one of the bad things about sidecars. So in this case our network proxy is taking a really long time to start up and because of that the log sender we don't even begin to start it until the startup probe and pre-start hook have or post-start hook have completed. In this case log sender also has a really long startup probe and post-start hook and what you end up seeing is that just sort of lengthens the time before we ever even begin to consider starting your main containers. So sort of a best practice minimize the time before your containers go ready so that we can quickly start all the other containers. Termination ordering or the termination sort of the same problem. There's a single graceful pod stop time period and it's shared between the main containers and all the sidecars.  I don't want to stop and so what ends up happening is eventually we run out of time and once we run out of time we just quickly try to shut down the pod as rapidly as possible.  And then lastly just a few things. I said that the resource calculation sort of summing up requests for a pod has changed so I'm certain that there are some metrics or cost accounting tools that someone has written to like allocate cost to teams. Those are all going to be wrong in one two nine unless you go update them to accounts for sidecars. So sidecars are in the internet container section so just be aware that you need to go check all that out and make sure it works correctly. And then there's at least been one report of a mutating admission webbook that dropped the restart policy field on internet containers so if you have any of those be sure to test those out with sidecars and ensure that it doesn't break anything and other than that just go out and use some sidecars. Go back to Sergey to finish out. Yeah you may have heard that I mean we spend a lot of time drawing all those diagrams with dots like six terms here what if it's here would be better and we've been spending a lot of time debating and understanding what will work the best and we not did it alone we did it with many many people and those people not only signaled maintainers and signaled reviewers approvers code reviewers it also people who actually implement in this so we can confidently say that we thought about almost everything that you may have to think of when you implement sidecars so if you haven't thought of something or you think we haven't thought of something maybe we just it's just impossible to implement so some things are just not achievable in this physical world but I also want to talk about something what's next talking about sidecars you you enter the room and you say in sidecars and immediately I see it and people saying oh you know what I wanted from sidecar I want something else so what we decided to do we decided to take this approach with smaller footprint we said that we will solve specific problems with the specific field and we did so we did alpha in 128 we did beta 129 beta now has termination ordering that Todd was talking about in at length so behavior of 128 and 120 and difference a little bit so if you want to implement something that will be surviving till GA at 129 is your version and then adoption wise we already have for Istio blog post explaining how exactly you need to you can try out sidecar containers with Istio and GCS fuses one of the data drivers I was talking about they also had a sidecar and already have a commit saying like let's remove all this old code and we'll all get the sidecars and it will be much better for everybody so we have an option we have testing already so welcome to try it out as well and upcoming so we have one small feature that we also want to deliver to GA this feature will change behavior a little little bit most of people wouldn't notice it it's a behavior for restarts of sidecars while pod is terminating so imagine you're taking 30 minutes to terminate your pod for some reason maybe you need to uninstall drivers or like clean up major file which is huge in this case if sidecar still running we want it to be keep being restarted if it crashed so it's a very hk scenario but it's important for some use cases and we really want to cover all of them so the last feature we'll take for GA as a part of this cap but a part of this cap we also had more goodness that people asked about it's one point or another and this goodness may or may not be implemented there is no guarantee but it's something we hear a lot and we may want to think about it more as part of a follow-up on sidecars so things like security boundaries like right now there is no difference between sidecar and non-sidecar and people really concerned about it because sidecars may be envoy proxies have been injected and it needs a little bit of privilege to modify a network table and people may not want to have even like allow SSH access to this sidecar that this has a little bit more privilege and they maybe want to allow SSH to something that is containers that is less privileged and just using this network tables what else other things is resource reuse so there are two types of sidecars one sidecar is logging you want your HPC running on dedicated CPUs and all the logs and everything else running as far as possible to not interfere and other scenario is networking when you want to run your sidecar as close as possible to your workload so like