My name is Kyle. I'm from Yelp. I'm an SRE. I'm here to share with you how Yelp runs our Mesa's clusters on Amazon Spot Fleet. And we do save a lot of money by doing this, but it comes with some certain risks and requires some certain engineering effort to make it work, and that's what I'm going to be sharing with you. Before I get too much into this, can I have a show of hands of those who are in the room who have heard and they know what Spot or Spot Fleet is with the Amazon offerings? Wow, that's most of you. Okay, for the camera, almost everyone raised their hand. That's a good sign that everyone here... I won't have to define too many terms, but I'll go ahead and go through the quick explanations regardless. For those in the room who are interested in running their production workloads on Spot Fleet, there should be some gold mine. This should be a gold mine of best practices, I hope. And of course, afterwards, I'm happy to share with more details about what's going on behind the scenes with you if that can help you run your workloads on Spot Fleet. If you haven't heard of Yelp, Yelp is an app and a website to help connect people with great local businesses. It can help you find maybe a good restaurant to eat after your Mesa's Con, or maybe help you get a quote from a plumber to help fix a leak, something like that. First, I'm going to go through what Spot and Spot is really fast, and then I'm going to describe how we manage Spot Fleet at Yelp, and then share some of the best practices we've learned over the years. And then I'll show you the graphs about why we'd go through all this work, how much money we actually save in real life. Spot Fleet, definitions.  There's a certain class of person who really likes it when people define exactly what they mean with stuff. Sorry, I don't have time. I'm glad that most people in the room do already know what Spot Fleet is. I'm not going to go through all these things, but it is important that when I talk about instance types, you know that these are the certain classes of EC2 servers. And when I talk about availability zones, these are special data center-style separations of Amazon regions. I'm going to be referencing reserved instances. This is where you pay Amazon in advance for a few years to have a server that is reserved for you. And I'm also going to be talking about the on-demand price. This is the price that you would pay if you just went to the Amazon console right now, opened up a new account and just launched a server. That's like the list price of a class of a server. So let's do a quick demo of what Spot instances are and how they work. Spot instances are servers that you can pay, that you bid on, and the supply comes from all of the extra servers that Amazon has that have been reserved, but they're not in use. So these are customers who have paid Amazon in advance for these servers for a couple of years, but they're not using that the second. So Amazon is like to recoup some, you know, use it as they're just sitting there idle. So they're willing to sell them, but you can't have them forever. If Amazon wants, if the customer who reserved them wants them back, you get two minutes to get evicted from that server and it goes back to that original customer. So the way that Amazon sells these is with a bidding process. You can see on the left-hand side, there's bids from some theoretical customers who are interested in buying these Spot instances. And then we have on the right-hand side the supply, the servers that are actually available in this pool of resources. The Spot price is the cheapest, the most inexpensive bid that gets fulfilled. So in this case, the current Spot price of this theoretical thing is $3. Let's go forward in time and let's say that somebody had shut down a reserved instance, and now there's some new supply. Customer C, who asked for two servers, is now getting a third, a second one. Got fulfilled. Let's go forward in time. Let's imagine that somebody had stopped another instance and that was even more capacity. Now there's another Spot bidder who got fulfilled where they weren't being fulfilled before, but the price that everyone's paying has gone down. Now it's gone down to $2. So even though everybody's bidding high amounts, the price that they pay is the $2. That's cool. Uh-oh, everybody recalled their servers kind of all at once.  These customers now get up-bid. And the only person who didn't get up-bid was bidding the highest, which is $5. So the current spot price is $5, and these other customers had to be evicted from their servers in two minutes. This is the quick overview of what spot instances are and how they work. The price can go higher than the on-demand price. There's no actual... I think the hard-coded limit might be something astronomical, but you can bid even higher than this and get, you know, to increase the likelihood of you getting not out-bid. So that's the quick overview of what spot instances are. Spot fleet.  It can respond to out-bid events by launching alternative instances and other ease to keep your overall capacity up. So this is somebody just buying new spot instances, so when you get out-bid, it'll launch a different one in this place. So let's look how quickly... Let's quickly look how that goes. So let's say that you were out-bid on a particular... like a 4XL. Amazon spot fleet might launch two 2XLs in its place because they're kind of equivalent. You kind of let Amazon know that it's close enough. Let's say that you got out-bid on all the 1XLs across all the zones. Maybe somebody just went on a shopping spree and just wanted all the 1XLs. And you got out-bid. Amazon spot fleet might launch two 2XLs in an alternate zone if they were available. So that's Amazon spot fleet. Spot fleet is that control system that Amazon provides to give you a bunch of spot instances and it tries to maintain a certain amount of capacity. This is really important for launching production workloads like Yelp's website because we need capacity around the website. It's not like a batch workload where if we got out-bid, it's okay, it'll finish eventually. The website doesn't... The website can't stop. So we really need this. It's important that users are able to describe exactly what kind of instances are suitable to run their workloads. And I'll show you examples of how we do that at Yelp. But it comes down to a big declaration of, I can do C44XLs and 10XLs and you describe all of these different instance types. The spot fleet service is what's doing the launching for you. This is really important. You don't have to be at your laptop launching new things and doing things when things go out-bid. Spot fleet is doing this for you. So that's their value offering. Now, let's move to how we manage spot fleets. Let's take a quick look at the web interface for managing spot fleets.  I hope I don't have to sell everyone in the room that infrastructure is cold. Code is the way of the future and that launching a spot fleet in this manner, although convenient and easy to get started, isn't really a long-term solution for running a website on. If you're going to make changes, you're going to launch another spot fleet, you're going to launch a new location, you need it to be reproducible and you don't want to have to write a big long how-to document about what buttons you clicked on this. Can we do any better? You could certainly use the CLI. Here is all of the text from the example spot fleet request from the CLI. This is, if you look in the docs, the recommended way to launch a spot fleet request via the CLI. And I'll tell you right now I personally find this not unacceptable. I think this is, it's too easy. I think there's, you read the docs and it says, oh, you should do X, Y, Z. But I'd like to, for those in the audience, to kind of expand your mind a little bit and think to yourself, is this really the best way to be doing this? Maybe they only have this in the documentation because they only went this far. They don't expect you to do this a lot or something, you know, something like that. But in practice, if you're going to be running a website on something, I don't want developers to have to worry about this or operations in yours, have to worry about this. Could we do even better? Oh, well, let me explain a little bit why I think specifically this is not a good idea. Let's take a snapshot of this JSON and just kind of like look at it really closely. Don't worry about the actual contents, but like all of these numbers, where are they coming from? What's magic numbers, magic numbers, P pairs, group IDs, security group IDs. Where's the subnet IDs? I had to look that up. Maybe they copy pasted. There's another duplicate number. I don't want any of these. Oh, and the biggest problem with this is that this JSON file, it's very cumbersome to write. If the, you'll see later, the key to making reliable production spotlight requests is diversity, but to do diversity with this, with this style means you have to make this JSON really, really big. That's really hard. So if you're making these things by hand, this style is really, it's forcing developers to do the wrong thing. It's not making it easy for them to do the right thing. So can we do even better? Well, I don't, at Yelp, we use Terraform. I no longer am a kind of a, I used to be kind of a Terraform kind of fanboy maybe, but I no longer do this. I really think that there's room for lots of tools. I'll just say this. There's a certain class of person who, when they see Terraform and they look at how it works, they think it's the best thing since sliced bread. And I was definitely in this category. There's some people who look at Terraform and they're like, oh, wow, this is scary. I'd rather just use the CLI. I think that's cool too. So my new thing is I say to everybody, why don't you look at Terraform and see just in case you're in that first class? Because if you're in the first class, it's seriously, your mind won't be blown. You'd be like, wow, this is really the best way to do it. If you're not, that's okay. But I'm going to show you how Yelp does it just because I'm on stage. Yelp, we built this module in Terraform to help reduce the complexity of launching spotlight requests. Again, the reason we do this is because we're running our website on it. We want to make it really easy to the right thing. We want to be able to reproduce it in multiple regions. We want to be able to iterate on it and make it better over time. Spotfully has a lot of rough edges. It's, I'm not, I don't feel embarrassed or anything to say that the Spotfully APIs is probably one of the most cumbersome APIs from Amazon that I've ever worked with. It's very difficult to work with. So I don't want to necessarily hide them from our operations engineers, but I do want to make them as easy to work with as possible. So that's why we use Terraform and that's why we use this provider. No magic numbers. The inputs have been reduced to only what you care about and I'll show you, we have a JSON file that we can reuse instead of copy, paste, and a lot. Here is how Yelp describes our Spotfully Request instance types. You'll notice in here there's nothing about security groups, VPC IDs, or anything like that. It's only about the instance types. We've separated this part from all of the parts that are region-specific. What runtime environment? Are you dev or you prod? Are you in what account number are you working with? So by separating them, we can iterate on just the part that we're interested in about what kind of compute we need and how much we're willing to pay for it. And then we just same like this file. It's that simple. So there's some good stuff in here. It's really easy to add to this file. And of course, that's making it, again, that's making it easy for our operations engineers to do the right thing, which is to increase the diversity which makes our spotlights more reliable. And through the magic of Terraform, if you make a change, Terraform keeps it in sync. That's the big selling point behind Terraform is it keeps you declaratively write your infrastructure and Terraform makes it happen. Reduced, duplicated data, all sorts of good things about having infrastructure as code and using Terraform in this way. Now, why did I take five minutes explaining why we use Terraform for launching spotlights requests? You could do everything without Terraform, everything would be fine. The reason is you're going to get it wrong. You know, we've gotten it wrong many, many, many times. We have to iterate. So we need to be getting, we need to get really good at recreating the spotlights request because things are going to change. You're going to change your policy and how much you're willing to pay for things. You're going to change it out a new instance type. You're going to add a new AZ. You're going to launch a new mesos cluster. You're going to upgrade your mesos clusters to lots of lots of things. So you want to get really good at it and you do not want recreating the spotlights request to be something that you're afraid of doing. You do not want recreating the spotlights request to be something that you're afraid that it's going to take down all of your infrastructure. You need confidence that you're going to be able to do this and do this well. So that's why I spent all this time explaining why we use Terraform. It's because it gives us the confidence to be able to reproduce these spotlights requests and not be afraid to adjust them. Let's take a look at those what this looks like.  