We're glad to know you're still there. Like we said, we're going to be looking at the fact that food prices have reason to or had reason to 26.76% in September and that's what we'll be discussing with our guest this morning. Our guest eventually is Mr. Nick Agouli, who is a public affairs analyst. Good morning and welcome to the show, Nick. Good morning and welcome to all of us. Okay, we're looking at the fact that food prices rose to 26.76% in September and this is November, October has passed. We have not had the assessment for October from the National Bureau of Statistics. Does that give you worry or is that a sign to good things to come? Do you have any hope that maybe they will come down? Are there indices that show or suggest that this is just for a time? I think the bottom line is that when something happens, like in this case food prices are rising, that is the symptom. There is a cause, there's a cause to that and until we deal with that cause, we can only be looking at the symptoms and perhaps even try to treat the symptoms. So the question is what are the causes of the rising food prices? And the causes are there for everyone to see, for even our policy makers to see. This is basic economics. They hire the demand for a product or commodity, they hire the price or the lower the supply of a product or commodity, they hire the price. So if you now want the price to fall, you have to reverse that by either increasing the supply and or reducing the demand. Now if we look at the full situation in Nigeria, we cannot reduce the demand because food is an essential commodity. Every human being must eat. If they don't eat, after a while they will be dead. So we can pretty much do nothing about the demand and as Nigeria's population is increasing, so will the demand for food be increasing. So the only thing that we can do in Nigeria about food prices is to increase the supply and to increase the supply, these are the bottlenecks. Number one, domestic supply of food. We mean more food needs to come off our farms. And the challenges with that are one, insecurity. The farmers, most of them have been driven away from their farms by bandits, kidnappers, terrorists, all sorts of marudas. These farmers are now in IDP camps producing no food. Instead, they have added themselves to the demand for food. As they are in the IDP camps, they are not producing food, they still have to eat. Now if government wants to do something about the supply of food, then they have to deal with the insecurity situation so that they can return farmers back to their farms so that they can continue the production of food. The last administration in its eight years did not succeed in doing that. I can't remember in the last eight years of the past administration where there were large-scale returns of farmers to their farms. Now the new administration has come in. About six months ago, there is nothing on the ground to show that the new administration is charting a different trajectory from their predecessors. They have set up programs of returning farmers to their farms, but that has not happened. Instead, we continue to hear every day of killings, kidnappings, and all sorts of insecurity situations. So that is the first aspect. The second aspect for the domestic supply is mechanization. Look at us now. I am sitting in London and speaking to you in Lagos. We are using technology to make that possible. If I were to set out on food to go and meet you in Lagos so that we can have this conversation, it will take the next several years and we will be in Lagos yet. What am I trying to drive at here? Machines and technology help us to do much more. But the farmers in Nigeria have not been given the machines and the technology. So they are still using their physical energies, bending down, as we speak now, farmers in their farms. They are using home and cutlass to bend down and cultivate. It is not going to yield much. If we want the farmers to multiply their farm output, we need to support them with the machines and technology so that a farmer who is currently using their physical energy and is harvesting 3 to 5 bags of rice. If we empower that farmer with machines and technology, that farmer can harvest 500 bags of rice. So imagine how much that is going to do to the supply and even have some to export. So that is on the domestic side. The domestic supply of food is hampered by insecurity and lack of technology and mechanization. Here it does now look at the other side. Because Nigeria is not producing enough food for itself, not to talk about export, we are having to complement that by importation of food. And while we are importing food, we expose ourselves to the foreign exchange dynamics. So the dollar that used to be a 115 naira, moved to about 450 and the advent of the current administration is now over 1000. Even in the so-called official market, the dollar has crossed the 1000 mark. So if we import the bag of rice at say $100, before now it would just be maybe 10,000 naira, 15,000. Today $100 is 100,000 naira for the same bag of rice. The bag of rice cost in terms of dollar has not increased though. What we are seeing is the aging rates. So the same $100 will now be 100,000 to import. And of course the importers are going to transfer that cost into the price that they will send imported food. And this is what is also causing the increase in prices of food. So how do we reverse that? The only way to reverse that is to boost local production. Because when we boost local production, we no longer have the need to be importing food. Instead, as we speak, there will be ship and ship and ship that will come to Nigeria to carry food and export. So that we can even end foreign exchange from that process. So in a nutshell, what I'm saying is that the phenomenon of food price increase can only be resolved if the causes, the causative factors are dealt with. And the causative factors are increased the supply. I mean the causative factors are the supply of food in Nigeria is not enough. And the solution is increase the supply either by domestic dealing with security and giving farmers technology and machines or reducing importation whereby the aging rates is being transferred into the prices of food. Anything short of that, the trade is going to continue. Well, increasing the domestic supply, this present administration just lifted a ban on 43 items, some of which are agricultural items that were restricted from accessing a dollar to import. So which means indirectly the ban on importation of these things have been lifted. Do you think that will translate into having more food? Food like rice for instance can now be imported more easily because effects for that importation has been lifted, the ban on effects of that importation has been lifted. Do you think that is something that will also help in making food available? The ban on importation of some of the food items has been lifted. It can only increase the supply of food at a very high cost because let all be honest with ourselves. I believe that the people in government are smart enough to know that the ban on the importation of these food items didn't mean that the food items were not being imported before. The reason was that we have two foreign exchange markets in Nigeria. We have the so-called official market and we have the parallel market or what people the regulatory say is the black market. The ban meant you cannot go to the official market and look for dollars to bring in those items. That was the import of the ban. But if you were able to source your foreign exchange independently from the parallel market you could have gone to bring those things in. Now lifting the ban meant the importers can approach the central bank and try to get the dollars through the official market so that they can go and bring these things in. The bad news is that the central bank does not have those dollars. Unfortunately for the central bank of Nigeria, the dollar is not an era that they can wake up and start printing. The central bank of Nigeria does not print the dollar. They depend on we earning the dollars before the dollars we come into the conference of the central bank. And the central bank of Nigeria does not have the dollars. That is why they cannot even intervene in the foreign exchange market as they used to do. Because the biggest source of the dollars that we're coming into the conference of the central bank we're coming from crude oil exports. And the NNPC, the government behemoth that is responsible for that has not been bringing the dollars back to the NNPC conference. Because as the oil prices are rising that same NNPC is not refining petroleum products locally. So they are having to use all the monies that they have from crude oil sellers to go and buy crude diesel and all of that and bring it to Nigeria. So this thing is that the central bank is very sure that the central bank governor is a smart man. The minister for finance is smart people. They know that they are just deceiving themselves. I can't even say that they are deceiving themselves because if you leave the bank where will the central bank see the dollar to give to people to go and bring those things in? They don't have it because if they have the dollars they would have cleared the backlog of foreign exchange needs that the central bank, especially for the airlines. You know, the government announced with Euphoria that we have resolved all the issues with UAE and Emirates Airlines we start coming to Nigeria. Has an Emirates aircraft been in Nigeria since? The answer is no. Why? Because the central bank does not have dollars to give to Emirates. The ticket said that they made in Nigeria. The central bank does not have the money to bring into the market in the foreign exchange market as they used to do. So the import of that lifting of the bank is actually zero. It makes no sense because if you go and free from A now that give me dollars, central bank give me dollars. Let me go and import toothpick which is also on that list. They won't have it to give you. If you say okay from A, give me a dollar and import rise. They won't have it to give you. So instead of the government looking at importation it's the government not looking at domestic production of food where we have comparative advantage over any other place.  