Live from the Oracle Conference Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering the Oracle Cloud Launch. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Redwood Shores, California, the Oracle headquarters for special presentation pre-game segments prior to the Larry Ellison keynote here for the special cloud announcements as theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program. We're going to go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of Silicon Angle, my co-host Dave Vellante, founder of wikibon.com research. Our next guest is Xavier, senior vice president of integrated products, welcome to theCUBE. So a lot of folks are going to be rolling in the press industry analysts about Larry's announcement. Pass and cloud certainly has been a big battleground of innovation. First question is what is the integration challenge for customers right now? Because everyone sees the cloud as a resource pool. Getting there outside of non-mission critical stuff is you can do some test and dev and some public cloud, leverage the cloud. What are the key things that they need to think about? So the reality is a lot of our customers of course and many customers you see which are not even Oracle customers have a broad investment in on-premise products. And they have a huge amount of assets which are running on-premise. And they're also starting to use a lot of SaaS applications which are in the cloud. So the big challenge for a lot of them is how do you connect all those on-premise assets to the ones which are running in the cloud and make it seamlessly done. And also use a tooling and kind of a solution which makes it easy to kind of do the mapping of different application endpoints, make it very easily available to them and have not just do up where you have to do a lot of programming, but also a lot of line of business users, a lot of analysts who can connect that very easily. So the hybrid ability to do hybrid integration becomes a very, very important thing. So on-prem middleware has been a big part of the success of Oracle, your specialty. Having pure play cloud is not necessarily a good answer. As Dave always says, the word stove pipes comes to mind or silos, however you look at it. But how does the middleware software work in this cloud environment? Could you tease that out a bit? Sure, the middleware always has been kind of the core element in terms of how you run your application, business logic, right? And today a lot of the applications underneath the covers is middleware is running the business logic for those applications to be performant, secured, connected, as well as be able to kind of do a lot of business processes around it. And the same elements and same kind of functionality is required in the cloud now. So if you want to run this in the cloud, you want to have a similar platform, which is available as a whole cloud integrated system for customers to use this in the cloud as well. How hard is it? I mean, it sounds super easy. I mean, I used to be a computer science major, haven't coded in a while, but I could just write some middleware, no problem. Hackathon weekend, super easy, right? I mean- I wish it was. Explain the complexities, because it really is not trivial. So if pretty much everything which you do underneath the application needs to be kind of managed and reused, right? So you want to be able to provide the framework for building the application. You want to be provided the engine on which the business logic runs. You want to be able to have the performant engine, which of course can scale to millions of users, especially when you go to the web or go to the cloud, be able to run it 24 by seven and make it highly available. So the complexity is really the building out of core platform, which can scale all these things, right? And make it secured. So you require a lot of good computer scientists. You require people who have really done a lot of server back encoding. So it's not really, you can hack your way out of this, right? We have been investing in the middleware space for the last 15 years. If you look at the success we've had is because we have very highly available, performant, secured and manageable system, where the customers or anybody who's writing the business application, they don't have to do a lot of the underlying technology work. They can focus on the business logic and kind of abstract out all the different things which we provide for them out of the box. What are the key abstraction points that you guys can share? I mean that for customers who are, aren't really keeping score on a day-to-day basis. What are the key abstraction points that you guys are abstracting away? Because if you can abstract away complexity, that's a good business model. Of course. So the big thing we do is of course, if you look at the Java application server, right? Which is really a system on which you write your business logic on. So we take away all the things you need to do for scalability, clustering, for high availability, for doing things in terms of security, all the different standards which are coming out, all the different Java technologies which are coming out, all the different tooling, different application languages which are coming out. So the application developer doesn't have to worry about all that stuff. And they just need to write to an API. And we take care of all the underlying changes which might be emerging, a lot of the newer trends which are coming in. So if you're adding mobility, for example, if you're adding technologies around IoT, you're adding technologies around, say, big data. All those things are really