It comes up and the other one scales down and then afterwards it's been recreated. You can see it's slightly more diverse, which is good. This is an engineer improving our spotlights requests without downtime, which is a big deal. At Yelp, this is really easy to do thanks to the tooling we built with Terraform. Let's talk about best practices next. If we're going to build a spotlights request, how should we build it targeting production infrastructure Yelp.com, things that need to be up all the time, not batch workloads where a spot fleet is traditionally or at least designed to be used for? The number one thing you can do to make a production-ready spotlights request and run the infrastructure on it is diversification. Remember, when you get outbid on a particular instance type, the spot fleet mechanism launches different instances in a different location. By diversifying, you're expanding the number of possible things that spotlights could do on your behalf and you're reducing the blast radius of when you get outbid. Imagine if you launched a spotlights request and you said I can run in two AZs on C4XLs. That would only be in two spot fleet markets. If you get outbid, which you will, you're going to lose 50% of your cluster. That's no good. So diversification helps reduce that blast radius. It's just like getting a mutual fund or something that's a diversified investment, that kind of thing. You might think that this is as easy as picking the diversified strategy over the lowest price strategy in the spot fleet request API. That's certainly part of it. You absolutely should pick the diversified strategy, but you need to do more. You need to expand the types of servers you're willing to run on. This means you might have to make sacrifices about the ideal instance type you're willing to use. At Yelp, for a long time, we used the C4XL exclusively for our big web app. Sure, it gave the best performance, but what we could run on other instance types would be a little slower, but could we save a lot of money by giving it the freedom to pick different spot fleet types and instance types? We decided collectively, after running the numbers, seeing how our website performed on other instance types, that it was acceptable to make this cost-benefit analysis. That's what this really comes down to. It's a business decision. You're choosing a type of infrastructure that's less stable, but very cost-effective, and you're making the trade-offs between performance and reliability. Diversification, Amazon spot fleet does not retroactively try to rebalance your spot fleet to make it more diverse, even when you pick the diversified strategy. You need to be aware of this because over time, the spot fleet can become less diverse, and as it becomes less diverse, it means your risk is increasing. I'll show you graphs of that.    And waiting. This is really important because if you don't wait, which types of instance types are acceptable correctly and you give the spot fleet the wrong kind of signals, it may inadvertently launch a lot of maybe M416XLs because you've waited them really high. This would be bad because you want your diversity, you want your weights to represent a diverse and evenly well-balanced fleet that, again, reduces your risk if you're interested in running production workloads. Let's take a look at that diversity in action on the left-hand side. There's some lines, but you can see that we're really hot on one particular instance type. This spot fleet request was not configured correctly. And then when we built the new one, it gets a little more evenly balanced. I have a better example next here. Look at this spot line request. You can see over the course of a couple of days, we've made a mistake in our waiting and the spot fleet request has highly favored two particular instance types. We are at serious risk here. If we lost one of these instance types and got up bid, we would lose half of our cluster. You can see towards the end of the week here we've corrected this. And look how nice and rainbow-esque the last part is. That's because our weights are now correct and we're more evenly balanced and there's no hot spot in our spot fleet request. Pretty cool. This is how you do this. You add more entries to this JSON file if you're using the Terraform provider. Of course, if you're using the CLI, you're going to be adding lots and lots of stuff. But how do you achieve diversity? It's through conscious and deliberate effort and tuning and deciding which instances are correct for your workload. Let's talk about AZ balancing. Most people who are on Amazon who are running these kinds of things, websites, are using things called autoscaling groups where Amazon is launching instances usually of one type and you click the force AZ balance button which makes Amazon launch equal numbers and equal in different AZs. Spot fleet does not do this. It's not really designed to run websites on. It's really designed for batch workloads and that kind of thing. You have to take it into your own hands to be able to balance these AZs yourself. Well, how can you do that? Let's look at another graph. This is a spot request. It looks pretty well balanced, but let's look a little closer here. Watch what happens when I look at it on a per AZ basis. So I take out all the instance types. This is our capacity per AZ. Looks still not bad, but then when I unstack it, you can see that at times there's some serious imbalances here. Not only is this a little risky, but it also means that some of our developers, in particular our database engineers and our memcache clusters, can get hotspots. How do you eliminate this? One way that you can eliminate this is by forcing Spotfleet to only launch things in one AZ and instead of launching one mega Spotfleet, you launch, if there's three AZs, you launch three different Spotfleet requests and they're pinned to the AZ. So when you get Outbid, Amazon is forced to launch more capacity but in the same AZ because the Spotfleet request is self-contained. It has to launch new instances of a different type in that AZ in order to meet your capacity and it's not allowed to move capacity to a different AZ just because it might be cheaper. This is definitely a trade-off. Although there may be instances in other AZs that are less expensive that Spotfleet could save you money on, but if you care about AZ balance and you care about diversification and you want to make sure that you don't end up pile on one AZ and they, again, serious risk, you need to set up Spotfleet requests that are AZ-specific to set up hard boundaries to let Spotfleet, to make sure that Spotfleet can't start getting in balance. Let's talk about bidding. This is something, if you're interested in launching Spotfleet requests for a website, you're going to have to choose what kind of bids you pick. At first glance, you might think you should just bid high because you don't want to get Outbid.  You can't bid that high but you do want to bid high and you certainly want to get win over the batch workloads that other people are launching on Spotfleet and at Yelp, we've come to lose at 2X is pretty good. If you want to survive the spikes, there's small spikes in the price but you don't want the bid to go so high that you end up paying tons and tons of money where you should have just been launching things on on-demand the whole time. So remember, this is a business thing. We want to be able to save money and if we choose the wrong bid, we won't save money and then what's the point? How do we come to that conclusion? Well, we wrote this tool to help scrape the pricing structure and then analyze how many times would we get Outbid with a certain bid price? And conversely, how reliable would a piece of infrastructure be if we bid X? So by using this tool, we were able to explore the space and try to come up with general guidelines about how much we should be bidding on our Spotfleet requests. Here's an example. If you bid a certain... Basically, we asked the tool, how much would we have to bid to make this class of server be 100% up over the course of the month? And it just spit out that it recommended that we bid $10 an hour for an M4 10XL, whatever. The point is, by inspecting the data, we're able to kind of prove to ourselves or at least give us some confidence that if we bid high, we really will stay up. Similarly, in this example with a C4 4XL, if we were to bid the recommended amount that this tool says to stay 100% up, we'd be spending about $11... Well, we'd bid $11.  So again, if we're going to save money, we might as well be just spending... We might as well just buy reserved instances. There's no purpose in us spending this much money on a spot instance just for the sake of availability. So make sure to keep this in mind and you want to keep a balance. You want to save money, but you want to stay up and you've got lots of knobs to do it. And again, at Yelp 2XL, this amount will be decided as close enough. You will be up in. It's just the nature of the beast. If you're going to choose to run on this very unreliable infrastructure, you need to be able to deal with determinations. Now, in EC2 anyway, things get dropped on the floor.  I remember the first time that I received a notification that my EC2 instance was on bad hardware. And I was like, oh, it's a cloud. It's not what I thought it was. Yes, EC2 instances go away, but they go away more frequently in spotler requests, of course. How do you deal with it? Well, luckily, in the Mesos land, this is very easy. Mesos has all the tools it needs to be able to move compute to different places. Super great. Can we do better than just letting Mesos reschedule things as it sees fit? We can. Let me show you a few examples of what's happened. So in this case, Mesos has done a great job of taking, of reacting to these OutBit events. In this case, we got OutBit on two spot markets at the same time, which represented maybe 20 or 30% of our capacity. The reason I was even able to find this example of us being OutBit is because it was a pretty big event. Luckily, it wasn't so big that it impacted our users because we're saving so much money on spotlight that we can overprovision, so we know to expect things like 30% cuts in our capacity. No problem. Let's just overprovision another 30%. We're saving so much cash. It's no big deal. But Mesos also is able to compensate. You can see only a few minutes after we were OutBit, we were able to relaunch on new instance types and Mesos made it happen. Pretty great. Here's one where it didn't go so great. At Yelp, we were OutBit. A couple things compounded here to make this event pretty bad. You can see that this is before we had really good best practices around waiting, so we were really, really hot on a couple AZs. And when those instance types in AZs and when those got OutBit, we lost a lot of capacity. It's about 50% in this graph, so that was pretty significant. Again, luckily, in this case, there was no user-facing impact because we were overvisioned. It wasn't super, super high impact time. Mesos did what it could, but somebody at the exact same time happened who had break. They broke Puppet. And when they broke Puppet, Puppet couldn't run. Puppet couldn't bootstrap and we couldn't launch new capacity. Spotlight was doing its job. Spotlight was launching