So the government needs to focus and know what needs to happen and I've already provided the template. Two things they need to sort out. They need to sort out security for the farmers and they need to give the farmers machines so that the farmers will move from manual level to produce food to mechanization because it is that manual level that is a discouraging factor for young men. A young man doesn't see himself that this money will carry a goal and won't stop bending down to cultivate. If you gave him a tractor, I'm telling you he will sit on the tractor and cultivate in ten minutes what it will take him five years to do. That is the essence of technology. In ten minutes a tractor can cultivate what a farmer will need five years of his manual effort to contribute. Anybody can check out those parts. And so if the young people produce so much with tractors then they have so much money to be made from agriculture while we don't want to be doing many jobs in cities and towns. So this is the issue. Go back to the basics and do things from the beginning. You can't come and start fighting food prices when you are not dealing with the costs. Okay, let's just by way of emphasis because you've provided solutions and there's hardly anything that can come that has not been spoken. But the previous government banned forex access because of a lot of things. They wanted the local production to go really high but they seem to have failed. Why do you think they failed to make local production so much to be sufficient for us? Because we actually have the land. We have the manpower. We have everything that we need to be. We have the fertile ground even. But I see no reason why we failed. So what do you think was the reason, the previous administration failed because everything we are experiencing now came as a result of what happened in the last administration. We are lacking food now. It's not because it was not planted this year but because of how it was planted last year and so many other things. So where did they fail and what can this present government do differently that will make sure that we achieve that. They failed for two reasons. Number one, they did not deal with the security situation that the farmers faced. So millions of farmers continue to be in RDP camps. How can they be producing food when they are in RDP camps? The second reason they failed is they did not provide the farmers with the enabling environment to cultivate a lot of food. Farmers are still using their brute energy bending down we go and cut glass. If you give that farmer a tractor that farmer will produce in one year what they would have produced in their lifetime using their brute energy. You already mentioned that we have comparative advantage and it's true. Nigeria has one of the most fertile lands in the world. I have been to a few countries, I can assure you of that. Look, if you are on a flight from Europe on a flight from Europe to Africa we will most likely cross the Mediterranean Sea. As you fly over the Mediterranean Sea and you now come on the African continent if you look down you will see that it's the desert. Total desert, no trees, no water, nothing. Just red soil. That's what you see on the ground. You will fly for about three hours in the air it's just that desert you are seeing. Then, immediately you now come to northern Nigeria. Miraculously, as God has done it for us. That red patch of soil you saw all the way because flushed green land from northern Nigeria down to the Atlantic Ocean. Green land, pure green land where anything you plant will germinate and grow. That's number one. Number two, Nigeria has a perfect climate for agriculture because plants need the sunshine to manufacture their food and grow. Nigeria is assured of at least eight to ten hours of pure sunshine every day. Look, I am here in London now and wish I could have turned my camera for you to see outside. It's not yet bright. Maybe some people don't even understand why the UK shifts their clock. Like now, we are seven o'clock something. Nigeria is eight o'clock something. Last Sunday, they moved the clock back and said UK was at eight o'clock in the morning. UK became seven o'clock but fear they moved the clock physically back. Do you know the reason for that? The reason for that is that we are in winter now and during winter, you don't see the sun much. You don't see the sun. So by seven o'clock, it is still very dark. Very dark. So how can children come out in the dark to go to school? So when there's Nazis here that say, that seven o'clock is Nazis o'clock. So that it gives the children one more hour at home to try and see if there will be daylight before they go to school. How did the reason for that? They are struggling. They can see the sun in the real winter in December by December January. Look, as I am sitting here, the sun will rise from the east and set in the east. The sun will never come across overhead and set in the west. Both people in Europe, they don't see the sun in winter like that. That's why it's cold. It's a lack of sun that makes it very cold. And so plants can't do well again. Actually, that is what Americans call the fall season. What does fall mean? The leaves on plants fall off. But not seeing the sun. In Europe, they call it autumn. Autumn is a season before winter. You will not see any leaves again on trees and plants. For lack of the sun, Nigeria has that sun 8 to 10 hours every day. Imagine what our agriculture will be. You mentioned manpower. You know, Nigeria has a very youthful population ready to work. If you announce a job, they can see now. You will see the number of graduates and young people that are going to apply for that job. How to work? We take support in the agricultural sector. You know, Nigeria has sufficient amount of rainfall. Sufficient amount of rainfall every year. There are nations that have drought. They don't see the rain. You can manufacture the rain. God gives us the rain. Meanwhile, apart from that, I have traveled widely in Nigeria. There is no community in Nigeria that you see that does not have a fresh water river close by. In most communities in Nigeria, you won't travel one kilometer before you see a fresh water river, even if it is extreme. It is the opportunity for agriculture. If the government were serious, the government would be providing a neighboring environment for us to be damming those rivers and streams. Once you dam that river, the mass body of water that we collect, you will get irrigation out of it. That means you'll be able to farm all year round. That means you'll be able to farm. So a farmer that is currently producing rice once a year can produce rice twice or three times a year. Plant, grow, harvest, three times with irrigation. You will have fishing. You will have pipe or water. You will have hydroelectricity. And you will have tourism. But simply damming a river. So you ask yourself, all the local government chairmen that we have, they come and stay for many years. Governors come, drive sari up and down. They are not rolling up their sleeves to do the real hard work. If governments were damming their rivers by now, almost all the states in Nigeria would have dam all their rivers. And you can only see how much agriculture that is going to support with machines and everything. So it's not going to be a miracle. If we don't deal with the causative factors that are making full supply in Nigeria to be short, the price will never come down. It's not about miracle. Even if you like, we can set up churches on every street and have mugs in every corner. The price of food will never come down unless we go and do the basics. That's just the bottom line. Okay. When you were talking about fertile ground, I was just thinking about some things. When I was in school at one point, I took a yam from my farm to the school to sell. And the people did not buy it. After two weeks, I found out that they thought that was a human being or something, or maybe I had used some rituals to make it grow that big. Because in my village, you can have yams actually as tall as my chest level and almost as fat as a five or seven-year-old child. So I'm thinking about how this can be used to our advantage. The fertile land. But yet, we don't find any enabling environment as you put it. Now, let me just ask you this question. We are wrapping up, so be very brief about it. You talked about insecurity as one of the reasons why we couldn't get the things right last administration or last year, not just last year, but in the last administration of eight years. That's one of the biggest reasons why we couldn't get everything, last administration is trying to tackle insecurity. And I've gone ahead to even have a supplementary budget for 2023 so that they can cover a lot of things and chief among those things is security. So they're going to buy more firepower and so many other things to fight security. Do you think that will help more