encapsulated in the platform to make it very easy for application developer to not have to deal with it themselves. So was that, a decade ago, you guys made a big investment in SOA. And the whole discussion was around component software and reusability. And the idea was simplification and to a certain extent, scale. You're talking about a whole different ball game now. What's changed? What's different? What's the key set of ingredients that enables you to enter this modern world? So no doubt, so SOA, for example, and as you mentioned, we kind of solved this idea of making integration easy because everybody used to do point-to-point integration once upon a time. Or you used to hire a lot of system integrators to come and wire those applications together and then when something endpoint changed, you had to rewrite them. So SOA abstracted that out and made it very, very easy for customers to do that now. So that problem has been solved. The part which has not been solved and what we have kind of done with this announcement we're making is really make it easy for customers to seamlessly migrate the workloads from on-premise to the cloud and vice versa. So you're not kind of tied to one way of doing your application deployment and make it very, very flexible. So any code you write, be it on-prem or be in the cloud, is portable. You don't have to rewrite it every time just because you change your mind in terms of where you want to deploy it. You can start with DevTest, for example, in the cloud and then move your workload back on-premise for production. So that requires a lot more innovation and a lot more investment in the core platform to make it easy and abstract it out for the customers. So I want to forget to unpack that a little bit. You talked about that. You started the conversation with that is the big problem that customers have that going from on-premise, they want to be able to move it to the cloud. Why? What's the motivation there? Is it cost? Is it speed? Agility? I mean, talk about those things. All of those things. And the big thing which a lot of customers have is that for application developer or a programmer they don't want to wait for IT to give them a system to be able to provision. It usually takes them three, four weeks to buy hardware, procure the software licenses, be able to provision them, configure them. So you lose a lot of productive time. So one is to agility to go to the cloud where I can get an environment, I can get a Java instance or integration instance in less than five minutes once I sign up is one, right? Second thing is the ability to kind of be flexible in terms of your adoption of it. So I can do subscription based month to month. I use it and I pay for it that time. If I don't use it, I can unsubscribe. So that also is second thing which is really makes it easy for developers to do DevTest very quickly, right? Third thing is to be able to now get more capacity on demand. Instead of having to go take some capacity out of your production system for doing DevTest I can now put that away into cloud for example and then use it when I need to and then go back to my production system if I want to. So instead of procuring more and more hardware every time and not using it to the capacity I need to I can now do this in the cloud. So test Dev obviously the killer app here, use case, right? But it's the lowest hanging fruit though. And it is, but is that sort of the tip of the spear? Is that the foothold? And then where does it go from there, do you think? Well, no, no doubt. I think people start with that just so they can understand what they're getting into. But the issue, what we're seeing is use cases now there's more and more is that they're starting to use it for production systems now or scalability for on demand kind of thing. So it's really test Dev is the starting point because that's why you start writing programs. But we've seen also a lot of customers who move or migrate the workload production systems onto the cloud. And they're going to start adding any time they need more capacity, it'll run in the cloud. That came up in the last segment I want to just ask you because when Steve was on top of vertically integrated vertically scale is a nice feature in Oracle and the benefits are starting to prove out. And people was, oh vertical is not the way because horizontally scalable was the beginning of the whole open source movement around commodity hardware. And that was what kind of got the cloud stars early Amazon runs on commodity hardware. They make their own PCs and that says commodities can be. But horizontally scalable is this new ethos of DevOps. How does a customer get the benefits of horizontally scalable and vertically integrated at the same time? Because it's not mutually exclusive anymore it appears to be. Do you agree that they're not mutually exclusive? And if so, how does the horizontal scale play in? Yes, I think you definitely need to have the ability in a data center and in a system like a big cloud platform to be able to scale both ways. So when you do vertical integration you definitely get the benefits of really tightly coupling all the different systems, right? So getting better performance, better scalability, better security, all those kind of elements. And then the system has to be able to scale to millions and millions of users as you need to. And that's really where what we have done with our investment in our data centers, in our software, in some of the optimizations we have done allows you to do that without customers having to deal with it themselves. They don't need to know that. They don't need to worry about