Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Oracle OpenWorld for exclusive coverage of Silicon Angles theCUBE, which is covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015, hashtag OW15. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship program that goes out to the events and extracts a signal from the noise. Silicon Angle Media consists of SiliconAngle.com, SiliconAngle.tv, and wikibon.com research. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm John Michael, Dave Vellante, founder of wikibon.com. We're next guest, David Donatelli, executive vice president of Oracle Converged Infrastructure. Welcome back to theCUBE. It's great to be with you again. It's great to see you. We've interviewed you in many of your lives and your keynote this morning was really awesome. I want to say congratulations, your first keynote at Oracle. How did it feel? I mean, you got the new role, reporting to Mark Herd, you're up on stage, really kind of laying out the realities of today's market. So first comment on, what's it like to be the first keynote at Oracle? And two, the realities of the market today is a trend. It's not a one-off data point. You mentioned obviously the Dell EMC in context and you're looking at all the stuff at IBM and transitions at HP. Not a direct comment, but the industry trend is pretty significant. Yeah, so first of all, it's great to be at Oracle. One of the things that really excited me about joining Oracle is I thought that we were so well positioned for where the marketplace is going. And I know it's a cliche to talk about, oh, technology's moving very rapidly. But as it relates to infrastructure, which is what I've dedicated my career to, it is moving at a pace right now that is unheard of. If you sat here for this week and I know you have, you saw yesterday Thomas Curry and about four charts announced probably what was like 30 some products. Like I couldn't keep up. I was like, oh, there's another one. Here's a new one. Here's a new one. Off we go. And all that type of speed is having huge impact on infrastructure. We're in fact going through the biggest change, I think, in 25 years. And because of that change, that 25-year change, it's really impacting who's going to be successful as a provider, not only today, but going forward. And just like we saw the last time this change happened, which was when the mini computer died, the folks who were leading that back then and being a Massachusetts resident, I knew them all, deck, wing, prime, data general. They didn't make the transition to best of breed. Now we're transitioning out of best of breed to cloud-based and a lot of guys aren't going to be there as this thing progresses. I had a chance to sit down with you and Dave when we were at the cloud launch and then I wrote an article on Forbes in July, actually, months and months ago. And you really nailed it.  But also you commented on this flattening of the infrastructure down to the chip level, which Larry announced. But more importantly, you said the comment, if someone doesn't have a public cloud, then they're in the box business. They're pretty much toast, that's my word. But I forget the exact quote, but what's happened between July and now? Obviously the Dell EMC things happened. You see a lot of transition in the marketplace. Customers want a new way to do things. What's happened in that time and you still feel the same way about this flattening? Yeah, well, I'd say two things. First, yes, I am a kidney candy store to be here. Because from an infrastructure perspective, I think what most of the market doesn't know is how much infrastructure development this company's done. And as you said, from the chip all the way up through the cloud, right, has been done in-house, good old-fashioned, ending in integration. And that's very exciting to be a part of. Second of all, as we discussed in July, I made a statement that more or less said, if you're an infrastructure developer and you're not successful in the public cloud or don't have your own public cloud, it's going to be very difficult to succeed going into the future. And there's a lot of reasons behind that. One, first is economic, right? If you're just an on-premise provider, as you all know, you read the paper, the economic model of making money that way is in decline. And as you also know, Wall Street's very impatient. They always want to see your economic model in ascent, not decline. So you're not going to be able to make enough money as a large-scale infrastructure provider on-premise. And then that leads to the problem. Once you don't make enough money, what do you do? You cut costs, you cut R&D, and therefore you're not going to be able to develop products people want in the future. However, in our case, we develop on-premise and in the cloud. That gives us the economic model that will flourish and it gives the opportunity to continue to invest in the R&D of the products people want going forward. You talked in your keynote about good old vertical integration. We're sort of back to those days at Oracle. But when you were at EMC, you were at HP, you obviously integrated with Oracle. You sold products into that market. It was a big market. What's specifically different about what Oracle is doing? Can you just peel the onion for us and compare it to sort of what the guys on the outside looking in do? Yeah, so here are some of the key differences. First of all, we have all the software stack here. We have the database, we have the middleware, we have the applications, and now we have the public cloud. So as a hardware developer, if you're developing the chip or if you're developing any of those elements, you can collaborate with the people who write the software to do really cool stuff that either increases performance, increases scale, or reduces cost. We gave a couple of examples at the show. One was a security in silicon where we even embedded things in silicon that enable your software to run more securely, either encryption, speed up, or memory that can only be viewed by one particular application, not others. Things like hybrid column or compression where we can compress at great rates, allows you to store less, also allows you to do things like query much faster, and when you start to use the two together, you get more benefit because in today's world, if you encrypt, you can now can't dedu, right? So now you need to compress. So these are just some examples of how working together is different. So those are two examples that your competitors can't do. That's right. So they're sort of stuck doing like RMAN integration and there's a level that they can integrate too. How do you decide where that line is drawn? Well, here's the basics. I mean, if you look at what everybody else is doing out there, it's I'm gonna take my favorite x86, my favorite storage, my favorite network, and I'm gonna put that together. And then on top of that, generally speaking, there's a Linux layer and then you have your virtual machine of choice. After that, you have no special insight into the software layer, you just don't. So what you try and do is say, well, I'll make this work as good as it can, then the customer can put the standard database or app on there and it's gonna run as best as it can. The difference between that and saying, well, gee, I have a private column to the database that only I have access to that speeds query or speeds the decryption. I call that one side of the bat phone to the database. But so, okay, so you talked about this pretty much the laid out a scenario for the end of the do it yourself best of breed in a world. However, does- I think that's better for customers. But so should we infer that can you, do you have to be best of breed? Can you be best of breed? Talk about best of breed versus integration. Is it a trade off? Well, you know, I think, well, here's what I'd say first of all, from a customer point of view, look at our engineered systems, right? I've literally talked to, as you can imagine, lots and lots of customers all over the world since I've been here. They all kind of go through a similar process. Hey, I thought your stuff was too expensive. We tried to build it ourselves. In many cases, reluctantly, we bought an engineered system. And what did they say? Ran faster, scaled higher, more responsive to IT, and on a total cost of ownership basis, saved a lot of money.  