firepower, bigger firepower, better firepower will help us fight insecurity? So let me just talk about that yam thing. Now I'm from Benway State. In Benway, we make heaps first. We make heaps before planting yam. Same as my community. Yeah, but I went to school in Benin. I went to University of Benin. When I arrived in Benin, to my shock, it was one of the cultural shock that I had. They don't make heaps in Benin or in those things. They just plant yam in the ground. Plant them, open the ground and put the yam inside. Imagine. So when they put the yam in the ground, they just put stakes and then the yam continues to grow on those stakes. By the time they have this yam, you will not believe that the yams are even bigger than the world. We use heaps. That is the opportunity that Nigeria has. Now talking about security, let us not forget for the past how many years are predating, predating especially Opus and Joe government. The security is being given the highest budget allocation year in year out. Go and check out the budget numbers. Security takes the highest chunk of the budget. In fact, it is the budget allocation to security that makes budget allocation to other critical sectors like education, healthcare, infrastructure to be small. Go and check it. How has been happening to that project? Go. There is grand corruption. I am not accusing anybody of anything. The details are there. The details are there. In fact, I was listening to a video. I was listening to a video two days ago of a Major General in the Army. This man was the Managing Director of Army Properties. Either Army Properties or Army Holdings. In fact, in his good matchup. This man, we carry 1.7 million dollars of Army money and put in his personal account. I am not making it up. The video is there. The Army people are in their uniform trying their colleague. We know how the Buhari government just started a small probe and we saw the feat that was coming out of Defense Equators and the other tri-services. So, it is not about budgetary allocation. The government can, if they like, they can transfer the entirety of Nigeria's budget and give to the security architecture in Nigeria. But if they don't enforce it to ensure that the monies are committed to what they should be used for, there is not going to be any difference. So for us, I don't think it's about budgetary allocation. It's just about the commander-in-chief living up to his responsibility and duties and the budgetary allocations made to security are actually used for security. We saw situations in the past where even the military, they were going to buy a helicopter. You bought a helicopter of this model. You went and bought a rotor of a different model and they take the money. So, if the Chinese government wants to show a clear or remarkable departure from his predecessors, let him just ensure that the real allocation for security is being used for security. Is that going to happen all the time with that? All the time with that. We'd like to thank you, Nika Gule, for coming on the show this morning and helping us make sense of what is going on. It's always a pleasure having you on our show. Thank you for your time. Thank you and have a nice day. Happy new month, by the way. Same to you. A public affairs commentator. It was talking to us from the UK and this is where eventually we wrap it up on the show this morning. We hope to connect with you again tomorrow for another edition of The Breakfast. In the meantime, on behalf of the entire team, my name is Nyaam Gule at Gadji, saying thank you for being there.


My preference is bleach gel or these bleach gel pens, which are even thicker than your standard bleach gel. I love them. They're great for writing designs and bleaching out designs in dark fabric. You can write words and all kinds of stuff. In this case, I've just crinkled up the leggings and I'm just putting a bunch of the bleach gel on there and I'm squishing it around and pushing it around. I've got gloves on my hands. Make sure you're in a well ventilated area and make sure that you have gloves on and that you maybe even have eye protection on this is not something for kids. Once you have them bleached out as much as you want to have them bleached out, then you need to machine wash and dry them and get all the bleach off before you do the next step. So they're all dried and cleaned now and I showed you the whole repair. So now we're gonna get going and turning these into galaxy pants. So the first thing I did was put an apron on and I've got some stenciling and stippling brushes off to the side and some of our DecoArt So Soft Fabric Paint, which I just love and some different colors of blues, purples, pinks, and of course white. I do get a blackout also. I will have the list of the colors in the description below. I use the patterns and shapes in the pants that were created by the bleach to guide me in creating the galaxy design as I'm painting. I start with my lightest color other than white, which is a blue, and I dip my stenciling brush in the paint and then use a swirling and scrubbing motion to add the color to the pants and as you see, I occasionally dip the brush in water to just thin it up a little bit and help with the scrubbing and blending of the colors on the paint and I'm just doing this swirling and scrubbing blending of the colors and I am starting with the lightest color, working my way out to the darkest one, which is the dark purple and then I go back and add touches of the lighter purple and a little bit of the pink and then some more of the lightest blue and I work my way around the pants. I also add some black in where I think I've gotten too much color or maybe there's a bleach spot in a place that I don't want a bleach spot, like we're in the middle of the crotch. So we're going to we're going to add some black to that and it helps with the galaxy design. Then you can already see by watering down the paint a little bit and scrubbing it in that you can see the bleach stains through the paint and it adds to the galaxy effect of the design on the pants. And I really you can do this with any color scheme. You need probably at least five colors. I use generally use somewhere between four and six. I prefer the blues, purples and pinks, but you of course could do this. Maybe your favorite colors are greens and yellows. You definitely could do that and just work your way around the pants, adding color. And so you get a design you really like working on the front, getting the whole front done and then turning the pants over and doing the back. I don't wait for anything to dry at this moment. I just go ahead and keep painting and painting and scrubbing. And I alternate between doing it, standing and sitting down because it actually did take quite a few minutes to get the pants looking the way I wanted. And I've sped it up for you guys here and cut out quite a few things. But my I'm not as young as I used to be. My back started to hurt. And I did a few of these galaxy projects, all of which are coming up. So anyway, I did use the colors of Indian turquoise, black, white, ocean blue. Again, these will be in the description below. Dark rose, lavender, dioxazine purple and Mediterranean blue. And those are the colors I had now. I've done enough of these galaxy projects. I actually I think I need to place another order with decor. So here we are working on the back of the pants and or I'm sorry, we're still on the front of the pants. Here I am adding the black. So I've decided there's a little too much color.  So I'm scrubbing in some of the black the same way I did the colors. And there you can see me adding it to the crotch of the pants because I just decided that does not need to be bright blue and pink. So I'm scrubbing it in in a few places and blending it out by getting the brush wet, just using a very little bit of paint. We're not, you know, talking about having globs of paint on the brush with any of these colors. You do want to make the pants maybe a little bit brighter than you normally would want them to be, because when you do cure the so soft fabric paint and wash the garment for the first time, you will lose a bit of that vibrancy. So you want to make sure there may be a little brighter than you want the finished product to be.  And that's so I can continue the colors around the side of the leg. And I don't end up with an obvious line down the inside, the outside of the leg. And I do the same thing with the inside of the leg. And I just bring the same colors around that I see poking out from the front. And I start scrubbing them in the same way I did in the front on the back.   