it. We make sure that the horizontal scale. This is the abstraction you were talking about earlier. Yes, yes. What's the hottest area? If you had to kind of like look at the customer environment, what's some of the hottest things that you see happening? Today, I mean, if you look at the three things which we've seen more and more, right? And the platform as a service, for example, one is integration, right? Integrating your on-prem to cloud and cloud to cloud, right? So how do you integrate all those multiple applications together, multiple systems together, be it devices, whatever it is, right? It's one. Second thing we've seen a lot of interest in terms of modernizing legacy applications and adding mobile capabilities. So how do I now take all the existing applications, all the users want to use it on a mobile platform? How do mobile enable them without having to rewrite those existing applications, without having to maintain multiple code lines because you have multiple device types. You have multiple OSs. You have iOS, Android, all the other ones. How do, as a developer, not have to deal with variations in device types, different OSs, and be able to do that very quickly? But that's your API entry into the platform. Yes, it's API entry as well as be able to provide something like mobile back into the service, right? So that I can take my legacy application, modernize them very, very easily. You can deliver those services, right? And without maintaining multiple code lines. Third thing is process automation. So now that you are cutting across multiple SaaS apps, multiple on-premise apps, how do you do a workflow which connects all them together? All those dependencies. All the dependencies and the business logic together, right? So as a business analyst, I can connect that easily through, again, a very nice platform as a service called process cloud service. And that cloud to cloud piece, what you meant by that is integration SaaS to SaaS? Yes, yes. So if you look at the SaaS, if more and more customers nowadays have probably asked 30 plus or 40 plus SaaS applications, they're not even aware of. Each of them are very siloed sometimes. So it's very functionally divided. Sometimes. We try to give them the full broad picture here on our side, but the idea is that how do you connect them together so that I can have application, business logic working across those things without having to, again, do all those point-to-point integration. That's the integration cloud service really does that for you. Amit, great to have you on the queue. I really appreciate you sharing the insight. So I got to ask the question around extracting the signal from the noise is kind of our tagline. There's a ton of noise in cloud. The blue mix for IBM, you've got Amazon out there, and they're all kind of like moving really fast and kind of filling their product holes to, and or in Amazon's case, shifted the enterprise. Blue mix is catching up and you've got cloud foundry out there, you've got open source. With all that stuff out there, it's certainly confusing customers. It's got their attention. No doubt, yes. No doubt cloud is the way to go. How do you tease that out for the customer? How do you break it down? What is the signal vis-a-vis the competition? Yeah, I think, as you said, I think there's a lot of interest in this space and a lot of vendors who are trying to provide a cloud platform for developers to build their applications on. The difference for us is really what we're seeing is one thing is to have ability to have the same platform which is broad and deep, which is well integrated with our SaaS application offerings as well as able to kind of add capacity on demand as you need to. The differentiation we see from our side is really ours is very standard-based, completely on Java, versus if you look at a vendor like Salesforce.com with the force.com platform, you have to learn Apex, their proprietary language. Second thing you have to worry about that there's no way to now bring that on-prem. So if you ever want to build an application on force.com, if you want to run it on-prem, you have to rewrite the whole platform again on-prem. There's no other way to do it. I mean, I've called Salesforce, what Cisco did in the 90s, all these acquisitions, cobbled together all these disparate parts is frustrating for customers. I mean, Salesforce has a lot of different components. Well, but so, but there is integration obviously with the Salesforce apps, but you pointed out some of the limitations. Now let's talk about Amazon. Amazon, I call Amazon infrastructure as a service, plus, is still versus SaaS minus. So what are you seeing there in terms of your competitive advantage? So Amazon is very, I mean, they have a great story in that infrastructure service and they've been offering that for many years. The part they're missing today is really a full-blown platform. Like if you're looking at integration cloud service, what we offer, mobile cloud service. If you look at what we do with process cloud service, the breadth in terms of the middleware capabilities, which we have on a platform, is really lacking on Amazon, it's one. Second thing, again, it's a very cloud-only solution. I can't bring any assets I've built on it to on-prem. So they have a million, I mean, we have a lot of use cases coming up with most of our customers who want to run some of the systems on-prem. How do you do that? I have a one-way trip to the cloud. I mean, there's no question about that, but can I run your pass in Amazon? We can run a lot of our products on Amazon. Today we allow you to run and deploy the database or our