I've talked to customers who saved money, bigger customers, obviously, and the hundreds of million. So it saves them money. It's actually the most efficient way to do infrastructure. And there's enough, you know, it's not theory. There's enough real-world cases to show it's true. I mean, that's a great example of customer banging their head on the wall, if I, okay, I give up, we'll go with it. And they try, they bring it in, so land and expand, which also, Sean Price was talking about, it's both on-prem and on the cloud as a growth strategy. So that's positive. But I got to ask you, with that thought of this new customer environment, whether they're banging their head on the wall, or they see clear shift that's upon them. You mentioned to me, when we talk, this architectural shift, because we asked, I asked you the bubble question, are we in a bubble? What's going to happen with consolidation? We talked about that. But the reality is, that trend is here, right? The management teams are the best, the best products that work in this new environment will win. So I got to ask you again, what is that architectural change fundamentally that is creating this new era of different looking products, different integrated stacks, you're looking at more agile, more DevOps, infrastructure as code, yet security plugged in there? Can you comment, because the engine of innovation, I mean, it's like Oracle's like a Tesla now. Yeah, there's cars out there, but this is a new kind of engine, this shift, talk about that architectural shift. Within ourselves or within the industry? Oracle and the industry itself, the customer is what they're facing and how Oracle ties into that shift. You know, you heard Larry say the other day, which I thought he put a well is, the best way to understand the shift is look backwards a little bit, right? And look at the pieces that have been assembled here over the last 10 years. They've redone all the software. They either built their own infrastructure or acquired infrastructure. And then they built that into a completely comprehensive cloud, infrastructure as a service, up through PASS and SAS. All put together over a long period of time, whole new infrastructure. And regardless of how you got there, that's the way the market wants to consume. And that consumption is driving the change in the way architectures are developed. As you guys know, for 25 years, what was it? I'm gonna take apart each piece and build it myself and on my particular company, I'm gonna have this knob different and that knob different. What's cloud? The complete opposite of that. I'm gonna take it as it is and I'm gonna use it more efficiently the way it is because I can get up and running faster and it's more efficient for me. So this is not an incremental improvement. The old days, okay, add a new feature and now it's a game changer. All right, now let's go back to the architectural question. Let's go a little bit deeper under the hood because it was great. Now all the inner geeks of the hardware guys were going, yeah, love the engineers, this baller. In memory is a big here, but flash has hit the scene hard. You see pure storage out there. So flash has changed the game. So talk about what's going on with the architecture around flash and now within memory. How do customers make sense of that? What should they be looking at that from an overall deployment standpoint of solutions? Yeah, well, certainly as you guys know, right? If you look at flash, that's we have everything changed because of cloud. That's what's charging the big architectural change. Then if you kind of go down to the storage layer, they got other changes on top of that, right? Flash is one of them. As you know, that market, the analysts say it's two billion this year. It's gonna be four billion next year. It's growing like a rocket. And then that's forced everybody to redesign from the ground up to take advantage. Traditional rays, as we know, yeah, you can put flash drives in them, but they don't have enough IOPS within the bandwidth of the array for customers to see it. So what's that force? To your point, ground up flash arrays. We built one here as well. It's called the FS1. The difference between ours and everybody else's is we also tied it to our database or I've been aware in our cloud. So you get that full stack integration on the way through. It has like a broken record on that, but that's the strategy. I mean, that's what it is, right? But it's a pendulum, David, because, you know, if you look at it, why did people like mini computers 25 years ago? Because they wanted a full stack. That ran its course. We then spent 25 years ripping the stack apart. And what we've done now is we swung the pendulum back. And I think a big driver of adoption is actually people's personal lives.  You're used to doing it personally. And you say, I want the same thing in my business. They're shrinking the stack too. They're actually shrinking some core stack and adding new stuff onto it. This new integrated piece. Yeah. Well, it's a fundamental part of your strategy, obviously, that hardware and software integration, but it's also a component of this. Well, it's very different than what's been going on. Yes, it's exact opposite. It was because it was 180 and it's working. But so, but you also draw a line between what you will let competitors do and what you guys will exploit. You've mentioned a couple. Hybrid-column compression, OISP, the stuff you're doing in ZDLRA. Those are all unique. Yeah, but I want to be clear about this, right? For years, our software has been open to all, right?  And they can still run on Oracle. Absolutely, right? And the only difference we're saying is where we invest our specific IP dollars in developing our hardware. Yeah, we're going to enjoy the benefit of that. There is a but there, Dave, right? They can't do that. We're going to enjoy the benefit of our development. Sure, but they can't do that. We spend five and a half billion dollars on R&D for a reason and we should get benefit from that. Well, so, but it's hard to argue that stuff doesn't run better on Oracle. I agree with you. Right, okay, so it's a long-term strategy to, I mean, that's increasing. The number of examples you can point to where your competitors can't is increasing at a pretty rapid rate. That's right. And we should expect that it's going to continue. Well, here's why, though. What I contend, though, is because we're investing so heavily, right? It's not that others don't have an opportunity, although unless you have your own software stack, it's difficult. They can't, right? They can spend all the money in the world. But you have to have the software stack and then you got to be willing to invest like we are. And we're investing extremely heavily, not only just on our software and cloud, but what we're doing in infrastructure. I think people will be shocked. I always, I welcome anybody, you know, who's interested in infrastructure to come see us and in particular go to our Santa Clara campus because that's where we develop all the infrastructure products. And if you're into that kind of thing, if you're into chips and networking protocols and storage, I guarantee you'll be blown away. How many engineers, what they're working on and the depth level they're doing. And I think when you saw the M7 announced this week, that's an example of that, right? That is not an inexpensive development effort. Right. And it's just symbolic of all the other things we're doing.  