plenty of instances in their place, but Mesos couldn't launch because our bootstrap was broken. You can see when the bootstrap was fixed exactly, Puppet started taking care of things, and Mesos recovered great. Mesos, again, is perfect tool for this job, and we were only able to run our production workloads on this kind of unstable infrastructure because of the way that Mesos is so good at launching, you know, things in new compute where they're available. But you can do a little better by using Mesos maintenance primitives. Unfortunately, these are only supported really in the HTTP API, so most frameworks do not support this. It's kind of a shame. I wish that this was... I hope that next year's Mesos Conf maintenance primitives are, you know, really well-adopted, but at the current state of the time of this talk, they just aren't. We use Marathon extensively, and Marathon, there's a pull request to do part of it, rejecting offers from agents that are maintenance. That's some of it. But we need the other half where Mesos will take things away from servers that are going down. The way that we do this is that you can curl this very specific URL on every EC2 server that's in Spotfleet, basically any EC2 server anyway, but Spotfleet specifically, and you can see when you're about to be outbid. You get two minutes to get out, to evict. So what we do is we just pull this URL, and when we notice that we're about to be outbid, we ask Mesos to go into maintenance mode. This is pretty easy because this is on the local host. So you can just, you know, query the API. When you get outbid, go into maintenance mode. Unfortunately, none of our frameworks support it, so we use our pasta as our platform as a service to kind of work around this, and we just ask Mesos and Marathon specifically. We ask Marathon to relocate tasks by downing them and killing them, and then it'll relaunch. We do our best. It's not perfect, but the tools are in place to be able to graceway handle this type of termination in Mesos using the primitives. However, the elephant in the room here is that two minutes is not very much time, so it maybe goes without saying that we don't run our workloads that take longer than two minutes to spin up on Spotfleet. Specifically, we don't run anything that's safeful. Of course, we don't run Cassandra on this. We don't run Kafka. But luckily, most of Yelp's compute workload is not that, so we don't mind paying reserve prices for those pieces of infrastructure that really need to be up most of the time, and launching this for pretty much everything else. Again, Mesos does a great job of tolerating this. I do have to say that at the time of this presentation, I can't actually recommend using the maintenance primitives for this because there's a critical bug. I think that most people just aren't using these primitives because they're not supported in their frameworks, but we can easily crash the Mesos master by hitting this maintenance API in the wrong way.  I hope that bug is fixed quickly, and then we can turn this back on to make our termination procedures even more graceful. So let's recap some general advice for those in the room that are really thinking about Spotfleet and how they might use it at their own company. Diversification is probably the number one best practice to take away from this. Diversify your Spotfleet as much as you can to reduce your risk to run your production workloads. Locking Spotfleets per AZ, I think this is a really good idea. And if you think that AZ-specific balancing is important, definitely do that. It's easy to do by launching Spotfleets per AZ. A Spot Market Mesos attribute is kind of cool. It's pretty easy to add attributes to Mesos arbitrary ones. And then you can have your frameworks interpret these in the way that they can to reduce your risk even further. If you set a Spot Market attribute like this, you can ask, say, Marathon to maybe group by certain things. So Marathon doesn't accidentally pile up the tasks on particular Spot Market types, Spot Market groups. And again, responding to maintenance events as best you can. ABS gives you the tooling to be able to curl that endpoint, do whatever you can to do with that. Yelp, that means taking it out of the low balancer, talking to Marathon to reschedule some stuff, do whatever you can do. Profit, is it worth it to Yelp to do all of this tooling, all of this instability? All the engineers required to keep this up and running? Well, I ran the numbers. I wanted to show my work. It's okay that you can't read all of the data here, but I promise that it, yes, the answer is absolutely yes. There are certain times where we are paying more than the reserve price. That's okay. On the whole, Spotfleet is saving us tons and tons of cash. Here's an example of that where there's a sustained period where we're paying more than the on-demand price, but again, it's okay. On the whole, we're still saving cash. And I wanted to make sure that this was actually true across all the instance types and across all of our regions because there could have been a case where we were, like there's one that's running really hot that we're like wasting money by launching a particular instance type. I'm happy to say the answer is no. When we look at across the board, all the regions, all the instance types that we're using, and then doing a weighted average based on the hours we're spending on each, I can with confidence say that we're saving 50% over the reserved price. Here's another way to visualize that data. You can see some hotspots that are coming up to the reserved price, not on-demand, but on the whole, we're saving 50% compared to our baseline reserved instance type, which is a three-year convertible. This is the type of reserved instance we would be paying at Yelp if we weren't using Spot. So this is the comparison that we have to make as a business. What would we be doing otherwise? It's not really fair to compare the Spot prices to on-demand for the business because that's not what we'd be actually paying. But compared to those prices, we're still saving 50%. To put another way, if we were to snap our fingers and stop using Spot fleet, we'd be paying twice as much for our infrastructure. This is a huge deal.  But if it's 2x, that's a big deal. So it is a lot of profit. I would like to shout out to the early adopters. These are the Yelp engineers who have early adopts spot in the development environments to save a lot of cash there. It wasn't until we learned a lot from them where we were able to move it to prod. I'm not an island here. I represent a team, and these are the team members that work with me to help make sure that this Spot fleet infrastructure stays up as well as it does. If you're thinking about going into Spot fleet, this is a must-read for you. Of course, look at the slides on the Mesa's Common website afterwards to see these. There's alternatives to Spot fleet that you can use that give you some of the same benefits and there's some hosted solutions. There's lots of alternatives. Before you get into this, you need to be well-educated. And also, there's some academic papers studying these markets to see how are they sustainable, can they work in the long term, and that sort of thing. I highly encourage you to look at these if you're actually going to go implement Spot. Learn as much as you can about how it actually works. And that's it. If you go to our GitHub, you can see Pasta, which is our Mesa's platform as a service thingy that has any of the code that I referenced in this thing if you're interested in the actual implementation. And of course, Yelp Engineering, hiring, blog, and all that stuff. And you can contact me personally with that email. We have a few months for questions. Microphone, would you like to? Or I can repeat the question. Sure.  That's really important for doing the kind of cost-benefit analysis. Hard to say. As you can see, it's probably the four engineers for Dev. So it's four engineers working for a couple of quarters, not working all full-time. But definitely at our scale, it was definitely worth it to do. I don't think we actually did a formal cost-benefit analysis, but looking at our Ares bill, it's obvious that it's worth it.  The Terraform provider, we open-source. We just made pull requests back on Terraform. The pasta infrastructure is all open-source. The auto-scaler and our AWS spot-aware auto-scaling is open-source as well. So luckily, you can learn from all the work that we did, spending hours looking at graphs and trying to figure out what the best practices are for using this tool by, of course, watching this talk. Maybe one more question? Okay, actually I have about seven questions. How do you change capacity of your fleets by hand? Or do you have some automated tools that tracks the usage of your mesos fleet and do it automatically at night, for example? Sir, you're asking why don't we... Okay, do you apply Terraform states by your hands or is it doing by some automated tool? The whole, the scale of the spot fleet? Yes, scale, downscale, or scale of your spot fleets? Yes, we have an auto-scaler in the spot fleet. Spot fleet, you can just like an auto-scaling group, you can tell it how big you want it to be. And if you look in the pasta code base, we have an auto-scaler that inspects the meso statistics and expands and contracts at will. Because we already have the maintenance period of stuff, or at least until recently we had it on, it wasn't, we didn't really care whether it was scaling down because our auto-scaler decided to scale it down or because Amazon decided that we ran out of spot, you know, we got outbid. You know, it's the same kind of event. So we were lucky to reuse that work. So whether we're scaling our cluster in or we're getting outbid, it's no big deal. Our auto-scaler has some special sauce though. We pick the instance type that has the least tasks on it. So we kind of, we have a sorting function that sorts things that are either not a mesos in the first place because they fail the bootstrap, maybe they don't have any tasks and we try to kill those off early to keep, try to preserve those things. I have long running tasks, you know, just do the best we can. Okay, do you exclude most unstable instance types from your fleets? Do you make some survey, for example? Yeah, we try to scale. We try to adjust our spotlight request to be able to run the largest thing that we try to run. So our largest application happens to be our big website. So the smallest instance type that we find acceptable is the kind that can run the website. But for everyone to have to make their own choices about what instance types are acceptable to run on their infrastructure. Okay. What is average real load of your machines in compared to reserved resources on mesos? I'm sorry. Okay.  Real, I mean. I'm sorry. I'm having trouble understanding over the accent. Okay. But would you mind, we're out of time. Let's talk offline and we can discuss more. Thank you for your time.


As we look at the 2015 elections, it's really exciting to understand that the next few months are going to be a time of great debate, great civic action, and the United States strongly supports a free, transparent, credible, inclusive, and non-violent electoral process.