I just think that might not be super attractive. If that's what you want, cool, whatever floats your boat. I'm not one to judge, certainly. I'm certainly no fashion maven, but you just might want to think twice about it, maybe. So I'm using all the same colors I used on the back and I'm scrubbing them in. I am grabbing water. I did decide to have a separate brush for the black. Then I do the colors. I decided that that was a bit smarter because I kept having to clean off my brush and that wasn't working for me. But I am going to add some black in also. And I get these base swirly, scrubby bits of color in and get them perfected before I do anything else. So I spend a lot of time doing essentially what's the background to our galaxy? Recreating the nebulas and the interesting background to our stars, which is what's gonna really make it pop. So spend a little time with this. Don't cover up all the bleaching because the bleaching helps you suggest your galaxy and that not only gives you a starting point for the painting patterns, but it helps you suggest the finished product when you get done with this part and you start adding the stars in. Here we go. We've got some white paint. I've got some smaller brushes and I thinned it down with a little bit of water and then I'm just splattering it on the pants. I just got the brush wet with paint and I just shook it out over the pants. And then I take a smaller brush and I take some of the same paint and I paint streaks on that I blend out part of to create sort of a misty foggy element to our nebulas. And you can see a better shot there. I take some of those large splatters sometimes and I will blend them out and I do the same thing I did before. I'll just grab some water if I need it but the white paints are already kind of watered down and this just really, as I'm doing this as you can see, the galaxy really starts to pop. You start to add that kind of foggy, misty element to your galaxy, to your nebulas and it really starts to make it come to life. And I do this first with white and then I decide when I go back if it needs to have the same thing kind of done with one of the colors from the pants. Mostly I do this with white but you will see me in a minute here. I blend out some of it and then I add some more splatters and then I go down to the legs. You will see me in a minute here also go in with some of the colors and I will go in with sometimes with the pink or the blue and I'll do a little bit of it with the colors too and I've done so many galaxies. I think I did it on the pants but I guess we'll find out in a minute here. So I just splatter it on and then if I get some of the splatters that I don't think look very star-like then I just blend them out like you see me doing and it adds that misty, foggy quality to our galaxy that makes it look like a galaxy, makes it look dimensional and makes it look a little more realistic. Not that I ever really shoot for lots of realism or anything because I don't. And if you get too much white don't forget you've got the black fabric paint so you can always go back in and add black or one of the colors and just really layer it up and add lots of layers and like I said make it a little brighter than you think you probably want it to be because I think you'll be happier once it's washed and dried if you do. Maybe I don't add colors to this one. I know in one of the pieces I did I actually did the white and then I went in and did it the same thing with I think pink or blue and it really turned out fabulous. Really just have fun and do some experimenting with this.   So I do believe that I do something about that because that's just not gonna work right there in the middle of my rear end but you'll see I just, this is sped up two times. So the whole process took me about an hour to get painted but it was a lot of fun to do and then you have to let the paint, now see there you see me covering up sort of some splotches that were not a good shape. You have to let the pants dry for 48 to 72 hours before you wash them. So there the pants are finished and dry. I really like the way they turned out so have some fun with it, enjoy the process and don't forget the most important thing.  Have fun painting some galaxies on fabric and I'll see you later.


We found five common mistakes that we're seeing at all levels, all across the board. And we're going to talk about it in this video, so check it out. Hey everybody, it's Eric Johnson from Airtate Throws Nation, and in this video, what we're going to talk about are the top five glide killing mistakes that we saw over and over again in 2019. So we're going to go from reverse, we'll go from five to number one. Number five is rotating through the finish. The glide is a linear beast, and you need to be able to open, pull this down, and you see this, and this is again why you see gliders finishing kind of like that, and they don't rotate out. So many young gliders will see kind of rotating with a high elbow, trying to come down, and they're finishing like this, so you see that there's this motion. So if you're seeing yourself, or if you're a coach, and you see your athletes kind of coming out of the glide, or they're coming out like this, and then trying to come down, that pull away is going to prevent that, and that's also going to lead to challenging reversing. So if you're seeing that rotational style finish, it's definitely worthwhile playing with the rotational shot. Check out our free mini course down below, and if you're interested, jump into the program, and we go through how to solve these problems step by step. Number four that was the most common thing is landing in the power position with the hips back, and so that's going to have to do with other things that are setting up inside of your chain reaction, your sequence, your actions that set up the reaction of the power position. And so what we're seeing is when the throwers come out of their glide, and they're pulling, their hips are back here. So they're landing in this position, and then what you're getting is they can't get the hips into the throw.  So when they come out, and you're kicking across, and they're landing back here, so that's heel down and hips back, that was one of the most common things we see. So teaching the athlete how to get the hip underneath the shoulder was a really important variable. So the number three thing that we saw most often was the kick leg path. And what we would see is as people set up, they were pulling in, and they would pull it up too far, and then kick it too high. And so what would happen is as they would come down and they kick, you're getting kind of a hop up, and the kick legs kind of doing this, and it's leading to this, which is also going to be one of those contributors to landing with those hips back. And then you're seeing athletes, and then they're kind of cartwheeling into the finish. But the kick leg path, when they're pulling it in, it shouldn't be pulled up too far, and it should be kicking kind of straight out to the board is what we teach. We don't want it to kind of go like this. We want it to go boom into the board, which is going to help pull the delivery leg into the right position as well. So the path of the kick leg is super important, and one of the quick fixes is avoiding pulling it up too far, or avoid, you know, this type of thing. This leads to this number two on our list of five most common killers is being kick leg dominant and not using the drive leg. So one of the common things we've seen with our athletes is we'll see athletes pulling in, and they're just trying to be kick. And so then they kind of roll off. What the sequence is, is what we teach. This is our pillar two, three in the glide. We would load this leg, have this kick leg in the right path, drive and extend. Drive and kick.  Double extension. We call it triple extension because we want to stay back and separate it. And so we're going to wind up in that position. So you've got to remember that the glide is initiated with the drive leg, and that's this leg. So it's here.  And the number one mistake that we saw year in, year out, not just 2019, at every single track meet in the country, at any given level, you will see the following. It is an improper setup, which again is the wrong chain reaction. The key is to set up everything on balance is that pillar one. And so the biggest mistake we see is instead of seeing athletes get themselves aligned, creating separation and setting up their path of the glide and getting over and getting the shot put outside the circle, the thing that we're seeing is that so many kids will stand up, stand square, and bend over. And now the shot put is basically on top of the ring. The things are here. So when they put their leg and they pull in, they're already kind of falling. And then they wind up getting into this position, which they go too high. You're going to notice I can't really pull my kick leg under me. I can, if I'm in the right position and I'm here, I can pull the kick leg into the power position. And that's all due to the alignment and that simple fix of not bending here and understanding how we set up and we initiate and create a hinge and a load so we can get our drive, drop, go. So again, in our system, setting up separation and setting up the trigger, loading and coiling, dropping and sliding, driving kick, dropping and getting our power. Those are the things. So again, if you'd like to learn more about how to throw the glide and how to avoid a lot of these mistakes, and if you're looking at this video, you've probably seen a lot of these mistakes yourself or maybe you're doing them. And that's what we're trying to get you to understand. You don't want to be doing these things. Grab a free mini course. And if you really want to dive deep, go in, become a member and we go through this step by step on how to solve all of these problems. The throws are very technically complex, but again, when you understand what you need to do, it's so much easier to train. It becomes very simple. And then the process is learning to train your body to do it right. And if you're focusing on the right things every single day, you get better that much faster. Hey, thanks so much for watching. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. Be sure to give that subscribe button a little punch. Turn on the notifications. Have any comments. Be sure to list them below. Thanks so much for watching and we will see you on the next video. So item number five, the thing that we saw the most common is that when people start to rotate and learn the shot, they wind the shot.