I said Sun was one of the best acquisitions in the history of the computer industry. I got criticized for that. And it's playing out exactly as Larry sort of laid it out. So I got to ask you, what's a better name? The zero data loss recovery appliance or the Oracle private cloud machine for infrastructure as a service and a platform as a service? I go with the second one, but I won't repeat it due to time limitations. And you know, and they joked about the keynote that Larry named those. And I could tell you how I was there for one of those, not the ZDLR I was named for, I got here. But it's absolutely true. He names them. And it's awesome being at a founder-like company because a founder-like company, one, you get the founder's vision and technology, but you also get great clarity. Yeah. Because when he says that's the name, everybody says that is the name. So of course I'm joking, but the ZDLRA is a game changer in our view. We just did some research on this in terms of backup and recovery. Yes. I wonder if we could talk, I mean, you're doing stuff in memory, your end-to-end stack, again, the same theme. Like I said, it sounds like a broken record, but it's changing the way in which backup is done, backup windows disappear. It's essentially a time machine for the enterprise I've called it. Yes. Talk about that a little bit. Nice term, by the way. But you know, here's my view of the whole thing. I started working, one of the first big software programs I did was backup software, and this is about 20 years ago. And I'm either humbled or saddened to say that in 20 years, backup has still been very difficult. The big leap that's happened was moving to backup the desk. That at least got it faster for people and able to make their windows. But I can tell you, I've had to do customer support. You're on the phone late at night, there's problems, and it is shocking. I've been there, I've been on the phone. People, like, I don't have a recovery option for that. You know, and I still talk to customers all the time who run into issues, how do they recover their most mission-critical stuff? The reason why I think ZDLRA is so important is, you know, it was written by the guys who wrote the database. And if you think about that, as for as simple as that said, it's like, why wasn't that done 20 years ago? Right, the guys who wrote the software actually figured out how to back it up and recover it and recover it to any point you want. So by having the guys who actually wrote the software, write the, you know, it's an engineered system, but it's a lot of software, write the software to figure out how to recover it at any point, probably the best chance of having it work great. And that's why I think it's so strategic. Now it's got all kinds of great benefits of automating backups, automating restores, making it, you know, trouble-proof. And I think it's a game changer for a ton of customers on what is their most mission-critical data. One of the things we talk about all week is that Oracle's positioned across the board some good territory, they're right in the middle of all the action, but they've got two vectors of competition, if you will, or customer concerns. From the top of the stack down SaaS applications and bottom up with infrastructure as a service, AKA Amazon Salesforce Workday on both sides. So what are you, tell me more about the cloud services, some of the things that you're doing in infrastructure as a service, because there is an engine of innovation that's coming out, the M7s, we talked to John Valer, encryption, all that great stuff, but what is the concern for people who are out there looking at doing their own infrastructure service or going to Amazon? What are you guys doing? How are you differentiating on that front? Yeah, I think if you look at, you know, versus like an Amazon or any of those other folks, the biggest thing, there's a lot of things we do, but let's just talk some of the basics. First, we offer engineered systems in our cloud.  So for people, you know, we're obviously believers in engineered systems, you can run your engineered system on site, you can run it in the cloud, you can run it cloud only, having that high end capability in the cloud, very unique to Oracle, number one. Number two, being able to move seamlessly amongst all these, meaning from your premise to the cloud, very unique to Oracle. And that gets back to business model, right? There's three cloud business models out there. There's people say, I only do private cloud, I don't do public, you know, we'll help you go to somebody else. There's people say, I only do public cloud, I don't do private, so good luck on your own premise, you got to figure that one out. We do both. And since we do both, we made it very easy to traverse both worlds.  And the things we're hearing about from the customer feedback is that what they don't want is they don't want to be in the integration business. That's right. They don't want to be managing the stack because it's inefficient. Can you comment on that piece? Well, what I believe is that those other models I refer to keep customers in that integration business, right, because you're traversing, you know, I said- So you think they should be in that business? No, I don't want them to be in that business. But I think what makes our model unique is we can help them get out of it. We have the simplest to deploy cloud. If you saw Larry's keynote yesterday, he moved the database, you know, from Prem. Right click. Yeah, right click, done. Okay, simple.  Everybody likes to talk about cloud bursting, stipulate. Everybody's cloud bursting probably technically works. Now, go try and do it practically. The other really important thing you just said is that Oracle runs optimized Oracle, Oracle optimized hardware in the cloud. You're the only ones who do that. That's right. So unless Amazon starts buying exodatas That's right. and configuring them, are they doing that? They're not. Right, and then so what does Amazon run?  How many enterprises run pure white box, server, network, storage? Can't think of many. So by definition, you're running what you're running on your enterprise. You're running, Amazon's running something completely different. Then in that scenario, you as a customer have to figure out how to navigate two completely different worlds. In our scenario, we make it simple. Same world, both places, same software, both places, same skills to run in both places. Okay, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight. Dave, do you have any final questions to get into the last couple seconds? Yeah, so, last thoughts on being here.  It really is full circle, right? It's where my career started was vertical integration, although I was the one who was against that. Yeah, yeah. You were strong saying you wanted to be best of breed. But no, it's fantastic to be at Oracle. It's a great company, great culture, and it's a really R&D-centric company. It's about building great products that help customers with their biggest problems. That's a lot of fun. My final question for you, Dave, is cloud consolidation. Will there be three clouds? Is it winter take all, winter take most? What's the number that finishes that, you know, as we settle the dust a few years down the road? Depends how you want to count them. But if you look at major, you know, big enterprise kind of things, they can count on one hand. One hand on the cloud. That's Dave Donatelli's prediction. Obviously, Mark Hurts said 100% of tests and that will be in 2025 in the cloud. Oracle has got the cloud business. Congratulations, congratulations to the new role. This is theCUBE live on Howard Street, where they're shutting everything down for 60,000 attendees. This is theCUBE live from Oracle Open World. We'll be right back with more after this short break. If you want to see all the content from the videos, go to our new crowdpages.co slash oow15. We have all the videos up there in real time and all the conversations from CrowdChat and all the trending stories. We'll be right back with more after this short break.