networking calls wouldn't take extra hoop so you want to run on same numonote or something and then other features like crash back loop off and better um handling we all we hear all these features they are not coming as part of this cab but we may start working on it later and we also wanted to highlight something that definitely will not be part of Kubernetes anytime soon so one of the interesting requests we hear is when sidecar needs to be declared in some other asset that will be automatically plugged like attached to the port so port became like not a single yaml file but bunch of yaml files that will be constructed together on the fly so I don't think that will be that will happen anytime soon it's a neat idea though but it's not something that we actively pursuing right now and also we've been debating a lot because we want to replace like emulate system D inside the port so do we want to make port an orchestrator of containers so you can say one container is dependent on another container and dependent on third container so random specifically in this order and if container number two restarts you restart like start from very beginning you need to start the first one again we decide that we don't want to go this direction anytime soon so port will stay a single deployment unit you deploy main container it runs to the completion or runs forever but it doesn't have any orchestration inside the orchestrator so yeah that's something we wouldn't implement and there are a couple more features I listed here that is like percentage of usage it's another interesting thing that probably not happening anytime soon but it's a neat idea so if you have any questions we left specifically more time for questions because we believe that it's a hard topic you can go to the microphone if you want to leave feedback here you go if you want to run grab lunch we are not offended at all lunch is very important for your health thank you so great presentation thank you very much I have a question since you mentioned that you thought of everything could you possibly share your thoughts behind why is it filled inside an unit container and not a zone set of containers why did you make that decision to define sidecar containers basically piggyback on meaning containers so the main idea was that we wanted to make sure that something running sidecar is running while in need containers are running and we also knew that not every in need container wants to run with a sidecar so if we will put it in some other collection we will need to have coordination with in need containers after that and we didn't want this actively have it already right so the in need containers without restart always run as in need containers and only then the containers we or can you actually mix and match yes we can make a mix and match an order will be preserved so first container will run second container with restart policy will start up and only after it's fully start up second third container will run so ordering is preserved container could be just a simple in need container not a sidecar yes and it will run to completion before the next sidecar container will run okay yes thank you in 1.29 how are you planning to implement the order of termination is it depend on the order of in need containers that we configure yes the reverse order that we started them up in so the basically look at the list of in need containers of your sidecars and going in reverse is how they're terminated got it thank you piggybacking off of the first question right now the field set to like either never restart or always restart is there a more option is there a idea for adding more options to that restart field or is it just going to always be like never restart or always restart there are ideas not for in need containers but for in need containers basically support all of them like we have three never on failure and always right so we kind of support all of them I mean you can only specify always so rely on default and default will be either all but theoretically we can introduce three of them and wouldn't be a problem the ideas are for main containers for main containers beyond never on failure and restart some ideas of how can we say that container is so important that it will restart alongside entire port so it will basically terminate the entire port and restart as a whole port together so that's kind of new values it may be the same field maybe different field but that is new life cycle ideas that we have for ports all right thank you hey thanks for the talk I just wanted to ask I know you about service meshes I meant I saw that you mentioned that Istio now offers native support for sidecar containers do other service meshes not offer the support how does a service mesh handle requests and things from sidecar containers in general can you if you can speak to that bit so they're really they're just they're just regular containers in the pod we just start them earlier and then also define a termination warning other than that they just act like regular containers within the pod so if you have a sidecar that you're running as a main container now for the most part you can probably just turn it into a sidecar by moving into the net container set the restart policy always and you've gotten serialized and known initialization termination order so it should work out