Okay so I would like to call to order the South Burlington City Council meeting of Monday, November 1st, 2021 and we'll begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. All right we'll continue with instructions on exiting the building in case of an emergency. Great thank you. So at the back of the room are two exit doors on either side. Folks can go out either one and then turn left or right to go to the back entrance by the um back parking lot or out the front entrance. No. It happens sometimes because there's something else. Okay hold on Travis is going to work on it for a sec. We got our IT guru on. Well yeah a day after Halloween. That's exactly the ghost of there's there's ghosts already in the library. So is that better now? Testing. Are we still echoing? We should we turn off our mics or then they can't hear. Okay. We'll. Okay all right I'll keep going. So we know how to exit right? Yes I did want to mention two other things one if you are participating on the phone and would like to make a comment please feel free to either turn your camera on or indicate to me in the chat that you'd like to speak other than that we are not monitoring the chat and then I did want to let those in the audience and those on go to meeting and those who may participate in the future who may be watching this at a later date that this room is wired for assisted listening devices. Great whatever you just did Travis we're getting lots of thumbs up. That's the ghost okay. So if you are interested in having the sound pumped directly into your hearing aids please see Andrew or myself. Thank you very much. Okay item three agenda review any additions deletions or changes in order of agenda items. Seeing none comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda and I know John wants to speak does anyone else and and Rosanne okay. So the question is is there an echo here you guys okay with it okay. Oh sorry it's okay. Pardon me. Well good evening to all of you and thank you for giving me time I'm John Boson I think I've met most of you directly or indirectly but soon you will be receiving a recommendation from the Planning Commission regarding land development regulations or as I prefer to call them land use regulations. Last week we had three South Burlington High School students who came and spoke to the Planning Commission. They expressed their concerns their fears about their future on the planet and they talked about the impact of the present red code climate crisis on their future. I'm asking you to think about them and their generation as I am now when you adopt a set of land use recommendations and regulations. Unlike myself when I was 18 and maybe this is true with you too I saw a bright future. I had dreams like you they were normal young adult dreams about my career, marriage, my education, friendships and my family. The environment was a big big concern for me back then. Pollution and litter were big. They were big topics in 1968. Whoops I just dated myself. But Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. We saw laws passed to clean up rivers, put scrubbers on smokestacks, catalytic converters on cars and companies were required to reclaim the land that was destroyed by pollution runoff. It wasn't even close to perfect but we had hope. We saw some light at the end of that tunnel and most of all we saw a future on the planet. You know those three students that spoke? I'm not sure they do. I'm not sure. They know what happens when we go to 1.5 degrees above an increase. They know by the year 2030 if we don't cut the greenhouse emissions in half they know what happens if we continue to use fossil fuels to heat our homes and drive our cars. They are smart and they are educated. They know about the Rio Summit, Coyote, the Paris Accords and they are watching the world leaders today in Glasgow. And we've heard the leaders all say this is our last best chance or we're done. And they know if nothing is done they will have no long term future on the planet. None. Just think about that being 18 years old as we were and thinking about that you may not have a future on the planet knowing that you may not be there in 2020 or 2030. It's that close and as someone said to me the other day we're on second base and we don't even know it. So they know what protecting land, water and air is all about and what it means to their future and mitigating the climate crisis. But they will find some hope. They will find hope if they see things happening right here in their own backyard. And we owe them that big time. They're placing a climate crisis clock in the lobby of the high school showing how many years they have left before it's too late to reverse the damage. The clock strikes zero before they reach 30 years old. Well we'll probably be gone when the cladismic and disaster events start but they won't be and they know it. And they don't see any light at the end of their tunnel. They're not, I believe they're not that hopeful at all. It's the giant elephant in the room for the next generation. They're talking about it whispering quietly. I can hear them. They're not open about it yet because they are absolutely frightened and don't want to come across as depressed and dark and negative during a time in their life as it was for us when we were bright, positive and hopeful. So my request of you and really for all of us at this stage is to be thinking about those students and all the others who are under 30 years old. We all need to be thinking about the year 2030 and 2040, not 2022 and 2023. We need to be thinking in the long term, the long game, their future and not about the short game for us. That game has been pretty easy. Immediate profit, immediate housing built, anywhere allowed, immediate commercial sites and jobs everywhere. We've been good at that and I certainly have benefited from that. But the long game, that's more difficult because it calls on us to make sacrifices to our lifestyle and in our community. And for those students at Burlington, South Burlington High School and the generation, I can tell you they are waiting for us to make those long term plans and sacrifices and plan ahead for them. They do understand. They do understand the need for appropriate and responsible development. They're wise enough to see that. But they still see how important it is to set the stage now with strong environmental protections for their land, their air, their water right here in South Burlington. They need to feel some hope and you can give it to them by including some of the recommendations sent to the Planning Commission at their hearing last week by having land use regulations on key parcels of land, habitat blocks, grasslands, key primary agricultural soils, forests and woodlots all to help mitigate the current climate crisis. Let's leave these students and their generation with some light at the end of their tunnel. In the letters and speeches I gave last week, it was very clear every one of them ended with, please save the planet for us. So let's make the LDRs work for them, not just for us. Thank you very much and thanks for your work. Roseanne? Oh, that was a hard act to follow. I'm Roseanne Greco. I guess I am now your city tree hugger. I'm here to talk to you about ash trees again. I know this is not a dialogue, this was not warned, so I'm just going to present something, but the bottom line is I hope you will still discuss this. I know you've taken a vote, I'm still asking for you to reconsider it. So the ash trees, I've done a lot of research, contacted a number of arborists, learned a lot about what other cities are doing and municipalities. And basically what I'm asking you was three things. The big thing is talk again, put a moratorium on any more cut downs until you get more outside information. That's the big ask. The middle ask is have a stay of execution for the trees that are on my street. There are 31 ash trees on my street. The vast majority in the first part of the block are all ash trees. And then the little mini ask is just allow me to save the one tree in front of my house. It may be the last remaining ash tree in the city if the city plans go forward, because all or most of the ash trees in our forest lands will die because we're not going to treat them. The city has decided to cut down all the other ash trees that are on the street. Some of us have ash trees in our backyard. I'm going to treat the one ash tree in my backyard, but most of the ash trees will be gone except for the ones we treat. So what the arborist told me today that I spoke with is that he's got many years experience with this. Treating them is 100% effective. You have to do it forever. I thought maybe once the emerald ash borer went extinct you could stop it, but he says no. He thinks they have to be treated forever. So here's the price he's going to give me to treat my one little ash tree and any ash trees on my street. So they're treated every two years. I can give you the chemical. It does not harm the bees, the birds. It does kill some of the little critters, but they have to be treated every two years and a tree with a diameter of about 14 inches costs $62 a year. They're treated every two years. In future years it may go to every three years. So for me, I can afford $62 a year. I actually think a lot of my neighbors would like to do that too. I just haven't had the time to organize everybody and pull our resources and commit to paying $62 a year to save the 31 ash trees on our street, but we can't do anything if you cut them down. So I'm just asking for a stay of execution for the ash trees on 4 Sisters Road. That would be wonderful. If you're going to agree to that, will you let me save my ash tree? I will assume all liability. I'll sign any legal contract you have that if if I don't treat it and the tree gets sick, it takes about 18 months to two years to five years before the trees get once they're infected by the borer, get to the point where they're dangerous, where things start falling off and trees start falling over. But it's not instantaneously. But let's say I'm derelict or whatever. I move out of town, which won't happen. I'll put money for cutting down, grinding the stump, planting a new tree. I'll put the money up front if that's what we'll take to get you to let me save. I've named her Ashley, the tree in front of my house. Thank you for hopefully talking about this in the future. Thank you, Rosanne. Are there any other comments or questions from the public? Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to announcements and the city manager's report. So, Tim, do you want to start? Just a quick note that the pension advisory committee met last week on Tuesday with Pat Blizzard from SEI. And of course, the market's doing well, so nothing negative to report. So, everything looks good. Also, Eric Schatt was there, our actuary, giving some initial reports about the percent coverage of the fund. I think it's like the market basis was like 96% funded. And, you know, there are all these different categories of fund in this, right? So, but it's very healthy at this point. We didn't need to make any changes so far. So, let's hope that it stays that way. Well, it will for a while, I'm sure. It will change. Yeah, it will change. Okay, thank you. Matt? Nothing. Okay, Megan? Just want to thank everybody again for the retreat on Saturday. I thought it was a useful process and it opens our eyes, I think, more to all the things that we have on our plates and kind of the serving size that you all need to take on. I found that, you know, educational. So, just thank you again for organizing that. And we've got a lot on our future plates. Yeah, we have a banquet ahead of us. Anything, Tom? Just one thing. One of the Sexton's reached out, Peter Taylor, and he's asking about what it seems to be, and I think there was an email thread on this, and maybe the city manager can speak to this in her announcements either tonight or at a future meeting. But I'm hearing that there are some homeless encampments on the cemetery down on the Shelburne Road. And I just, I did speak briefly with Chief Burke about it. But after walking down into Sears Lane, I just hope we as a city are fully aware of how it's getting colder and we do have residents that are experiencing homelessness. And so it'd be great to know and I think the community would want to know what we're doing for outreach and other things to serve that needed group. Thank you. I don't have anything to announce other than I would just, you know, echo Megan's comments that I thought the retreat was really helpful. And I like the idea of having those on an annual basis so we really can have time to have the conversations with all of the leadership team and the entire council. So it's great. So thank you. Do you want to mention the reapportionment meeting that we had last Thursday at all or that the BCA met? And we were presented with some information from the legislature apportionment board because the population has increased in the city to the point where we could take on another rep district. And so the question is how to configure that district. And they just wanted some initial feedback on whether we thought that we should go with five districts in the city or partner with Williston or Essex. They don't want to. We don't want to. So I think we said that we would like to move forward with five. And then the question is later on if that goes through, how do we draw the lines? Right. Oh, and I forgot to mention and we were all, I think almost all of us were present anyway, we had a steering