again. Yeah, Cheryl, go for it please. Cool. So Ricardo, I know you and I we've kind of collaborated and worked together in a few different ways now through CNTF, but it'd be great if you can tell us a little bit more about your role, what you do within your team and something a little bit about the infrastructure at CERN. Yeah, so yeah, first of all thanks for the invitation. I'm super excited to participate in this. I'm always happy to tell people about CERN and our use cases. So I'm a computer engineer in the CERN Cloud team. I focus mostly on containerization and networking aspects, but also on accelerators, GPUs and other types of accelerators. And more recently, I tried to help our users on machine learning use cases. So I've been here for a while. I had different roles, but right now that's what that's what I'm doing mostly. We have a pretty large infrastructure. I'm sure most people have heard of CERN, but we have we are a big particle physics laboratory and we have a large scientific experiments that do cool things like accelerating protons to close to the speed of light and making them collide at specific points. And the result of all of this, it's a lot of data and that's why we have to have a large infrastructure to to process to store and process all this data. We generate something like 70 petabytes of data a year. We have more than half an exabyte already in-house. So to analyze all of this, we have a large private cloud with more than 300,000 cores. And we actually that's not enough for our requirements. So in the last 20 years, we built a large distributed computing infrastructure that more than doubles that capacity. And this is done by collaborating with more than 200 centers around the world that that help us with our tasks. What was it that prompted the adoption of cloud native? Yeah, so this has been we've been doing big data things for for many years now. So we are always looking for the next thing that can help us be more efficient and basically process more events per second, which is our main measurement. And this is the main thing is that we saw the potential to use this kind of technologies to improve our infrastructure and be more efficient. And this was in terms of simplifying our infrastructure because we could just rely on a uniform API that is declarative and kind of separates well the workloads from the infrastructure and allows us to have our users just telling us what they need. And then the infrastructure itself will decide how to replicate the services or the workloads and also do things like cluster auto scaling. And the second one was the ecosystem around it. We started the Kubernetes, but there's like a very rich ecosystem that will handle things like logging, metrics, alarming even. So this is it gives us a very consistent set of tools to do all our tasks. And this is also like very important, of course. Maybe a third one would be I mentioned this distributed computing infrastructure that needs to scale out. And the fact that the Kubernetes API got so popular, it also means that there's a lot of options for people to deploy to elsewhere. And also there's public cloud supporting it. So we can more easily integrate external resources into our systems. And then instead of focusing so much on the infrastructure, just focus more on the physics side. That's actually a very good introduction of your infrastructure. However, you've mentioned before that you manage more than 600 cluster at the moment and you have hundreds and thousands of nodes. Would you be able to maybe dip dive a bit more into some of the technical challenges that you face of managing infrastructure scale? Do you have any challenges around like access management, networking storage, just some examples of what exactly have to solve on a daily basis? Yeah, so one of the main reasons as well is to have this kind of consistent infrastructure where we do the integration with our internal systems once for everyone. This includes identity, but it also includes as you mentioned networking and storage. The challenges are really like in some they are very different. One of the main challenges is that we have a huge variety of use cases we have to cover. So we have the more traditional IT services that have to like the administrative services and the things that keep our campus going. And this is kind of not something that we associate necessarily with CERN, but actually we have more than 10,000 physicists working here all the time. So it's also a challenge to do that. So we have to focus on availability and making sure that these services are always up. And on the other hand, we have to scale out to the physics analysis. So we need to like be able to distribute the workloads really fast and push a huge amount of workloads into these clusters. So I would say that having clusters that serve both use cases is a challenge. We need to be able to configure the clusters very differently depending on the target in use cases. The technical challenges I think the main one we have is managing upgrades that we've had for several years now, I would say. And the way we do this for the application, the application upgrades and deployments, we promote keytops as much as possible to be able to deploy the applications in different clusters. And then we kind of promote also clusters as cattle internally so that people, if their cluster breaks for whatever reason, they don't lose completely the service, they might lose some capacity. And also they can easily do upgrades into new clusters by just moving the applications there. So I would say those are the two main areas where managing many clusters for us is kind of challenging. You've actually mentioned two main very good areas I would like to maybe ask a bit more questions, the GitOps and cluster as a cattle. Now managing multiple clusters, there's usually the approach between managing either multiple name spaces and distributing that to different teams or having multiple clusters. Would you be able to maybe elaborate a bit more on how you set up those clusters and what is the tools of choice to manage your clusters overall? Right. So we have two different types of deployments. One is one big centrally managed cluster which is using OpenShift. And this is doing isolation using name spaces and and it's very well centrally managed. And then we offer a service that is more Kubernetes as a service where we build, we are able to deploy Kubernetes on top of our lower level OpenStack deployment. And users can create their own clusters using an API that we provide which allows them to create the cluster but also like scale, upgrade and delete the cluster so they manage the whole life cycle like this. And then on the layer above, the tools that we use for these clusters, maybe you mentioned this, so we deploy Kubernetes but we also deploy alongside Prometheus for monitoring, so indeed for the log collection, Corgi and S to manage the logs like pretty standard stack I would say. And then on top of that, we promote a lot of people using Helm as much as possible to manage their applications. And this is the first step to for the next level key jobs where then we give internal tutorials and seminars for disseminating these best practices so that they can use something like Flux or Argo CD to manage the deployments in the multiple clusters. So it's kind of several steps from the infrastructure. We focus a lot on making the clusters as reliable as possible and then disseminating best practices so that the end users can do the best for the applications. Amazing. That's actually a very nice segue to developer experience and how can we improve the application deployment life cycle because I think there has been a lot of thoughts about how can we transition our engineers to work with YAML, maybe to work with templates, like if you have customized our Helm, and now there's a big movement and shift towards GitOps. And you've mentioned already that that is a practice which is already enabled, so would you be able to maybe showcase a bit more, describe a bit more how exactly an application is deployed with GitOps if you use any particular tools specifically and what kind of support you provide for your developers? Yeah. So I mentioned this is not something new, I would say, GitOps, that we've been doing similar things with the other configuration management systems that we had like Puppet or previously we had others even with other types of version control. And this is something that we are used to. So one of the main motivations here was to get people interested and onboard into our Kubernetes deployments. Sometimes the learning curve can be kind of hard. So if they can just go straight to the version control