I guess it's good afternoon now. Thanks for joining us. My name's Melissa Chapman. I'm the product owner for Cloud Foundry at T-Mobile. Today, Brenda and I are gonna just talk a little bit about our journey from deployment to our first production app, and we've got 30 minutes. So we will try to get through the slides as fast as we can. We thought we had more time. My name's Brenda Day. I'm one of our Cloud Foundry platform architects at T-Mobile. Been working with Cloud Foundry about five years or so in production, only a little over a year. Previously open source, but switched over to Pivotal in the last couple years. So we'll kick it off. So T-Mobile had some issues with our deployments. It was really, I'm sure some of you have seen long deployments. We were taking seven months and 72 steps to get new code out the door. That was everything from development to getting servers, networking, maybe storage, firewall rules, load balancing, DNS. All these things together resulted in a very long time to actually get code to production. And this was the same problem again when we tried to scale this application up. So a few times a year we had big promos, Black Friday, the whole holiday retail season. And then also we have a Father's Day or other promos like that. And trying to scale up to meet demand for those meant we had to start planning pretty much as soon as the previous one was over. So we're always trying to scale up infrastructure, always trying to expand our applications, and then we can't scale down quickly enough. Finally, the environment configuration and stability. Some people have great stories around config management. We don't have a great story around it for applications. And so it resulted in development, test, and production servers that were all very different from each other. And that made it very complex to do deployment sometimes because what worked in development did not work in production. And so we have to make changes last minute, shoot from the hip, and that results in either further configuration drift. It's harder to account for later on. So we found Cloud Foundry. We had a development VP who sat in the room with Pivotal for a good eight hours or so, which is a pretty good show of faith in someone's product that you're willing to spend that much time as a VP. So he immediately was sold on the concept of microservices. He wanted to go down that route since previously we had a lot of large Java modelists. So along with that, shifting over to DevOps. We talk a lot about DevOps, but we hadn't really been practicing it very much yet. We were all very much separate development, test, and production teams. So with Cloud Foundry we've been working to move towards a more formalized DevOps model where we actually put these teams together and they are wholly responsible for owning and developing and operating these different services they're developing. Consistency is a no-brainer. It's very easy to get a ephemeral container to be consistent with another ephemeral container that you push in the same way. The concept of fail fast, fix fast. It's hard to take on risk if you take 72 months to get something out the door. So by allowing us to move more quickly, we're able to try things out that we might not try otherwise and we're able to recover from that risk just as quickly. And of course, the elasticity we need, the scaling. You know, the principles of the cloud is the rapid elasticity. And so being able to get code out the door more quickly and being able to scale these applications up and down to meet demand, even sometimes daily, which we're doing with some of our apps, has been a huge help to us for Cloud Foundry. We talked about open source versus Pivotal. T-Mobile likes to have a neck to choke. And so we have some Pivotal guys in the room here. You are all our necks that we can choke. Just having that expert guidance and support from Pivotal where we can call somebody on the phone was really a big benefit to us. In addition, we are primarily platform operations team coming from a UNIX ops background historically. We're not developers. We can't begin to suggest the best ways to architect your apps to be cloud native. So having Pivotal with us allows us to have these application architects that we can bring on and talk to our app teams and help them build better applications. And finally, you know, Cloud Foundry was sort of an experiment when we first started out. It was not going to be the standard going forward. And so to hire people that were developing the open source components that are actually very experienced in this is a big effort. Whereas if we get a vendor in there, if we don't like them after a couple years, it's much easier to get rid of those resources than having full-time employees. We did face some problems. Every company has people, process, and technology that makes up the core of their IT. We'll focus on each one of these. Technology is one of our biggest ones to begin with. So we really are developed around, you know, the stateful applications, stateful servers, large Java monoliths, and all of our infrastructure and setup was designed around this. So because of this, we had some challenges that we had to overcome. First one was our networking layout. We have a situation where a layer two network cannot exist on more than one switch pair. This means our fault domain is basically a single rack or a single switch pair, which for Cloud Foundry was not great. So what we have is a bunch of separate networks for each one of our AZs. And this caused some problems for PCF. It was not set up to support these multi-subnet networkings from the start. And so we had to figure out ways to work around that. We also had no on-premise S3 object storage. We weren't allowed to use the Cloud for various political reasons. So we had to find something on-prem that would work for us. There was an option to use a built-in NFS server from PCF, but that was a single instance, not highly available, so immediately that did not meet our needs. We wanted to run that RabbitMQ and MySQL, but the tiles are multi-tenant single clusters, which for a large production environment is not great. You have a bad neighbor who's producing a lot more messages, not consuming them. You can take down a whole cluster. Database the same way. Someone that doesn't have good database queries or that floods your DB with stuff they really should not be can really destroy your whole cluster. And finally, we have multiple data centers. We have multiple foundations, but we don't have control as a platform team over the global load balancing that we need in order to distribute load across these. So without being able to control this and automate it, we had to figure out solutions to this as well. So we know we needed MySQL and RabbitMQ. We did this to support Spring Cloud Services, which was a requirement for our platform. But these tiles did not support the multi-tenant networks we had. We had to actually crack open the tiles, use the Bosch releases from them, and deploy them manually with Bosch, which of course supports multi-tenants. And PCF has since been updated to support all of this. At the time, though, we had to deploy all these things manually really just to support Spring Cloud Services. For on-prem S3 object storage, we used LeoFS, which is an open source tool. We've since moved on from that. But at the time, we created the Bosch release for LeoFS, got that running across all three AZs, and got a highly available S3 object storage on-prem that we could use for our Blob Store for PCF. We did not offer RabbitMQ and MySQL at launch for actual production workloads. It was used for Spring Cloud Services, for histricks, and things like that, but it was not used for production messaging or for production databases. We said, you guys are on your own for databases. You have legacy teams you can use for databases or for messaging, and so you have to use those external services for now until we can figure out a good solution.  