committee. We've met so often I get confused about was this before the last meeting? Which last meeting? But we did have what I thought was a constructive conversation with the school board. And one of the issues and information that they shared with us was the data that they have received from their demographer that clearly is indicating continued growth in the school population, I think across the board. But they were having, except for the high school and we, and they have some concerns about some of the conclusions as well. But and they will be looking forward to a recommendation by the superintendent on what to do, how to address the real overcrowding in two of the elementary schools. So it's just good to have that conversation keep us up to date. And certainly I think it's helpful for us to use that information to help them understand, regardless of what a demographer says, if there are, you know, 1900 houses being built in the next year or two are permitted, that that will have an impact on schools. So we all need to kind of pull together around that and understand those implications for all of our decision making about, about, you know, building schools, addressing the lack of space in the schools, as well as, you know, what kind of development should we be promoting to not to either, or to not exacerbate a current situation until it's resolved. So I thought it was a really good conversation. And they went out 10 years. I'll just add and redistricting wasn't a solution to them because the all three would be over enrolled within a few years, according to the demo demographics. So there's no quick, easy solution. So they're looking for some leadership, I think, from the superintendent about some options. Matt, did you just want to add to your point, Helen, if I could, I was on the road, so I participated by phone, I couldn't be there in person. What I thought was fascinating was that how the discussion that we had about building a new facility two years ago was really based on the demographers report saying that we're going to have a larger population into our middle school and high school and how this new report indicated that really the growth, as Beckett said, is in the elementary schools and it's more of an art than a science. But it informs some very big decisions that we as a community will have to make over the next decade. Okay, thank you. Jesse? Great. Well, this is our third meeting together in six days. So really appreciate your commitment and also want to sincerely thank you for your time and energy and expertise on Saturday as well as that of the leadership team and the community that participated. I was just so impressed by how engaged everyone was and I'm really hopeful for our next conversations. So just for council and community awareness, the next round of those recommendations will be coming back to the council for consideration on November 15th. We do a couple of other updates and Councillor Chen and I will talk about what we are seeing at our cemetery. We do anticipate the climate action plan task force meeting this month having their inaugural meeting this month and kicking off that work. There are we do have some upcoming hydrogen replacement and water service disruptions happening this week, specifically on Twinbrook Court, Spear Street, Sherry Road, Airport Drive, and Nolan Farm Road. We have flied all of the impacted property owners, but just in case you all here in the community, I want you to be aware of that. We also have received an update on the Kimball Culvert project. It is now scheduled to reopen the week after Thanksgiving, so that is a little later than we intended, but that is where we currently are. I also want to share that the Allen Road Shared Use Path is complete. We are working on some opportunities for stenciling that around Penny for Parks and hopefully having some photography opportunities with the bike ped committee who really was so instrumental in getting that done. But our staff shared that when they did the final walk-through with their contractors to make sure everything was kind of appropriately lined up, there were already people using the path, so they were really excited to see that. On the Fun Parks and Rec Front, thanks to the 800 community members who participated in the Glow Walk on Friday, it was a great success and the 75 folks who carved pumpkins at the senior center. Just because I've heard that this is a very big deal, basketball, winter basketball, registration closes for that on November 4th, so get your registrations in for that if you're interested. Last week, the library also celebrated their 1,000th new library card membership since the opening of 180 Market Street, so just a couple of months, which is a huge success. What's the total membership, do you know? I don't know that. But they had 1,000 new ones. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, so if you build it, they will come. Just a reminder about upcoming meetings, we will meet next Monday night for a special meeting to consider an IZ permit and to potentially here receive a recommendation from the Plank mission, then we have our regular meeting on the 15th, and then you have a little bit of a break until December 6th when you'll receive the FY23 budget. Two other late-breaking items, so I did want to give you a few sentences. You may have seen the press release on the University Mall today, so at 1255 we received, our dispatch received an Inamon call about shots fired at the mall. What we know right now is that there were two males or parties of males who were known to one another in an altercation. We have identification for some of them, and that investigation is still very much ongoing, so if folks have information about that incident this afternoon around 1 o'clock at the University Mall, they should reach out to Detective Greilis and that contact information is on our website. And then in terms of the the camping we're seeing at the Shelburne Road Cemetery, we are aware of that our priority right now through our community outreach team and the police department is really to ensure those folks have the services they need and hopefully get into permanent homes for themselves before as soon as possible, and we are prioritizing that and then we'll once those folks are served well we will go back to maintaining the cemetery. We are keeping an eye on it. Chief Barker is certainly well aware and has engaged the Howard Center police. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. So moving on to the consent agenda, which frankly is the bulk of our business tonight, we have one, two, three, four, five items, um, sign disbursements, consider and sign disbursements, approve a grant application to the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry program, approve an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Audubon Vermont to conduct habitat management work at Wheeler Nature Park, execute a stormwater agreement with Windridge Condominium Association and accept related documents for the stormwater easement and permit under the city's MS4 permit and lastly execute another stormwater agreement with Hayes Avenue Homeowners Association and accept the related documents for the stormwater easement and permit under the city's MS4 permit. So I would entertain a motion to approve. One question first? Yes, you may. I want to talk about a C. If that's okay, could we remove C and then vote and then we'll have C and probably vote on that right after that? Sure. Okay. So I'll move to approve except for C. Okay, second. Okay, so any further discussion? Okay, all in favor of approving A, B, D and E signify by saying aye. Aye. And no opposed. So that has passed and let's go back to C. This is the Fish and Wildlife and Audubon Habitat Management work. Right, so yeah, this is a great idea and I'm glad it's being pursued so I don't have any negative feedback for it other than the acronym of the head of the Audubon Vermont's last name is Fowl. I thought that was great and I had introduced that acronym name to some people as I define that for them but well the guy Volts was the head of the Public Utility Commission for a while, right? And Buck was head of Fish and Wildlife and Wood was head of Natural Resources for a while, right? So anyway, getting back to it. Well, we like that in Vermont. It means you have a real commitment. You can't have a job unless your last name. So I just wanted to ask the city attorney, well the assistant city, well no. Sure. Mr. Bullduck, about any possibility of this plan running contrary to any aspect of the proposed conservation easement on that property. I'm just, I'm a little bit worried because they're two separate things and I want to have the other entity review it and give their okay and that's that's all I'm asking. Yeah, no, it's a good question. One we thought of as well. Ashley reached out to Bob Heiser who's our contact at VLT and had that discussion and they have no objection to this and certainly as we move towards closing this will be part of the overall management plan on the property. So it would be mentioned in the management plan, do you think? Yeah, it may end up being mentioned in the management plan. We have to get the money first. Yeah, yeah, but they're they are fully aware of the project and support it. Okay. Yeah, I was really interested in the work that would be needed to remove the invasives and I know we have a lot of invasives in the city and just how important that is for the bird habitat. I was also intrigued by the fact that they described the type of, you know, vegetation topography that is best for the birds and that brings back to my mind and suggested that I made several years ago about requiring that delineations between people's yards be left with some, you know, number of feet of uncut vegetation, you know, that would provide provide some sort of hedgerow for whatever growth it would be that would be non evasive. But anyway, so anyway, so we can vote on this now. I'm happy with that. Yeah, no, I was impressed with the plan as well and pleased that we were going through and hopefully this will be the start of of the city really thinking about investing the kinds of money it takes to maintain our parks in good shape. Did you have a comment? I'll just add that the NRCC reviewed it too, so it has been on, you know, people's kind of work plans over the past year. So I mean, I noticed that they said that they shouldn't you shouldn't brush hog before October 1st. And I just want to reiterate the complaint that I've raised with the city about the stormwater division mowing the edges of some storm ponds, especially in cider mill, twice a year in the early spring and before October 1st, sometimes in late September, and that we should only mow once a year and should be after October 1st. If we could possibly do that, that would be great because I feel like there's a nice band of like natural milkweed and Queen Anne's lace and a bunch of other plants that grow up in a pretty wide swath around the edges of those ponds and they get mowed down twice a year a little bit too soon. So well, we can certainly have that conversation or you can share it with them because I would agree. And I'll just add Ashley Parker, our projects manager who who separated this is on the phone and listening to this conversation as well and is prioritizing those maintenance plans. So thank you to Ashley for moving this forward. Yeah, this is very, very nice. So are we ready to approve this agreement? Ashley, did you want to say anything or you just want to see us? Or we see you as we vote? This one to let you know I am here and I appreciate all the feedback you guys have given and I am on the same page. So yes, this has been very interesting to listen to. Between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Audubon Vermont to conduct habitat management work at Wheeler Nature Park. Second. Okay, are we ready for the vote? All in favor signified by saying aye. So that passes. Great. Okay, now going on to item seven. This is consider approving a resolution amending the Public Art Selection Committee purpose and Alana Blanchard, our Community Development Director and Penny Thompson, who's the chair of the Public Art Selection Committee. I had forgotten that and I wondered why are you here? Just to give your husband support? Maybe? I don't know. Did you say I was lonely? Okay. Is the light on on your mic? I don't know. Oh, I