where they have a bit of YAML describing how things should look and then build on that, it actually kind of put straps there, their entry into the Kubernetes world. So that was one motivation. But then what we try is to have a single source of truth for all the application definitions and this covers the defaults for all the environments that we have but also allows to customize per environment or per cluster. And we do this using, we used mostly flux at the start, there's quite a few users now that also use Argo CD, so we don't mandate one of them. What we try to do is to have people using either Helm or customize as much as possible. We have still a couple of deployments that use plain manifests and that also works with gate ops but it's not as customizable. So we do a lot of internal training where we advertise repos where we have small tutorials that show how to use these tools internally. Cool. I wanted to ask a little bit more, Ricardo, about observability because we did a CNTF end user tech radar on observability in September 2020 and we kind of asked people what observability tools are you using. So obviously, since you run 600 clusters, you must be observing those. So can you tell us about the tools that you're using and the approach that you take? Yeah, so what we took an approach which was to try to build, to integrate with the existing infrastructure we already have for other ways of deploying applications. So this was crucial so that people can migrate their workloads gradually. So our infrastructure for collecting logs and metrics already existed and we have gateways where we can push both logs and metrics. For logs we use as a back-end, we use elastic search for short-term log storage and querying and then we have an HDFS back-end where we store logs for longer-term analysis. For the metrics, it's a similar situation. There's a gateway where we can push the metrics and this will split into multiple destinations which include influx-tp and HDFS as well. When we started introducing Kubernetes, then Prometheus took a huge role on it. So we are able to push the same metrics types from Prometheus sources into these gateways and they are centrally collected. So one interesting part here is that we offer our users two levels of observability. So in cluster they get very fine-grained metric collection and they are kept for something like two weeks. This is configurable but on average I would say two weeks and this allows us to like debug very recent problems in detail. And then what we push centrally is an aggregation of these metrics for more long-term analysis as well. We actually do this using a standard Prometheus federation for now. So the registration of the cluster is still a manual step but one of the things we are looking at as we speak is projects like TANOS or Cortex where we could do a more dynamic registration of the endpoints centrally. Awesome. I was actually about to ask if you use anything like Cortex or FANOS to manage Prometheus scale but seems like it's already in your pipelines. The other thing I wanted to mention is that if any of the attendees have any questions please just ask them. We'll be again monitoring them so we'll try to ask them live if possible. The other thing I wanted to focus on is that currently you seem to have and solved multiple challenges across different stacks, be it infrastructure, observability. Another aspect I'd like to focus a bit more is the community because I know that CERN have been giving a lot of talks at past KIPKONs and cloud native KONs including keynotes and actual sessions throughout. And we're going to have the KIPKON Europe in May which is going to be from May 4th to 7th and there are going to be free main talks delivered by CERN employees. So the first two talks I'd like to focus about. The first one is going to be focused on CRDs and operators and how this can be used to manage triple websites. This is going to be given by a colleague of yours so if you have any details about that one I definitely would ask you to elaborate a bit more. But the session that you'll be actually delivering is going to be on managing a centralized machine learning platform using KIPKON. Now would you be able to maybe give a short summary of these sessions and why KIPKON attendees should pretty much sign up for these talks? Yeah, I'm happy to of course. And that's I would say that's also one of the things that is pretty special in this usage we have of cloud native is that it kind of touches everything at CERN, all the groups. It's very common that we use like an open source. We are very much users of open source technologies but having a set of tools that is touching so many groups in our community is kind of special. So like for the talk from Konstantinos and Verulia that we'll talk about managing triple sites this is something that is quite important at CERN because dissemination and communication is very important for us. We run tens of thousands of websites. Some of them are extremely visible like the home page of CERN and it runs in this infrastructure. So this what was developed is really exploring an operator that will allow us to not only deploy a website but manage the life cycle of these websites. So upgrades and backup restores things like this. So they will give all of you a pretty cool talk about this. I hope I'm sure. And then for the machine learning this is machine learning is really having a huge impact at CERN. There's many groups looking at it for different areas. There's use cases from doing like particle classification in the detectors to simulating generating simulation data in a very fast pace. And also things like reinforcement learning for beam calibration things that I try to help but I don't completely understand always. So the idea here is really to help our users. It's very common that groups will have like one node with one GPU or a couple GPUs and they can do their training there. But then if they want to scale out they don't necessarily have the infrastructure or the knowledge to do that. So we wanted to offer a service that will help them out with this. And also if we start thinking that there are multiple groups with these custom deployments then the resource usage is not super efficient. So we wanted also to bring everything together so that we can improve the efficiency of using resources that are kind of scarce these days like GPUs and other accelerators. So we try to offer a service that and we will describe how we do this that will manage the whole life cycle of their machine learning workloads from preparation of the data all the way to serving. But also how we integrate these types of different types of resources even like how integrate types of accelerators we don't have on-premises like TPUs, IPUs and things that we get we get from public clouds. I'm looking forward to to to like talking to people with similar requirements as well after. That sounds like a great talk actually. Like I think I need to build out my schedule for KubeCon. I'm sure there's plenty of other ones like yeah it's always the problem with KubeCon. So many talks indeed. But this one is definitely a great one. Sounds like a very good deep dive into how KubeFlo can can be of help to a real use case example. Cool. It's something that I really appreciate about you Riccardo and about CERN is how open you are to sharing what you've done and what you know with other companies and helping them on their journeys. I know you have another talk which is about the CNTF Research User Group and you and I have collaborated within this for probably a year or two now. So can you tell us a little bit about the CNTF Research User Group and how you got involved with it and what's your experience been? Definitely. Yeah so I think that's one of the advantage of working at CERN is that we are we are able to be really open and this is promoted about what we do and we really want people to learn more about our our main mission but also how we do things. So the Research User Group was actually came up after a lunch break during KubeCon Barcelona with Bob Killen and other people together and then we thought of having a group that would be dedicated more to the more research oriented use cases which are kind of different from the more traditional IT service deployments. This includes things like batch managing batch workloads, having queues and the way to do fair shares, focusing on accelerators and then he talked to you and as usual or as always the response was very positive and he kind of started this group and the goal is really to get together all these different institutions and academic institutions companies that have these similar requirements try to and like learn more from