You can push your apps to both locations. You can set up your global load balancing requests. We can't do any kind of wildcard on this because you're not going to have health checks that you need it. So really, you guys are on your own for that portion of it. We'll work on solutions later on. I'll also mention these slides are all available on the schedule, so don't worry about taking pictures of them if you want to see all those or follow along. Process is one of our biggest challenges we had to face. Every company has a lot of process. The older the company, the more process. This grows organically over the course of the company's life. It never really starts out. The way it ends up getting back to business requirements, we really focused on that pretty heavily. So compliance, we probably have some compliance guys in the room, that was a big hurdle for us. This did not fit into any of our existing paradigms. And so we had to really work with the teams on all of this. Initially, we had some trouble getting enough traction with these teams. They basically said, nope, it doesn't fit. We're not going to do this. So by getting cross-organizational sponsorship from security, from development, and from operations, we're able to break through those walls and say, it doesn't matter. This does not fit in right now. This is a requirement. It's going to happen. All of our leadership wants this to happen. So let's figure out a way we can make this work that we're all happy with. Compromise on both sides, but really it was the executive sponsorship really made people come to the table and work with us to fix these problems. Wildcard certificate configuration. I talked to a few other big enterprise shops about this. It's a problem that a lot of people don't want to deal with. We said, wildcard certs are perfectly safe. You can use these things safely. Google has one on star.google.com. If they're able to do this safely, why can't we do this safely for something much further down the line from teammobile.com? So we had a lot of pushback on this. We had a lot of conversations back and forth. Eventually, we just said, this is a hard requirement. Let's figure out what's going to make this work. We cannot function without having this wildcard cert. They wanted us to have app-specific certs or environment-specific certs. And it was really just a non-starter because our network can lay out. We could not move quickly enough if we had to get a cert for every app. It would result in, yes, you're on the platform, but you can't use a cert yet for another four to six weeks while we get the cert. We install on our load balancers. We can figure our go-wetters properly. It just was a total non-starter for us. And then finally, we have some resources people need. Pipelines, access to source control, access to an artifact repository. We don't control these resources. Or we didn't at the start. And it'd not be able to get these things when somebody needs them. Resulted in a kind of slow start for our customers. We can say, we bring you in here. You should pipeline your deployments. And they say, how do I pipeline my deployments? And we have to say, oh, go talk to that team over there. Hopefully help you out in a period of time. And those teams have come to the table as well and worked with us to figure out how we can control those resources, which we figured out is the only solution to this problem. If you want your customers to have a good experience and someone else is not giving that, you have to take control of that. And you have to own that yourself and make sure that you own that whole customer experience from your platform to your data services to the kind of add-on services like source control and pipelines. Finally, we had people. This is always a fun one at companies. You have some people that are eager and happy to get involved and some people that are a little bit slower to adapt and they think that the future is very bleak and they're not gonna have jobs in the future. So the biggest issue we saw initially, the whole DevOps culture not being practiced. We had some app teams and some developers who we said, let's start this process. Let's do a dojo with Pivotal. And you guys will sit with Pivotal for four to six weeks while you work on your app. And they all said, we can't do that. We don't have enough time for that. We have other priorities. We have other things to do. Furthermore, they'd say, all right, we'll develop our app. You guys test it and you guys over there run it. And it was like, this is not really the whole goal. You guys all own this together. So the first dojo is really set the stage for all that and allowed people to understand the point of this, why it will make their lives better overall and how they aren't dependent on someone else external to them to test or to run their application. It's a total ownership they all have to face and they're all responsible for the code they develop, how they test it and how they run it. So by making them all responsible for that, it was the best way for us to get them to understand what DevOps truly means and how it's not just, we put a few ops guys on a dev team and they told them what not to do. A lot of things around automation, we have people say, you can't possibly automate my job, but what would I do or my job's too complex? And that's something we faced a lot of, you know, our traditional infrastructure teams focused on load balancing requests or cert requests or DNS, we say your job for this platform is done from the start. You give us a wildcard cert, a wildcard DNS record and a very simple load balancer pool. After that, you guys don't do anything else. And so some people fear that and they say, you know, how am I going to function if I don't have these jobs anymore? And we just basically said, you know, this frees you up from doing the mundane, day-to-day repetitive work and gets you to focus on your higher level architecture, how you can work with us to automate these things even quicker so you don't have to do these tasks ever again. A lot of people get on board with that very quickly. Like we were paying our, some of our database administrators to install Oracle or SQL by hand through a GUI. And for someone making six figures, it just doesn't make sense to pace one to do that. They should be optimizing queries and, you know, actually doing the stuff. They became a DBA, reasons why they became a DBA. And so we got them to shift their mindset of, like your job security is not your job functions. It's, you know, your ability to do these higher level functions and to maintain automation instead of just focusing on what you do right now. So the whole cloud data thing was a problem for some of our developers. They were developing very stateful apps on stateful servers. So even things like, you know, how do I share files between instances or how do I, you know, recover my logs after my instance crashes? And we had to teach them, this stuff is not stuff you should care about anymore. Develop your stuff to be cloud native. The platform will help you out along ways towards doing these things. So it's been a bit of a challenge. We still have some developers who say things like, can you please mount some NFS points on all my containers inside PCF? And we're like, no, that's not, that's not what you should be doing at all. There's different ways to do this. You can look at external object storage for this. It's a different way of doing things, but it's been a little bit slow to start. What we've been doing is hosting PCF 101 sessions. This is basically a full day session where we do lectures and labs in the morning. We talk about cloud native apps and what it means and what it is. How PCF is built or how CF in general is built, how all these components work together. And then the afternoon's all lab sessions. They get their hands on it. They get to push apps, scale apps, bind services, log apps. And they're able to see pretty quickly, you know, the stuff I used to care about is not a concern for me anymore. And every time it starts out, we'll have a few people in the room who say, you know, well, how do I control my load balancers? How do I change DNS records? How do I, you know, get pseudo access to the server? And we say, this is not anything you should worry about anymore. Here's why you'll see it later today, but it really, it's kind of an eye-opening experience. And some of our biggest critics from the start become our biggest proponents later on and they're able to see the light and start telling other people how great this stuff is and how easy it has made their lives.  We should we change that text in the slide, but I mean, honestly, like everyone faces it. Everyone's got to deal with it. People don't want to do what you think is their job. They don't think it's their job. It's just the back and forth. And we just kept on going back to that sponsorship.  