guess now it is. Thanks, Jesse. Okay. Okay. Yes, Alana's going to help me if I need it. So thank you. I guess you've all had a chance to read the proposed resolution. So I just have a couple of points. I wanted to also thank Trice Stratman who's here. She's one of our committee members. She's the previous chair, but we switched in July. And the other members of our committee are Jean-Sebastian Michelot, if I pronounce that correctly. Yeah. And Michelle Bailey and Amanda Holland. So is that, did I forget anybody? No. Okay. And we are, we're a small committee and we are really excited about what we're doing on behalf of the city. I got involved with them. I volunteered to be on the committee and you actually appointed me after participating as a community member in the selection of the geese sculptures. And it was like so excited. I said, oh my gosh, look at this that goes on. So luckily I was appointed. And for the last couple of years, the committee's been in place since 2015, but got active in 2016 from what I gather. I joined after that. What we've done so far is supervise the two big public art projects of the geese. And most recently, the clock seasons out of time that got placed in the library. And they've both been really exciting projects to work on. And the other, but as we were working on those projects and our remit is to do projects in city center, you know, that we're the committee that helps select and recommend to you which artist and then follow through on getting those art works placed. And in those intervening years, some of what was also happening was independent organic projects coming up about public art. Katie O'Brien was, you know, yes, who's that? She's a close community. It's a close knit community is a small community. But she started, she started the idea of painting our electric utility and utility. And obviously it was really popular across the community. You know, we were seeing all the positive reaction to that. One of our members actually was Trees, I believe, attended one of the conferences and the New England Foundation for the Arts and saw what communities can do with public art on a broader scale. So we've kind of been talking about it amongst ourselves for a while, but we were busy with the clock and other things. And so we finally this year said, well, we're going to ask if we might broaden our scope a bit to help advise the city on broader matters about policy about art and also change our name from Public Art Selection Committee to Public Art Committee, more broad based. And we see the opportunity to, we have many arts organizations in South goington already. I mean, we have both private organizations like Davis Studio. We have Spotlight. We have Lyric Theater. So there are a lot of arts organizations already here. And we want to help foster the, you know, awareness of the arts and the artists we have in the community. We need to do an inventory and have other things we'd like to be doing. But that's really what the, that's the gist of what's in the proposal or our resolution to amend our committee charge. And I don't know if there's, oh, I forgot one big thing. Sorry. When we built this building, of course, we ended up having a new public art, a new gallery, an art gallery. And our committee is also responsible for managing the art gallery. We are, we believe we found a curator we'd hope to appoint. And we have hung just, if you'd noticed, you might have noticed this evening as you came in. There's a new show that got hung today with Trees and John Kalaki's Help and others. And so that's been an exciting piece for us, but it does already broaden our scope, you know, anyway, you know, just by virtue of what we're working on there. And we started with a South Burlington artist. This show has three South Burlington artists. We're committed to help, you know, when, when appropriate, you know, try to help promote for other artists in South Burlington and also student art. We, so we have lots of great ideas for what we can be doing for the city. And that's why we're asking for the amendment. I guess I'll let you ask questions. I'm not sure. Did I leave anything else? Thank you. That was very complete. Are there any questions? I just have a comment. I'm glad that you want to expand your work and include some of those other opportunities, because I think art is sort of foundational to come to a community and to humanity. And it's really nice to have an active committee and certainly volunteers from our community who care so much and are interested in putting in that time. So thank you for what you've already done. And I appreciate that. And I think in my mind, I think what you're asking makes perfect sense. Great. Thank you. And the second show is up. The second show is up. The reception is on Thursday, 5.30, because of the times we are in. There will be no refreshments. So don't count on that, sorry. But we hope some of the artists will be here. And actually it was really fun today. People, as they were walking through while we were hanging it, I think almost every single person stopped to just sort of comment and went, wow, great. And it was interesting. One of the people probably didn't like the last show as much. So that was also funny. It's like, oh, I like this more traditional art. But I was like, fine. So you see, we're expanding horizons every day. New age photography. So anyway, well, thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Well, thanks, Connie. So I would entertain a motion to approve the resolution as presented in our packet, amending the Public Art Committee charge. So moved. Second. Okay. Is there any further discussion or comment? Okay. All in favor? Signified by saying aye. Aye. Okay, that passes unanimously. Thank you so much. Good job. All right. Item eight, approve a tourism and economic recovery marketing grant application. And Alana Blanford, our Community Development Director, will be reading that. Thank you. Briefly, the State of Vermont has put out a call for applications for a grant for marketing and tourism, essentially to get people traveling to destinations in Vermont and spending money at Vermont businesses. So it is for any type of marketing that gets people to move around and sleep in hotels essentially. So we pulled together a few folks including from the hospitality industry and from the arts industry in our general area and in South Burlington and had a conversation about whether or not there might be a good project that is a good candidate for this program. One thing that is perhaps unique to Vermont is we don't really have very many high profile winter events in Vermont, especially since first night is no longer around. There aren't that many things that drop people out in the cold that aren't related to sports activities. And so and Market Street is a great resource. It's established for events and we don't have any annual events that have a sort of more regional impact yet in City Center. So Holly and I had a good conversation with folks about the possibility and have put together sort of a short summary of what we're looking for in terms of a grant application. It is due November 3rd and it would we Holly reached out to talk to an event planner and also given her experience and some of the people that we're working with their experience we feel that the grant maximum of 30,000 is not enough to put off that type of an event but we feel that it's important to get something like that started and to also get it started and on a good foot. And so we would be looking for an ARPA or other type of funding at least a match if not more than a match. So really wanted to call attention to that. And so in general, I think we're looking for something warm and fuzzy and twinkly and bright and as Holly described it classy. So we're all about fun, sort of wanted to elevate that a bit in sort of winter night type festival. So that's where we are. Matt. Thank you. Sorry, I may have missed it and it's really hard to these mass things. We're we would close down Market Street to hold it there. Is that what you were saying? Correct. Okay, I want to confirm that. So and we're looking at what we've discussed we I think for the grant application we wouldn't be specific to give ourselves flexibility but we have been discussing a Friday and Saturday night. And most likely, I think personally, but I think that's really a leadership discussion is it would probably need to be before Thanksgiving due to the overall, you know, the importance of Christmas shopping and or holiday shopping in this area. So we would probably look at a date prior to Thanksgiving. We think there's a lot of synergy with other events that happened just before Thanksgiving like the craft, the craft event and in talking with someone who's very involved in their planning, she and she said I haven't talked to my board yet. They may not agree with me, but there's there's a lot of opportunity in having multiple events, especially a daytime event and a nighttime event to that appeal to the same group of people, you can start to draw more and more people from far away for something like that. Especially when it's all within walking distance. Tom? Three things. One, love this idea. It's great. Glad you're doing it. Two, I was talking to a South Burlington Rotarian, a volunteer extraordinaire, one that just when he puts his shoulder behind things, things happen. He loved this idea too. And I would just in the final comment is really to broaden it. I like that you're thinking before Christmas did not mess with the holidays, but I also think January, February and Vermont are just cold, dark months. And I see this as a way to just bring it to life. So if you if the besides the grant, if you want to look at the Rotary as a partner to to get some some volunteer as well as they have, you know, some resources, they helped with the city, the things that we're doing in the park that was started as a Rotary event. So I hope you'll involve that. And then the final piece of the third one is I went to South Burlington. I went to Rick Markott. And when I went there back in the 80s, they used to have an outdoor ice rink back right over there. And I just fondly remember it. I think Mr. Bullduck also had that too. I would love to bring that back. I love to have that be part of this if we can partner with the school, but an outdoor market street thing where now there's night lighting. So it's that was a big problem back then it'd be dark. We have the facilities here at City Hall for people to warm up and get a hot cup of cider. So I would love to look at possibly outdoor ice rink to if that's in the horizon at all. That sounds great. Okay, any other comments or questions? I have a question because the lights I was curious if the public art committee would be at all useful there. It can be an art. Or were you thinking, you know, like red and green just lights in the trees or were you actually thinking of something? Well, yeah, that's a great question. So I think I'm not sure I think we know we want lots of lights, but that's all we know right now. I do think that the public art committee would be a very important partner. We were definitely had had conversations with Davis Studio and also the Vermont Creative Zone Chittenden County coordinator. And they've already provided a commitment letter to participate. So I think that the that as part of marketing Vermont products and places art is a very important component of that. So yes. And would it stay up through the cold dark months of February and March? Or is that something that would come down? I think that's to be determined to be determined. So I do know that we own the snowflakes, but well, so those will go up again this year. I'm not sure what type of structure the lights will be on or how they'll be designed. So okay, but that's a good desire to keep track of. Thanks. Okay, well, I would entertain a motion to approve this grant application for a tourism and economic recovery marketing event. Second, and just one comment for Alana. I was at a at a light kind of fest, and I think I told Kevin Dorn. So this was some time ago, but disco balls, if you shine lights on it's it's it's kind of amazing under trees. So I just wanted to put that in your notes. Thank you. Have an old one. Okay, so we ready for the vote? Yeah. All in favor of approving this application signified by saying aye. Aye. It passes. Thank you very much. For a few minutes