each other but also to document these use cases that we have and the solutions that different people have and then maybe give feedback to the whole community on how the systems can be improved to serve these use cases. So it's been like really exciting to be part of it. I think we have a pretty good momentum right now with a set of regular attendees and newcomers all the time so I think it's it's quite exciting. It definitely is exciting I mean I really enjoy learning about it. As you said we have this core group of people who have the same use cases and therefore run into the same challenges just very openly sharing what they do what they do and you know I want to mention also that you are one of the co-chairs for this group so you've really been a leader for this group and it's been fantastic to see that. Yeah and it's very interesting to see and it really shows another benefit of this cloud native community is that CERN has this big data requirements for many many years but back like if we look 20 years ago we're kind of by ourselves and now there's so many people with similar requirements so we can really benefit from from each other and then focus on like other aspects like more physics related and not so much on the infrastructure because there's so much momentum in here. So as Katie mentioned it does seem like you've solved a lot of challenges but what do you see as future challenges? What's next for you at CERN? Yeah so we have one internal challenge that is pretty big which is we have a big machine and we generate lots of data but we are about to have an upgrade in a couple of years that will multiply this by 10 and it's not totally obvious how we can handle this so we do as we always do we look around and try to to find solutions so we work together with everyone to try to tackle these challenges and I think if we look at the integration with cloud native technologies the things I mentioned before like supporting patch workloads in a more advanced way things like queues doing fair share on workload submissions this is very important for us our systems do this and if we manage to like integrate this functionality into the ecosystem then it will allow us to like have all the other benefits from scaling out integrating external resources in a much easier way coming together and then the second one is again we are moving a lot of our workloads from CPUs to GPUs and our accelerators so support for this type of resources is extremely important and we have to be able to do this it's not only integrating resources but even like virtualizing these resources so that can partition and do better use of them I think these are areas where we will be focusing quite a bit in the next couple of years or year at least. Fantastic and I know that you are probably a little bit unusual in the infrastructure that you run but if you were giving some advice to somebody today about you know where to get started or you know what advice would you give to someone who's just getting started with cloud native and what you learn. Yeah so I think the experience we have from from the way it internally is really to like the resources are plenty to learn about the details and all the the tooling but one important thing is to to focus on the intrusion gradually we've seen internally that any kind of dramatic transition will always be very complicated so making sure that all the integrations all the required integrations are done properly first sorry and then gradually transitioning the services to the new infrastructure this is something that is very very important to start slow I would say. Since we touched upon the community I have another question of certain's experience as an end user member would you be able to maybe describe a bit how do you find the end user community your engagement within it has it been helpful for you to either reach out to the other companies within the same industry just kind of more a bit of how do you find this this experience overall. Yeah so that's that's I mentioned this earlier as well it's one of the main benefits of being part of the community and such a huge community is that a lot of the problems we had to solve internally by ourselves are now shared problems it's extremely easy to to to approach other end users these days is more in in calls and different groups that are organized so joining the special interest groups or or the end user calls is is a good way or slack of course but one one thing that I really appreciate is also the conferences and the events where it's like the direct content makes it really easy to to engage with other with other communities with other end user members and this this we've we've had several we've had follow-ups from from like lunch or coffee breaks in in the conferences that turn into like full day sharing and exchanges between members of the different institutions so this this has been like great you definitely make me miss the in-person conference experience yeah having copies and yeah hopefully it's not too long I hope so definitely I can only echo that like I saw very much miss the coffee chats during the networking sessions at Kipkan hopefully it's some time soon another thing I wanted to mention is recently you have been elected as a TOC or technical oversight committee so congratulations for for your new positions would you be able to tell a bit more about your responsibilities within this role are you like any are excited about this like how you're feeling being within this position I'm very excited it's it's been I it's been a very like quick start jumping in but but I'm learning about all the tasks and all the things to do and yeah so it it's super interesting because I get exposure to to a much wider set of of like even projects and communities that are part of the cloud native ecosystem and not something that I could it's something I could do externally but not necessarily I would have all the time to to to focus on this but dedicate some time so really the task is to to make sure that all all that is coming into the ecosystem kind of integrates well together and that we we are able to to offer and especially in in my case I'm as an end user representative I'm part of the TOC as an end user representative to make sure that we we we take the requirements of the end users into account not not just the wishes from from the project of course but try to match those against the expectations of the end users it's very important that that we have like a vibrant tech coming all the time and it's also important that we don't keep our end users that we keep our end users happy and not like constantly break systems because there's a new one so it's it's really my role is really to to try to give an end user perspective into into these decisions that's so critical to have that end user perspective because I think there can be a lot of discussions about what the right thing is to do but once you have an end user who says I actually have this problem well I see other companies who have this same problem then that cuts through a lot of that and just keeps things moving so that that perspective is really really important and it's something that I think will grow over the coming years yeah and it's really also one thing that I keep saying as well internal is that all the work that is done in the in the TOC about evaluating the projects and even giving them like a maturity level is extremely helpful for for end users because you know what to expect you know what the criteria is for for the different levels so you can you can already approach a project with some some kind of assurance of what you can expect about it. Personally I'm definitely looking forward to your contribution as a TOC to the entire ecosystem so yeah it's going to be quite exciting. Another question I have maybe to kind of wrap it up since you are a TOC representative and CERN is actually a very big user of cloud native technologies I would like to ask if there is any new projects or new maybe methodologies of kind of practices on the horizon of the cloud native ecosystem that you'd like to use in the future or something which maybe draws your attention or your team's attention in particular is there anything that you would evidence so far? Yeah so I can give my a bit my personal experience but also from what I hear from my colleagues which is maybe also relevant which is one one project that I've been hearing about is open telemetry and how it aims to to offer like a more consistent way to to handle all the observability parts and this is something that is quite important we have a good story for logging in metrics but we probably don't have such a consistent story for tracing so this is something that