They said it's a priority. So let's figure out how we can make it work instead of trying to be a roadblock to it. Melissa will talk about our first application launch. Yeah, so as Brendan mentioned, so, you know, kudos to Pivotal and their dojos. I don't know if the other companies offer them, but hands down, we would not be where we are today without them, so I'll give them some good plugs. So we mentioned earlier that, you know, so this, we had this huge monolithic application and we were, you know, Pivotal came in and we're trying to find an application and which one do we build. So we happened to find a very, very good dev team that was motivated, knew Cloud Foundry, knew what microservices were, so it helped that we started with a very smart team. The second piece of it was, is it was a huge application. We call it the middleware for our middleware. It was just, it was very convoluted and had thousands of calls and it was kind of crazy. So we said, okay, we're gonna pick one and we're gonna pick a low impact call, but that has big volume. So it was 12 million, so anywhere between two and a half to 12 million transactions a day, roughly running through there. So we, I'm going off the slide here. So we said, okay, that's good. So it's get usage. So whatever you do on your mobile phone, if you wanna check how many data you've used through your phone, through the website and I believe through our RBR system, you went through this call. So it was low impact. If it didn't work for a few seconds, you would probably hit refresh and it would be okay. So we ran it through. If they were to do this previously with our traditional infrastructure, it would literally probably take them seven months and they would end up buying, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 VMs just for a promotion and it would take forever to get it. With this, it was, I don't know, a day or so. It was nothing for them. So plan was rebuild it on spring. So we talked a lot about refactor versus just lift and shift and so I'll say that we did a little combination of both. For the most part, it was a lift and shift. They just had to refactor a handful of pieces to make it work. So big bugs happen, right? Outages happen and we are very shy, especially in the operations world to, I don't know, tell people that things like this happen. So this app had been running, I don't know, for probably a week and a half, two weeks or so and they had auto scaling turned on and they kept noticing that apps were auto scaling for no reason. It would crash and it would spin up and it would crash and it would spin up and it was no big deal. There was no outage. There was no impact, no customers noticed it. The architect happened to be in there looking at logs and went, I think we have a bug. What's going on here? So he literally started digging through code, they found the bug, they fixed it and rolled it through all of their environments in one day, zero impact. So their VP actually sent a mail up to our CIO and said, hey, just so you know, we know we don't celebrate outages but look what we just did. That was a huge turning point for us. Since that day, our CIO went, he pretty much went all in and said, this is where we're going, this is our future. We now have pretty much 100% of the traffic in PCF taking about 40 million calls a day. So that's pretty fantastic. And then just like I said, happy, happy, happy. There's no more, T-Mobile used to have, well and still does for our traditional apps, huge release weekends. I mean, people come in on Friday night, we get pizza and dinner and the whole nine yards and they're pretty much there all weekend. Well, we're not, we don't. We release on Tuesday, we release on Wednesday. You name it. They typically don't do releases on Saturday because nobody's there. And we do have a test store now that we can test with. That's actually only open Monday through Friday so it's even better. So it's been good. And we started our platform Dojo around May of last year just before CF Summit of last year. We finished up, we launched our platform live to production I guess around early July. Yeah. Around July 1st. So by August, around August 5th or so, actually during the spring one platform conference last year, they shifted 100% of the traffic over to PCF. So within four weeks of us going live, they already moved their entire app over there and we're taking all the traffic inside of PCF. And they did it from spring one. We were all down there and they launched their product on our platform while we were all at a conference. Yeah. So very good velocity from them. They've since been moving as fast as they possibly can, taking all the apps they can, either doing a lift and shift or splitting into microservices and it's worked very well for them. So looking at our platform adoption, we have the August there is when we started getting good metrics around our number of AIs. By February, we had starting to ramp up quite a bit. We had about 1,000 AIs running on our platform. Our CIO said this is the way forward. We're going to move to microservices for anything new going forward. Any apps that we're going to be using for a long time, let's start to refactor those and break those into microservices and run those on PCF. So the so-called microservice mandate that really sped up our adoption. Just about two months after that, we doubled our AIs on the 2,000. We actually had to, due to some compliance concerns, we set up automated provisioning of permissions to our platform. So having org manager was a security risk for our corporate security team. So what we actually did is use a tool called CF management written by one of the pivotal guys that allows you to use a Git repo as a source for your permissions for your orgs. So by doing this, we can leverage all the existing stuff you have in source control like pull requests, permissions. It's very easy to see who approved something when they approved it, what they changed, who actually changed it. And then this is applied through a pipeline to our foundations itself. So doing that allowed people to move very quickly instead of us having to help them out with permissions. They do it all themselves through PRs or through direct commits to the source control. And it made them go very quickly. Within just about a month after that, we're already at 3,000 AIs. And at that point, we had our users themselves selling the platform for us. They were telling their other users about the platform, helping them with problems, helping them on board. Really, all the teams involved started moving this ahead for us. I think we're over 4,500 now, just about a month later, and growing very quickly. We've got nine foundations right now, two of which are for a sensitive data or PCI socks environment, one for non-production, the rest are all production in one sense or another. So it's been moving very quickly and really has been very rapid adoption for us. So in terms of what matters to us, the biggest difference that we had, executive sponsorship for us was absolutely critical. Without that, we could not have gotten anywhere that we needed to be. We would not have gotten the collaboration from other teams and we would not have been able to break down walls between organizations that typically prevent us from doing things like this. Fight for what matters. The wildcard search, for example, this, we probably could have made it work without wildcard search and figured out more app-specific search or something else like that, but it would not have been the right decision. So picking your battles, figuring out what truly matters, what you need to ensure your success was very important for us and you just got to put your foot down and say we can't do this any other way. We have to make this happen. Let's figure out how we can compromise and make sure that we're all happy with this approach and whatever else it might be. You have to pay attention to that stuff. Branded and Sales, Melissa's our product owner and also our number one salesman. She'll find anyone who has an application and get them excited about PCF. So by having a consistent message that she delivers, we find people who like it and we say, please talk to Melissa. She can help get you on boarded, help get you guys started. She gets them rolled into our PCF 101 sessions so they are on the same page as we are and that's been very important for us. A lot of big enterprises will say the same thing. A consistent message to all of your users and figuring out the way to address them all the same way really goes a long ways. Slack has really been invaluable for us. It's the way we communicate with all of our customers. They'll say, do you have a DL you can use to email all your users? We say, no, just get on Slack, join our Cloud Foundry channel. We have 300 or 400 users in there who are from T-Mobile that are all actively using our platform. So we communicate to them that way. We talk about any kind of outages or upgrades we might be facing. People will post questions and either we will answer or somebody else will answer. We have a chat bot running there that will take in tickets, help with org requests, things like that. So it's been kind of our central clearing house for all of our customers. Then we also use it personally for our stand-ups. We use it for all of our monitoring. We use Datadog for monitoring. So all of our alerts go directly to Slack. See a history of everything. We can see everything going on there. It's been great for us to use Slack. Control your own destiny. Our comms guy picked the picture, but it seems pretty fitting. Like I said, the stuff that you need to be successful, for us, control and access to Git. We had an incident caused by a config server repo running on a Git server that was not highly available. This Git server goes down and config server can't pull its properties. The application can't restart or scale or stage up and it caused an application impact for those people. So we decided right then and there, we can't trust someone external to our team to run this because they were a development team historically. They weren't running this Git server for production. So we had to work with them to figure out the best architecture to use for Git because we saw it as being totally critical path for us. If we use it for config server and it's down, we're gonna have issues. And finally, monitor everything you care about.   