of the box okay I guess I was a little confused why you know what Istio means by native support maybe it's a better question for Istio but yeah so right now how Istio works it has a this injection proxy and for every port it will inject the sidecar sidecar is basically envoy proxy preconfigured it will inject it as a regular container so what they implemented is if they detect it's 129 and it has sidecar support they will inject it as a new type of like in it container with the restart policy always and it helps a lot because now they cover in it containers that they have better termination so I mean it's the same functionality but better okay got it thanks I appreciate it yeah I think like what a survey I had mentioned with Fuse it may allow some of them to remove some container or some logic that they're doing now where they're trying to sort of enforce this initialization order termination order themselves and just rely on the fact that that's how that's how sidecars work now so I have a question so once the port runs is it is it the default setting of the sidecar that it's going to run automatically once it starts so we will from a Kublet perspective we will start you you be inside car and then we will start sidecar and we will monitor its execution if it terminated or finished we will restart it and then restart it and then restart it so we will keep it alive for the duration of port being alive okay gotcha so if we're doing any type of a code change is sidecar can be added can be of any value to the main container can you repeat the question in order to do any code change will the sidecar will be of any value to the main container I mean doing any code change and testing it I mean if you have already sidecar implemented as a regular container yes I mean minor changes will be needed mostly changes will be needed in how you terminate so typically sidecars today will receive a sick term and we'll wait for a little bit to provide services for main containers now you shouldn't wait you just like terminate and you know that it will be terminated in the right time so probably you just remove a little bit of code but other than that it will work the same okay gotcha thank you so this kind of blurs my understanding a bit of like init containers and main containers so init containers now are just kind of ordered and main containers are running in parallel is there any like interest in making that maybe more flexible where you could define like layers of ordering and parallelization or yeah I think there was a on one of the slides on the things that are not going to be done soon anyway or like sort of implementing a system d like the container a depends on container b depends on container c and just build a dependency tree and figure out how to start up like this is sort of like a minimal api that gives us the ability to solve a lot of the problems that we've had with using sort of extend extended sidecar containers before without introducing a through a whole new set of features and maybe one more if you only have one main container is there a reason not to just use these init containers exclusively now or yes the sidecar containers do not extend the lifetime of the pod so okay that's the other sort of key thing so if that was your main container out so if you don't have any main containers and like it will terminate it wouldn't do it start okay thank you very much


In this video, I will be focusing on the ride experience review of this custom painted Elf's Falloth Evo UCI approved frame set with some general thoughts on their Aurom Velar 50mm carbon wheels. Time stamps for you below if you'd like to jump about and I'll also link to the build video and other videos I've made about this bike in the video description below. But first up, I need to clear the air because there was very much big sentiment about this Elf's Falloth Evo anonymous frame that I purchased and took in to see Aaron Dobbs, who's an experienced bike mechanic and carbon fiber repair expert, Gary McDonald to give us their thoughts. My big takeaways from that whole experience is that the use of glass fiber or fiberglass is perhaps more common than you think. And I feel as consumers where ill informed. For example, if I go onto the Elves website, they say the Elves Falloth Evo has a full carbon fork. But the inside of this steerer tube is borderline half fiberglass. So I say not just to Elves, to all bike companies, please stop bullshitting consumers and just tell us what's in our carbon bikes. Additionally, from an Elves perspective, my biggest takeaway was the original Falloth I purchased anonymously at the end of 2022. Gary from Carbon Steed said, ah, this is what I'm saying to you, it's almost too nice. And with this one, Gary said, is this the same brand? Because I don't keep up with all the frames you bring me as the one I said that was really good because it doesn't look the same. Hey, so there appears to be inconsistencies in the Elves product or manufacturing process. But in my humble opinion, I don't think that's just an Elves thing. That's probably an industry thing. And it just comes down to the fact that some companies may do it a bit better than others. But in no way shape or form does that video that I created on that frame stop me from sharing my ride review experiences on this bike right here. So I've heard many