ahead of time, but application. We do have two and one of our candidates is here and I know the other candidate was likely to be here right at 730. So I think you could start talking to Mr. Biyama. Okay. And I will I guess just do a teeny bit of table setting, which is this DRB vacancy. We are hoping that you will consider and vote on tonight. We do have some big permits coming to the DRB meeting in the middle of November that we would love to have this person on board for. Okay. The vacancy is is one year. It's Alyssa. What's Alyssa's term? I'm just curious. I can find out. Yeah. Thank you. How long? So is one stepping down? Is that Alyssa? One is moving out of the city. It's moving out of the city. Yeah. Lock up a four will happen. Well, let's see. So this is for a term ending in 2023. Good. Ready? Well, welcome Michael. Thank you for expressing interest and wanting to start by telling us why you would like to do this and what skillset you bring to the table that is important. Thank you. Thank you for considering my application. I've worked in the commercial real estate business since I graduated from the University of Vermont in 2010. At that time, I actually interviewed at Redstone, believe it or not, in which they told me I did not have the experience for a job. So they told me to go cut my teeth elsewhere, which is what I did. I moved to South Florida where I got a job in commercial real estate. I was fortunate enough to do well enough to come back to the state that I loved, which is Vermont. So I've been here for about four years, been in and around DRB meetings, drawings, planning, reading land development regulations, and doing my best to understand them. So I'm hopeful that I can offer the city my time and the skills that I've learned over the years to consistently and evenly apply the land development regulations to projects that come for in front of the DRB. Okay. One of the questions that we do ask DRB candidates is trying to explore a little bit about events or work that comes before proposals, I guess, that comes before the DRB, where you might have a conflict of interest given your connection or employment with rearch properties. And I'm curious how many you think that might be. And I mean, obviously, I would hope you would recuse yourself if it was for your own company, but how do you think that is an issue, do you think? It's a great question. And one I was prepared to answer. We have one project that is, we just submitted a sketch plan on it's going for preliminary plot review next. So I would obviously recuse myself from that project. There are potential other projects at Technology Park, which I would recuse myself from. There are two or three remaining plots of land that could be slated for development sometime in the future. So if that's a potential conflict of interest, I completely understand, but I would obviously recuse myself from any decisions in those cases. Are there other questions people? Are you the same Michael Biama that suffered through some of my classes back about 10 years ago? I recognize the name and I was like, but I thought he moved out of state. So it's good to see you. I did for a period of time. That's that's correct. Yeah, we had those gateway computers, the first touch screens with the pens. Yeah, remember that well. Welcome back to Vermont. I guess my question is sort of tied to the former DRB chairs. Did that happen a lot with those conflicts? And what are your how much of a problem is that usually on his term? Yeah, you know, you know, having knowledge of civil engineers, architects and engineers, as you say in your resume, that's really a plus. And it's also something you have to be aware of, because if you have a negative or positive relationship with any one of those professionals that are involved in building, you know, that can affect your judgment. So as long as you're clear and upfront, I don't see it as a problem. And I see it is an advantage to understand what it takes to design a building or development. And I will say most of my experience locally has been in the brokerage community prior to joining REARC in February. I was just a commercial real estate broker. My previous responsibilities included leasing the Palmer Lowe family's properties, all their shopping centers. So I was responsible for providing, you know, leasing services for them as well as third party services to the outside community. So so is it fair to say your book of business or your portfolio is more related to buildings that are already in existence rather than ones that may soon be in existence? That is what the majority of my experience is correct. Yeah, it is a new responsibility for me to be sourcing development deals, which is kind of the responsibility I'm now undertaking at REARC. Yeah, can you tell us about REARC and tell us, I mean, off the top of your head, what the portfolio consists of in South Burlington, both, you know, current properties and impossible future developments? Yeah, so REARC is comprised of two companies, the construction company and then REARC properties. REARC properties is owned solely by John Illich, senior, and we represent the properties at Technology Park on behalf of Technology Park partners, which is comprised of a partnership of individuals, including John Illich. So my responsibilities include overseeing the properties at the park that are still owned by Technology Park partners, so that's property management and leasing there. And there are, besides the lots that we're currently trying to permit for a large project, there's additional three or four lots that we would ideally in the future like to develop or sell to the right candidates, but we've been very selective in terms of the number of the types of uses and the types of facilities that have gone out there, so I don't expect that to happen, you know, super quickly. So you're just focused on Technology Park that's the only land that's currently owned or managed in some way by REARC? No, there are some, we also have some property management contracts across other parts of the state for other clients. But just in South Burlington is what I'm asking? Yeah, there we have a property management agreement with other owners to take care of other properties. Can you tell us who they are? Is that okay? Sure, I'd be happy to. REARC properties manages community health centers of Burlington's properties, so they have eight facilities kind of in the area, and we do the property management services for all those facilities. We also take care of a couple other properties in St. Albans, one in Claremont, New Hampshire. That's good, great. Can I keep asking?  Not me personally. During we had a sketch plan presentation a couple weeks ago, I sat in the back. That was your first DRB meeting? That was my first DRB community here. I sat through a couple in Burlington before when I was interested in a project that was being permitted down there, Cambrian Rise, which I'm sure. So as you drive around South Burlington today and you see projects that have been completed in the last 10 years, let's say, do you ever have any particular opinion about the project or how it was implemented or the architecture or the design or something that makes you say, oh, that's really nice or boy, that one didn't work out so well. Any eel fillings to any former DRB chairs? I'm just curious, you know, because we're, you know, you're in this is a position where there's not a lot of room, right, for changing the LDR is kind of like layout what the template is for how things can go, but there's some gray or nuance in there. And sometimes that's the opportunity to make changes that benefit the city, you know, sometimes at the expense of somebody else. So I'm just asking you, I mean, do you have any aesthetic opinions about things that you've seen where you think something should have been done or something was overdone or? I mean, obviously, sometimes you wish things had gone differently. Their development is a complicated process and aesthetics and design are only one component of it. And especially nowadays, there's a lot more things to consider when it comes to sustainability and efficiency of buildings, especially, you know, how they're designed. So of course, you always see opportunities where maybe the land development regulations don't quite get there. But at the same time, I think I do believe that you try to keep your personal opinion out of it as much as you can and apply the regulations consistently and evenly across all the projects and keep your personal opinions out of it. And that's that's how I would approach it. Yeah, well, just to go back to what Tim Barrett said is that there are some sections that allow the DRB to to have, you know, some parameters that are fairly wide and open to opinion and and to best judgment. And some of those things have to do with aesthetics, they have to do with design of the parcel, they have to do with waivers to some things or exemptions from some regulations. And so you named some of those things you talked about sustainability, you talked about aesthetics, you talked about various things. And where do you come down on that as, you know, and I think talking about past experiences as possible, you don't have to speak just in vague terms, you can also talk about your experience in Florida, if you prefer to go out of state. No, not particularly Florida, you know, they're a little bit different. You can permit a lot of different things down there, especially once you kind of go outside the more regulated areas, there's less control, I would say, and the ability to to permit something quickly and build it quickly is is much more apparent, I would say. In terms of projects that I've, well, in terms of the the components that you mentioned, obviously aesthetics is something that everyone notices, people that don't know anything about the development business or architecture, engineering can see a building and know that that was well designed or they have an opinion on its design. And obviously, that's that's one component of it. But I think that today, it's less of a component than the sustainability and the efficiency, which is is what really people are really looking for. They want a building that has a tight envelope that doesn't waste a lot of heat and cooling and make sure that it's efficient and that the emissions from that building are what we're striving for is net zero, right. And so that's I think a big component of where this city is headed and where other cities in the immediate area are headed. And I would would I agree with that entirely. So in terms of siding to have solar ready roofs, you would think about the placement, you would think about things like where it would be located if it were near a sensitive natural resource, those kinds of things is where the DRB has some has some room to maneuver. Absolutely. Are there other questions? All right, just so if there are not, just so you understand the process, we have a another candidate that will interview. And then we if the council is interested, it sounds like we probably should be. We will go into executive session to consider the applications and make a determination tonight. Typically, we don't do it the same night and have anyone hang around to find out and you don't have to hang around because you'll get a letter or a call. But we would I suspect we will make the decision tonight. Okay. And then we would want to move over that candidate is to be ready to be meeting tomorrow night, right? DRB is meeting tomorrow, right? It's next Tuesday. Next Tuesday? Yeah, it's tomorrow. Yeah. Sue knows. We're double up tomorrow. I'm available tomorrow. And so and you also understood one last question. When they meet, maybe we don't, but and the time commitment involved with five to 10 every other Tuesday, right? About? Yeah, it's every other Tuesday. I don't know what time they start. Is it five? Seven, but they sometimes have deliberative earlier. Oh, sometimes they go. Right. Sometimes it's five for deliberate. Okay. Yep. And there's a volume of data to absolutely adjust. All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your interest and willingness to serve. And if you're not selected, I hope you won't go way upset and might not at all think about other ways you can serve the community. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Michael. All right, so. Quinn man. Yes. So you're here. Good evening. Good evening. See you all. Thank you very much for expressing interest. One thing I didn't find on any of your submittals was exactly where in South Brownton you live. Eastwood. Yep. Yep. I live in the Eastwood apartments. Oh, okay. Yeah, I couldn't find it. It's right at the top. It says Eastwood's have probably smaller. Number 401. Is that building one or two or three? Yeah, same with same with mine. They got stuff that I didn't see on Eastwood Drive. Also made stone. Yeah, I'm the same as Helen. I went to the bar. There's a couple back there for sure. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, two of us got the application that was empty. Oh, so all I got, which was actually was fine, was your kind of resume. Okay. And then I went to your LinkedIn and so I could find out a lot but never could find out where you live. Gotcha. Yeah. At first I thought 180 Market Street. Let's see. The number was one of the apartments. Okay. I will just say, and I'm happy to pass my computer to you guys. Sorry, Quinn did absolutely fill out the complete form, but all the content is in the document you do have. It's also in the box. Oh, I don't have that either. You don't have this either? Mm-mm. I should read it. It's good. Yeah. I will when we go into executive. Sorry, Quinn. No, you're totally fine. I'm sorry. There's technical difficulties. Have you maybe quickly, since we got different information, you know, your experience and why you applied and what skill steps do you think you bring to the table? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I'm a 2015 UVM grad. I studied environmental science and I now work in environmental compliance and policy for a small consulting firm working with federal agencies for compliance around the National Environmental Policy Act. I've been there for about two years. Prior to that, I worked for the state of Vermont with the Vermont Community Development Program, which administers federal funds for housing and economic development projects. So in that role, I was the environmental officer with my title. So I oversaw that all the projects we awarded complied with the National Environmental Policy Act, which was a requirement of our grants. So, you know, looking at a lot of federal regulations around floodplains, wetlands, all that sort of thing, you know, and also there's the kind of softer criteria of aesthetics, socio-economic impacts, all those sorts of things. So I definitely bring a kind of natural resources environmental perspective, but also experience with, you know, these are the rules and regulations we're operating under. We have a project that's proposed, you know, does this comply and how does compliance look for that particular project, given the parameters we have. So it's my high level. Oh yeah, yeah, of course. So like I said, I've been in my current position for about two years and it's less Vermont focused. I was born in Vermont, have stuck around here and I just have, working for the state, I really gained an enjoyment appreciation working directly with Vermont communities and that's something that's, you know, missing from my professional realm right now, which I knew was something that I was going to miss when I stepped away from that position. So I saw this kind of opportunity come up and I thought it would be a great way to be integrated into the community that I'm now living in and that I bring good experience to it. So that's the primary, just wanting to be more involved in the local community. Okay, and you're aware of the time commitment? Yeah, and probably better than we. Yeah. Are there other questions people have, Megan? The housing and development work you did with the state. Did you talk a little bit about what that involved? Yeah, so we awarded primarily affordable housing projects. So, you know, the Cathedral Square you have in this area. So we funded that. But as an example, so, you know, we would have applications come through and they would have to, you know, meet the criteria of being eligible under our grant program. And then I would, you know, do kind of a primary check of are there any big red flags as far as potential impacts or consultation that they need to do from an environmental perspective and also make sure the applicant had the right resources and understanding of what that process was going to look like. So to kind of meet compliance. So my role was a lot of, you know, I held quite a bit of trainings, developed guidance materials for that, a lot of one-on-one interaction and guidance around that, and then reviewing materials once they were submitted, plans, studies of, you know, the like wetlands or whatever it was, and reviewing that whole package and eventually, you know, providing sign-off, putting conditions on something if necessary to, you know, say, all right, you're going to implement the project this way, but you're going to have to put in this mitigation or that sort of thing. So that was kind of the full circle of what I did. Anyone else? Go ahead. You said in your resume, your lifelong grimoire, did you grow up in South Carolina? No, I grew up in Bennington, Vermont. Oh, sure. And you worked at, is the Department of Housing under the Agency of Commerce and Community Development? So you worked under Secretary Shirling? I did. Then who was the commissioner at the time that you worked there of housing? Katie Buckley was for a little bit, but gosh, Noelle was there when I first got on, and then Josh Hanford was commissioner when I left for a little bit of time. That's a great experience. Have you been to a Development Review Board meeting? I have not. In any municipality? No, I have not. Have you ever been to one of his classes at UVM? No, I don't think so. Did you take any French in college with him? No, I didn't, unfortunately. Well, that's just... Did you take a former Councilor Dave Kaufman? You graduated from the Rubenstein School. I did, yep. Did you have any classes with him? Who was it? Dave Kaufman. I don't think so. He's more tourism. Okay, yeah. Okay. Can I just one more question? Can you tell us about your Act 250 experience? Yeah, so my experience there was mostly kind of seeing how it overlapped with the federal process. So sometimes we would have applicants come in and they had already, you know, are farther along in the Act 250 process. And my mentality was always, I want this to be as efficient as possible for you and then you don't want to like redo what you've already done. So, you know, really just sometimes taking that documentation and pulling out, okay, this is what we need just in a slightly different format or this leads directly to it. So pretty much just kind of reviewing documentation that would have been prepared for Act 250 and providing guidance and pulling things out that were applicable to our process to make the overall approval process more efficient for folks because, you know, there's the local level, federal level, state level. Sometimes they're dealing with all that. So do you feel like you're semi-fluent in the whole Act 250 process? Yeah, I would say so. Again, I haven't not super direct experience, but I, it's, it's, I know there's a lot of different nuance to it that you don't know unless you're in the process, but it's very similar to what I, the regulation I work with at a federal right level. So I feel like I have a good handle on the process. Have any of your projects had to deal with environmental court? No, no. Any other questions? Do you have any questions for us? I guess my first one was just as far as getting the materials prior to the board or is it more common that the board just like is kind of seeing the materials of a proposed project for the first time at the meeting? Yeah, whether you or Mike get appointed, you first thing one of whoever was appointed will do is meet with Marla and she will provide sort of backdrop of how you prepare for meetings and protocol and you'll meet with the chair, Don Filibert, and she'll go through that as well. And the idea is give you all the information you need to do to hit the ground running because it will be absolutely, you're drinking out of a fire hose for the first couple of months, but then it gets a lot more, gets a lot easier. Yeah, definitely. Okay, that's great to hear because that was my help. And because it's a regulatory committee, it has very specific notice requirements, so you get materials, I think, farther in advance than the council does. Yes. We have lots of time to review the things. We have great staff that run that. Excellent. It may really support you. I mean, absolutely. Oh yeah. You're not slogging through this stuff and the staff leads you. Yeah, their informs you, I should say. Definitely. Leading sounds like the wrong word. Your materials referenced the design review board, but you are replying to the development review board. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, yes. We're not appointing to the design review committee. All right. Well, I don't have any other questions as well. Thank you very much for applying. And as I said to Michael, if you're not selected, I hope there's other ways that you might be interested in getting involved in this great community. And I'm glad you're living here. Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate you guys' time. Thank you. Thank you. Next item is consider entering executive session for the purpose of considering these appointments. I should have brought this up earlier, Helen, but is there a reason why we wouldn't go to executive session for both things and the reason why we'd go and then come back? I don't know. So the reason I organized the agenda that way is that if you are going to take a vote tonight, and it was a staff request, but you are not required to, you certainly can vote. You have two more meetings coming up in the next two weeks. You can vote at a later date. The reason I layered them like this is if you are going to vote, you should vote on camera and re-enter regular session, vote, do other business, and then we can go into executive session where there's no other business. That makes sense. But it's your prerogative. Yeah, that was a good explanation. Thank you, Jesse. So would you like a motion? Yes. So I'd like to move that the council enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing the appointment of an individual to fill the vacancy on the city's Development Review Board, inviting in Jesse Baker and Andrew Bould. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Six to five are saying aye. Aye. So we will move into executive session with the expectation we will come back. Can we just turn off the cameras? So if you're ready for that vote, all in favor say aye. Aye. Could we ask the manager to ensure that Michael gets a note saying that he, to be notified properly that he was not appointed? So that's just been a minor complaint in the past from some applicants where they didn't receive prompt notification. Sure. Okay. The next item is reports from counselors on committee assignments. I do not have anything from the airport. Nothing from GMTA. That's new. Okay. All right. The sound app is pretty cool. I've been looking at the sound app on the web, you know, with the two sound meters and then that tracks the flights. It tracks most flights. It doesn't track all flights, but I haven't seen it go above 62 yet, but I'm just looking at it once in a while. And so, you know, you have to catch it at the right moment. Okay. Great. All right. Is there any other business? So would you like to consider entering executive session again for the purpose of discussing pending litigation? Sure. So I'd like to move that the council make a specific finding that premature general public knowledge of the council's discussion about the O'Brien Eastview PUD Environmental Court appeal to which a city's a party would clearly place the city at a substantial disadvantage and move that we, well, that's the first motion. Second. All in favor? Aye. And having so found, I'd like to move now that the council enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing the O'Brien Eastview PUD Environmental Court appeal, inviting Injustice Baker, Andrew Bull, Duck, and Amanda Lafferty. Second. All in favor? Aye. And I would say we don't intend to come back. So this meeting is adjourned now, I guess. Well, we'll cut it. We adjourn at the end, but there's no further action. But there's no further action. So