some of our groups have been focusing on and then personally because I work a lot in this area of distributing workloads across multiple clouds and multiple clusters one project that I've started looking recently is crossplane and I think it's a really it's a nice way to integrate again existing infrastructure or existing services into the same ecosystem and try to make again the API's uniform and well managed in a central place so it's another project I'm kind of excited about as well. Absolutely especially with the crossplane I think there's going to be a dedicated qualitative entry keep going for it so definitely looking forward to that one as well and we have actually a question from Jerma and he's asking are using different public cloud providers to deploy the whole infrastructure there's communication between them so would you be able to elaborate a bit more on that? That's an excellent question so we are mostly on premises or using data centers that are shared with us basically that other institutions make available for us we are investigating the use of public cloud and we've been doing this for quite a while we have several use cases where we try to scale out and we gave a keynote about this where we managed to reproduce the Higgs discovery in just a couple of minutes using public cloud resources in that case Google and we keep pushing in reality what we want is to do like the most with the resources we can access so we will keep pushing for public cloud. The other question regarding communication this is a very very good question and I come again to the fact that we don't have traditional service workloads for most of what we want to scale out we we often say that our workloads are embarrassing parallel because we can just distribute them and they don't need to talk to each other and this allows us to actually distribute them even across different clouds in a much simpler way than if you would have to have like very tight interconnectivity between the different systems so we are able to scale out in this way more easily. This is true for our traditional workloads machine learning workloads are posing new challenges because they often need this sort of communication so we are also investing in understanding more the service mesh area and how it could contribute to our deployments. I just want to mention that keynote at KubeCon that was an amazing keynote I do remember it it was in Barcelona as well and it was a live demo where it used like an amazing amount of compute there like within minutes so I definitely recommend twice that keynote on YouTube. So is there anything that you'd like to maybe evidence or maybe some talks you'd like to recommend for our listeners to go to drink at KubeCon anything that maybe you'd like to leave us last remarks in regards to service and its journey towards cloud native? Yeah, honestly I didn't have time to go into detail into the schedule yet I plan to do it very soon so but I'm sure like the issue is really like to be able to watch all the talks even later it's very hard to find the time to go through all of it. But I think the last message I would put here is that the community around cloud native is having a huge contribution to our mission. I mentioned that yeah we have this mention of doing fundamental research understanding the universe better but this implies a lot of technical challenges including IT challenges and the fact that we can get so much help from the world community on all these institutions that collaborate in cloud native projects it's a huge plus. This changes the way we work compared to like 20 years ago again so I would stress that message that the world community is having a huge impact in ourselves. We try in our work we try to contribute back but what we get is much more. Well I want to say thank you to you Ikada actually because I really admire how much you've contributed in all different ways through being a member of TOC, sharing what CERN is doing and leading the research user group and just being a really warm and welcoming part of our community so thank you for being there. Thank you both as well for for for helping out in all areas. And we actually have a very positive comment from I'm trying to pronounce that name right Aya you but they are mentioning that the end user end user perspective at CERN and the support they've given to the community has been amazing so thank you very much for mentioning that. And with that I think we we kind of getting towards the end of this stream and I would like to thank everyone that attended and pretty much was with us for this first episode of the end user launch and thank you very much Ricardo for being our first guest and Cheryl for co-hosting this as well. And I would like to to mention that if you have again any questions please please ask them in the future streams as well to join us as well. We will try to deliver this every second and first Thursday of the month at 9 a.m. Pacific time. And please do join us at QPCON and CloudNativeCon it is going to be in May, May 4th and 7th and of course we're going to have the co-located events if you want to focus on more targeted technologies or methodologies as well. And if you'd like to join our end user community pretty much this is the community which is vendor neutral and we'd like to showcase your usage of cloud native tools you'll be able to join our end user community and you can find more information on cncf.io slash end user. And thank you for joining us today and hopefully to see you next time.


Hello, welcome to CTN member highlights. I'm Leslie McVane and today I'm at the Portland Public Library with Constituent Service Representative Dan Reardon for Angus King. Hi, good to see you Leslie. I'm Dan Reardon, and I am a constituent service rep for Angus. I'm a retired businessman in the community and I have been working for Angus since he was elected.  The library, I have learned in the last four plus years that libraries are the best community center that you can hope for. I do this at other libraries, but boy the Portland Public Library couldn't be a better place to meet people and to help and to talk with people. It's a nice flow of people from all demographics in the city and beyond the city coming through here on a daily basis. It's lovely to see. It surely is. I was just explaining to somebody else earlier that, you know, we see business people who are going down to go to meetings. We see people that are in groups that are meeting here. We see immigrants. We see people who are staying in the shelters in the neighborhood. There really isn't any constituent that doesn't come through here. It's a welcoming place. So tell me what do you do when you're here, and how often do you do this? Okay, this program is called Your Government, Your Neighborhood. And Angus initiated this when he was elected. And what this is based on is that the senator believes that you shouldn't have to come and find us, that we should be out where you are. Our office is in Scarborough here in southern Maine. And what we've really done here is set up a mini-office. So if you're having a concern with a government agency, well, then I can take that information and begin the process to help you with that. If you need information about services offered by the government, I can do that. If you'd like Angus to have your opinion, I can do that. And so this is really a mini-office. I'm here once a month for two hours. And people feel more comfortable sometimes talking to a person than leaving a message on a phone or writing a letter. You know, one of the things that I found is that people will go by and they'll say, oh, you're from the senator's office. You know, I've been thinking for weeks to send an email to call. But you know, now that I see you here, there's something I'd like you to tell the senator for me. It's sort of like the kitchen table thing, you know? Well, you know, it is. And recently we have found more and more and more people who just want to come in and talk. Okay? You know, and that's been great too. I think the political atmosphere right now is very confusing for people. And to know that there is someone who's actually working for us in Washington, that they can have some dialogue with, a representative, not necessarily the senator himself, but somebody who can give him messages. Absolutely. You know, I've had three people come by today who said that they'd either called or sent emails and they had gotten a response from the Washington office and how pleased they were at that. I was wondering about that as well.  