people say that this bike looks super aggressive but uncomfortable and probably fast. However, in my opinion, it's quite the opposite to uncomfortable and super aggressive and fast in different ways. Now, before we get into that, please know that the geometry of this bike is odd. So I would suggest if you're going to invest in this bike right here, downsizing, going with a longer stem, this is to accommodate the elevated top tube, which is going for that streamlined integrated handlebar look, which as a result, gobbles up your available seat post. Now, having said that, I downsize from a 54 to a 52 and I'm 179 centimetres in height, by the way. And you can see I'm still only scraping into the Elves seat post guidelines and Aaron even removed the rubber boot that comes with the setup to make things look more visually appealing. Now, please note, I have tested this bike right here with the creative 45 millimetre wheels with ultralight hubs and Vittoria Corsa 25 millimetre tyres, the Ascent Polaris 69 millimetre wheels with 30 millimetre Vittoria Corsa tyres and of course the Auron Velar 50 millimetre wheels with Vittoria Corsa 28 millimetre tyres. And be aware before I delve into riding experiences here, I am one bloke with one opinion and your ride experiences could be different to mine. So surprisingly for me, given the fact this bike looks like an angry beast, this bike is actually comfortable for an aero bike. In other words, it's not a stiff plank of wood like the Cannondale System 6 or the predecessor to the Currants of Velo S5 that I've ridden and I'd even put the old Venge in that stiff plank of wood category. And when you start to look at the frame more closely, you start to get a picture as to why this may be the case. It's got a big fork absorbing the front end bars. In fact, there's roughly 20 millimetres more fork than the six other bikes I have lying around here right now. There's a chunky drop seat stay area which does a good job of softening the rear, particularly seeing we don't get a lot of seat posts which can often lead to an uncomfortable riding experience in the rear. But we do get a lot more seat tube compared to other aero bikes, which may be compensating for the limited seat post when it comes to comfort. So the comfort box, I'm gonna give this bike a tick when it comes to aero bikes in terms of speed. I'm gonna pull up some speed tests for you here where I've taken this bike up a local one and a half kilometre climb at 350 watts and on a 1.6 kilometre descent on a low wind day. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do the two other tests I normally do for various reasons, including some roadworks. So what I found really interesting was the uphill closed road segment at 350 watts, particularly when I go back in time and compare the results to the three-way comparison I did with the Windspace T1500 and the Giant Propell and Merida Reacto mid-tier models on the Windspace hyper wheels. Yes, different days, but the wind conditions are basically the same because I tracked those and we're using the same Asioma power pedals you will see. The elves is surprisingly faster. Now I say surprisingly because this bike feels quite cumbersome when you're climbing hills. This is despite the fact that it weighs. Without pedals, a respectable 7.5 kilograms with the creative 45-millimeter wheels and 7.7 kilograms with the Aurom Velar 50-millimeter wheels and just over eight kilograms with the Ascent Polaris 69-millimeter wheels with the 30-millimeter tires. Keep in mind for that weigh-in, there was a computer mount and two bottle cages. Now during this climb, where certain sections have a very slight gradient of two to three percent, I really noticed with this bike, you gather or gain some momentum rather rapidly as you would hope for a bike with aerodynamic profiles but as soon as a gradient hit four to five percent plus that momentum that you had would go like that which is very common for aero bikes but I feel more pronounced with this aero bike than most others that I've ridden. And then when you go up a steeper climb and you're out of the saddle pushing the bike side to side, expect a bit of interference between your legs and the top tube. I feel this is mostly to blame because of the elevated top tube and just how wide or girthy it is. So in other words, any climb over four to five percent gradient, I feel this bike isn't gonna be doing you any favors.  The time of one minute 35 down my local descent is decent but one minute 27 is unheard of. Now that time discrepancy I should note was probably caused by three to four cars, about 20 meters up ahead of me causing a bit of a draft down this descent. But I've left the time there because it demonstrates the ability for this bike to generate speed very rapidly down a descent and for me to feel very safe and comfortable with the speeds that I'm hitting. On this particular descent, I hit 90 kilometers per hour and I felt like the bike was as solid as a rock. And I feel part of this stability sensation I'm getting as I'm going down descents at high speeds has to do with longer wheelbase on this aero bike compared to others in the same category and the elevated top tube when you look down. Maybe it's just a mental thing but you feel more at one with the bike so you get a big tick when it comes to descending on this bike in terms of general bunch riding or group riding.  