Even using it to control a status page built with cache where we have our Datadog alerts drive the statuses on cache through some Python scripts. So really by looking at every single component, making sure we know what's going on, it helps us figure out what went wrong later on or what's gonna go wrong in the future when we're not able to see stuff we manage directly, like the infrastructure. So monitoring the stuff we care about and we tell our app teams the same thing. If you depend on your config server for your properties, monitor a config server. Make sure it's up before you do anything. You can check the health of that. It's very easy to figure out a glance if your config server is working, it's already built in. I would just say, I would add to that though, that if you have a non-technical member on your team and you send them alerts, make sure you tell them that the world isn't ending. Yes, very true. That's about it for the slides. Any questions? We're actually running entirely on, the question was about which cloud provider we're using. We're running entirely on-prem with vSphere. We have that in two data centers right now for PCF and we're looking to deploy to AWS in the coming weeks. We don't have a clear goal for AWS yet but expecting it to be for burstability for big promos coming up and things like that. For redundancy, do you keep it in sync or it's just two different parallel environments with load balancing? It's two entirely separate foundations. It's up to our customers right now to push things and to load balance themselves across them, which we have some customers doing due to data gravity reasons. Some of them don't run in our traditionally DR data center and so we're working on essentially deploying a second production foundation to our primary DC so people can run in separate foundations there, kind of like an AZ inside of Amazon region. Yes, in the back. Questions around the last year and what we've been doing. So going forward to what our plans are, continuing to expand our offerings. Like I mentioned, we had some manual deployments of MySQL and RabbitMQ that got us into a not great state with PCF where we couldn't really upgrade our foundation, at least not cleanly. So we're deploying second foundations to replace these existing foundations on 1.9, 1.10 where we have the multi-subnet support. So kind of showing up that and getting ourselves in a better state and then beyond that it really is starting to work on the low balancing story to allow our customers to be able to push an app one time and have it run across all of our foundations that meet that context. That's one of the biggest goals we have. Also starting to offer those data services, bringing in a partner to help us with on-demand service brokers for MySQL, RabbitMQ and Kafka to allow our customers to have dedicated clusters instead of the shared multi-tenant clusters. Those are the current plans at least. Yes, in the back. So I would say they're fairly formal. It was initially all driven by Pivotal and now it's much more collaborative between us and Pivotal. We've got one of our local guys who comes in, he's got good slide decks, good labs. So they were fairly formal, usually improving on the same stuff we did previously, one slide deck on architecture, one on more cloud foundry in general, and then labs focusing on different architectures, some Spring Cloud services, MySQL pipelines, things like that. So it's been fairly formal and consistent which allows people to get on the same page with us and to make sure that they all kind of seen the same experience. I will say that in the afternoon lab sessions, we often break out where people say, oh, I've got an app, can I try running that? And we're always a little nervous about that. Like sure we can try running that, it might work, it might not. But we try to keep those pretty consistent and on the same message. So we generally, we'll try to do a PCF-101 every month or so where we'll have kind of growing interest among different groups. So we'll say we're planning one for next month in Bellevue or in Bothell Seattle area and we'll get those people involved. From there we say you have this organ space that we set up for the 101. You'll have this for 90 days. If you'd like to start running anything in more than just a POC environment, let us know, we can set up an organ space for you pretty much same day. And so our goal is to get people moving quickly if they're interested and they wanna actually be involved. We get them on very quickly, set up an org for their team, they can start selling it to their own people. Yeah, we try to move that very quickly. But I will say we started our first PCF-101 probably in February of the year we did the deployment. So we did all this great training for several, several months and we had nowhere for them to go and play. So if you are looking at building that, make sure you have an environment ready for them to go right after because some of them adopted quickly. Some of them took months to play. So just be prepared for that. Yes. So we have a separate infrastructure team supporting the on-prem IaaS. So we support primarily the platform itself. We started out with two guys, grew to three and now we have basically three guys who are more of the platform architects slash operators and then one or two guys who are more of the day-to-day operations, try to answer customers, questions, things like that as they get onboarded. We have one developer who builds custom tooling for us. So primarily three or four guys supporting the platform. So they generally will start with our team and if it's not something that our team can answer as non-developers, we'll generally loop in our pivotal guys. We've got two great resources from Pivotal who are helping us be successful and they generally will dig in with the app teams, even come on site with app teams to make sure that the app teams are able to resolve problems they have. And it's mostly been just moral support. When they have issues, we'll hop on calls with them but for I would say 99% of all of the issues that we've had in the last year, it's all been their code. Yes. Yes, it is right now. We'd probably estimate 65% is non-production at least. We're splitting off. Initially we had a single foundation for prod and non-production, which was not a great idea for several reasons. We're splitting that off, so we'll have better picture on that in the coming months. But we estimate that probably the majority of our traffic is non-production right now. We also have found that a lot of our application instances are Spring Cloud services. So we'll have app teams that run a single app in a space and for their microservices, they'll have config server, histricks and turbine instances. So three app instances might have three SCS instances as well. So we've seen a lot of additional swell from that. Yes. Yes. Yeah, so generally for organ space, we'll onboard people with probably a 50 gigabyte org. It's up to them if they want to further subdivide it into their own spaces. We give them that capability. We're not very restrictive in terms of how much they want to scale up. If we start seeing someone who says, I've got 50 gigs, can you please give me a terabyte? We'll want to know what they're actually doing. But for anything under 200, 250 gigs or so, we're pretty free to give that out. We don't worry too much about, yes. So we're running our middleware on our platform, so it's all Java based, right? So it's Tidco and it's their container edition and I think each service runs anywhere between one and two gigs at any given time. So right now I think they're actually at 650, maybe 700 gigs of memory. It's a big app. We also tell them for availability, please run at least three instances of your app that'll make sure you're on all three AZs. So as we do rolling upgrades, or if we lose a whole AZ or even two AZs, you won't have any actual application impact. We add the nodes in very deliberately. So we're keeping a good eye on our overall Diego cell memory availability, how much we have left. When that gets below a certain threshold, we'll look at our IaaS, figure out if we have enough capacity there. Because the IaaS that we have for this is dedicated, separate nodes, separate racks, separate clusters, separate vCenter, just for this purpose. And so we know that we can use as much of that as we need to and be okay. And so we work very closely with our IaaS team, make sure that we have enough capacity there and we scale up our platform as needed to meet demand. Yep, I wanna be sensitive at the time. I'm sure we have someone else presenting pretty shortly. Any more questions? Well, thank you. Have a good rest of your afternoon. Thank you.


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