There's a series of ways. Primarily, there's a form here where we can take in detail what an opinion is. And then when I go back to the office this afternoon, I'll enter all that information into the system and send it to the policy person who's responsible for that area. And that way Angus will see what happens and will get an answer from the person who is most knowledgeable about that area. That makes a lot of sense and it goes directly to the area it's supposed to be in instead of floating around somewhere. That's correct, yeah. Now this is something you do other places in the Portland area as well? Yes. In the greater Portland area, I do the YMCA, which is another great place. You see a lot of folks there. Again, across the whole spectrum of people. I do Yarmouth Public Library, which is also interesting there. We have a little different experience. Very often groups of people will come to see us. Again, to talk and give their point of view, but they just feel comfortable doing that there. So those are the key Portland places that I do this. And is this something that Angus has started around the state? Oh yes, yes. We do this all over the state and we've been doing it since the beginning. Now does Angus ever surprise everyone and come to some of these? I haven't had that happen, but you know, an interesting story. The phones have been so busy in the last month that a person I know, they came over to me at some event and they said, you know, I called the Washington office today and the person answered the phone and said, Angus King. And I said, who is this? And he said, this is Angus King. He said, the phones were busy and I thought I should step in. Oh, I love that story. That's a good one. And with all he's doing too right now. But he so much cares what people think, what they say, and he wants to hear that. He's a good listener. It shows. Yeah, and when we had the listening session over Gorsuch and those issues, I think everybody, you know, saw that was what they wanted was a chance to talk. Well, I think this is wonderful. And I wonder a little question before we close. What seems to be the question that you get the most of when you're at these? Is there any one issue that people are concerned about? Well, you know, it's been very interesting this year that it's very hard. I got to ask that question earlier today. There's a lot of change going on. And depending on what is going on at the national level, you know, you might have 30 people come in and ask you about this. And then the next day, you may have 30 people come in and ask about something else because it affects them more directly. So it's day to day. But on any given day when you're here, about how many people do you average coming by to talk? To sit down and talk, I would say at this library, probably eight to 10 people sit down and talk in, you know, people who stop by and or just even walk by and say, I want Angus to know very often 20, 25 people. That's good. How can people find out where you're going to be and when you're going to be there? It's on the Senate website on Angus's Senate website. That's terrific. Well, thank you for doing this thing. Angus for doing this, it's good for us to to have a place we can go and just find out what's happening. Thanks a lot. Thank you.


Good morning everyone. I'm Dr. Pani Bhushan, head of the Department of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at Manipal Hospital, Leshampur. Dear friends, we've been seeing a lot of infections in the last three weeks. Almost every child who goes to the school helping getting annual and community operation departments in the hospitals and nurse opportunities. So I thought I'll just brief a little about what these illnesses are. When should you be worried? When should you go to the hospital? When can you relax and wait? So basically the 90-95% of the infections have been viral respiratory tract infections.  What we have been observing is the fevers are very high-grade. It is lasting about two to three days and by day three to day four the fever seems to be settling down. Which means the fever still stays but the frequency comes down. Which means instead of coming every once in four hours or six hours, now the fever is... Now there's a gap of more than six hours or eight hours in between the fevers. So if your child on day three looks reasonably cheerful than what he or she was on day one, day two, number one. Number two, if the fever frequency has come down, which means the gap between the fevers has increased. You probably can relax a little but the cough what we are saying is the cough tends to stay for about a week, ten days and longer. And most of the cough syrups have not been greatly effective at this point in time. But two things are very important. There are no high-grade fevers accompanying into day three, day four. And two, if there is no breathing difficulty, if your child is comfortably breathing, otherwise looking alert and happy. And cough is the only issue which is no one can happen. You don't have to get too panicky about it. So absence of fever and no breathing difficulty, just light cough, a simple cough syrup would do. This is number one. 90% of them would come into this category. But some children who are known to wheeze can have a little more, what to say, troublesome set of symptoms. Or some children tend to wheeze with viral infections. There is a difference between them. Most children can have wheeze and that doesn't necessarily mean they are asthmatic children. Basically what it means is when there is a bad viral infection, some children have wheezing. And as a result of which they can be breathing difficulty. So a good number of children this particular season have been wheezing along with viral infection too. So such children may need some kind of a nebulization help or some medicine to open up their airways. So if your pediatrician is prescribing some kind of a nebulizer, do not get too anxious about it. The illness is such, usually it's a period of five or seven days and they should get better after that. And as I again said, fever and breathing difficulty should make you comfortable in hospital. Now this is also a seasonal thingy, not meaning to scare you. Just in case if the fever goes into day three, day four and the frequency doesn't seem to be coming down. There is not much of cough and cold. And more importantly, three important things to remember. If your kid looks too tired or there is a bad headache or a bad tummy ache, please come to the hospital. It's important that a pediatrician reviews your child, sees if he or needs a blood test to rule out a possible dengue infection. So fever persisting into day three, day four along with that being too tired. Tiredness is very, very important and classical. A lot of headache goes with the dengue and the tummy ache. If these three things are there into day three, day four of illness, it's always safe to get a pediatrician's review. It could be still a viral infection of a throat but nevertheless it is safer to do so. So we have had viral or respiratory tract infections, then we have had wheezing associated respiratory tract infections and a small number of dengue infections, which is important to be ruled out in the fever, stays on with their day times. Number four, I think a good number of children are also having hand foot and mortises. You may have seen in the television of the WhatsApp groups spreading the message. This is a milder illness. Basically if you see any kind of rashes over the palm and the soaps or sometimes outside in the mouth, it is very characteristic of hand foot and mortises. The good thing about this is it's a very mild illness, very mild rate of fever, but the rashes can linger on for about five days. Some children may have a difficulty in eating because of the rashes inside the mouth. This is not something you need to get very worried about, but the key most important thing you need to remember is do not send your child to the school. This illness is highly infective. You send your kid to the school, everybody else in the class is very likely to pick it up. So the importance of hand foot and mortise, do not send your child to the school and do not get worried at all. It will come down to some kind of anti-histamine syrup or anti-syrup syrup should sort the rashes out and five days come, then you should generally be alright. Usually the infective plate is about a week from the day the kid started having rashes.  So if you remember these things, I think you should be fine. All of this are self-limiting. Only dengue is the one you need to be worried about. So remember that and then if you are trying as a background wheezing tendency, any presence of breathing difficulty, extremely disturbing cough in the night, take a help from your pediatrician. I hope this amount of information helps you for this reason.