But to be honest with you, given the raw look of this bike when it comes to speed in group rides and bunch rides I was hopeful of a little bit more but to be fair I feel a big part of this for me is because most of the bunch rides or group rides we have here are lumpy. You're going up and down hills all the time and while the descending is fun the pinch climbs are not so much fun. And from a stiffness and handling perspective I wanna give you a bit of an analogy here. My first proper bike was a 56 centimeter specialised tarmac. I'm right on the specialised geometry border of a 56 and 54, well I used to be. Anyway, and one day I was riding with a mate who had a 54 tarmac and he said here you go take it for a ride. So I took it for a ride and immediately it felt a little bit stiffer, a little bit more agile and a little bit more aggressive. So the next time I bought a tarmac I bought a 54. Now let's take a look at this bike. It's simply a beast. There is just so much frame. Interesting to note as well is this bike external to the Merida Reacto which also has a long wheelbase, has a five to 10 millimeter longer wheelbase than most aero bikes in its category and the standover height because of the elevated top tube is significantly higher than other aero bikes I've ridden. For some icing on the cake the tire clearance is just borderline out of control. Out of curiosity because this bike was asking for it I went and purchased some 30 millimeter tires put them on the Ascent Polaris 69 millimeter set up and to me it just felt like it slowed the bike down. Yes it made it a little bit more comfortable but I don't understand why we need such a big tire clearance on a bike like this unless you're intending on taking it on extreme gravel adventures. You can let me know below. But back to the point because this bike is so big it rides big and for me in certain tight and explosive situations it does feel on the cumbersome side. In terms of stiffness you've got a small head tube to accommodate the integrated bars which you'll want to slam. So that combo for me makes it feel stiff enough in the front end and I'd personally get a soft rear end riding experience. Finally on practicality before we talk about the wheels I like it how elves are going down the local distribution path. So if you experience an issue with your frame you can call up somebody in your country and get it resolved there. Big tick. They also offer a five year warranty on this frame which as an emerging Chinese brand isn't too bad. For example the Windspace T1500 is a three year warranty. The tire clearance is a big plus if that's what you're into. I believe you can get up to 32 millimeter tires technically but I reckon you could go over although to me the 28s were the perfect match and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of this monster gap between the frame and the tire which I feel could be impacting aerodynamics. If elves come back to me on my question to them on that point I'll pin a comment below. They're not so positive when it comes to practicality. First one is geometry. After you downsize are you going to be happy with having a slammed or running a slammed front end? The reason why I say that is I feel like if you're gonna buy this bike one of the big reasons will be aesthetics. You just like how mean this bike looks or you might be interested in getting a custom paint job which elves offer at a very affordable rate and they do a great job too. You can see my one is based on an old school Porsche 904 color scheme.  On geometry as well because of the elevated top tube the standover height is gonna be a lot higher so if you have a short inseam this bike may not be practical for you and this very girthy seat post makes it difficult to strap on lights and my old specialized saddle bag I can't even strap it on properly. So the wheels to me in my opinion these are the pick of the bunch. If you are sitting on the fence or you've been waiting for this review go and buy these wheels right now and here is why I'm saying that and please know I am definitely not earning any commission off the sale of these wheels from elves. Number one, they're $1380 Aussie dollars. Tic, they have a visually appealing T800 carbon layup and an ideal all round 50 millimeter depth at under 1500 grams in weight. In terms of the hub they've gone with custom ceramic bearings in a CNC hub with a 52 tooth star ratchet system which is all based on a very well regarded DT Swiss system and I can tell you after a solid few months of use the bearings still feel buttery smooth unlike cheaper bearings which tend to become notchy after a thousand plus kilometers. The pillar triple butted spokes despite hitting a pothole of 50 kilometers per hour have kept the rims true which I know for a fact when you're paying for wheels at this price isn't always gonna happen. Finally, if you like the aggressive hub noise these wheels are the noisiest wheels I have ever heard. Mitigating the need for a bell on a bike path. If you've gotten value from this video please don't forget to give it a like. It helps the channel out. I would greatly appreciate it and I'll leave you with my rating system which is based on the category. So here we're talking about mid-tier aero bike. I'll give you some everywhere in town.  Try to see the trail.