web logic server or a lot of our products. You can't run the whole integrated and optimized platform on Amazon. So it's the integration, Sikhi. Now what about something like, you hear a lot, you've got these IBM events here, a lot about Bluemix. You see Bluemix in the marketplace and where your thoughts are? I mean, Bluemix is really late to the game as one. I mean, they try to rebrand themselves. They used to have a whole cloud offering based on WebSphere. Now they try to do something with Bluemix. It's kind of a modern WebSphere. But it's not compatible. So it's not compatible. I can't take the WebSphere code, which I've written for many years and run on Bluemix. I have to rewrite a lot of the stuff. So now take us to the Oracle analog there. So Oracle today, if I build any application of WebLogic, which is our Java container, I can instantly deploy that on our Java cloud service on Oracle Pass without having to rewrite a single line of code. And if I start for the cloud, if I want to run on WebLogic on Trump, again, I don't have to rewrite a single line of code. So it's a big, big difference because all the investments I've made as a customer don't have to be thrown away just because I'm moving to the cloud. So what's your message to developers? Maybe you could talk about that whole developer angle.  I mean, today we have millions of them who use Java. And our core goal is to really provide them a full-blown, broad and deep platform as a service offering where they can write their application on it. They can integrate different applications with it and be able to manage it very easily and have a low cost of ownership and a very quick agile system for them. So Java is your open play. A lot of people criticize Oracle. Oracle's closed and new counters. Java. We completely Java compatible. I mean, any Java-based application you built works on a pass. And we continue supporting that and continue investing in that. So one of the things that comes up, speaking of developers, is the real-time aspect of it. You're seeing obviously Java as standard. And a lot of folks, how are they all their analytic stuff with Java? So it's, you know, whether you're old school like us and or the young guys are still using Java up and down. We're seeing that, no problem. But new stuff like Node, AngularJS, this is more of the real-time languages. How did you guys look at that, Mark? How are you guys embracing that DevOps kind of like the new languages? Yes, you'll hear some of these things today. It's a good question in terms of like, we do believe that customers have different, or developers have different language requirements for different kind of things they're doing. Java is a core engine underneath the covers. But if you look at Node.js, for example, or Ruby. So we have services, the polyglot kind of services to allow you to run and build applications of multiple languages. And we support that in our platform as a service offering as well. So, okay, so you embrace that. So I want to ask you about Cloud Foundry because that seems to be what they're trying to differentiate on. Do you see them in the marketplace at all? Do we see them somewhat? I think that the idea, the concept of that we have multiple vendors trying to come together and not being able to agree is kind of the confusing part there right now. But the issue with Cloud Foundry is again, it's a very limited platform. It provides you a good runtime. But a lot of the breadth around business process management, mobile services, BBLU integration between different applications doesn't exist in there. That's your big advantage is the integration of the applications. But what I'm hearing in the Cloud Foundry marketing is choice, but you're saying whether it's Node, Ruby, you're offering a similar choice. Similar choice, exactly. So we always talk about lock-in and this is coming up on the crowd check. So I want to ask you a specific lock-in versus choice. And it's always a debate on the queue. We always talk, first of all, lock-in is competitive advantage home run. You can get a lock-in that's not always good for customers, but choice is what customers want. That's kind of table stakes. That's kind of what we see. But lock-in, the new lock-in or the new differentiation, if you will, is scale and value. What is that piece for you guys? What is that differentiation that will give you the new lock-in as open choice but yet real value? What's the key thing? Yeah, I think as you said, I mean, definitely want to give choice to the customers where they can, if they don't like to use a platform they want to move somewhere else. It's again, very much standard based. So you don't have to really lock yourself in this. But we do provide the ability and the scalability in terms of having this vertically integrated stack, which is very, very scalable, which is completely standard based, right? And that's really, for us, a big differentiation versus anybody else. So I think if you want to look at that as a lock-in, because you're going to be happy with it, sure, we would like to use that as the way to tell you that this is the right platform to build on. I mean, I love Dave, I love the lock-in. And when I had the business school, no one said, hey, create a business and create, give your competitors more advantage to commoditize your business. But Amazon's the mother of all lock-ins. That's why it's such an attractive business model to me. Well, it's easy to get in, but lock-in is going away. I mean, if you look at open source, you look at the lock-in as a quote, no choice. Was the older definition people would look at. But lock-in is a choice. Lock-in with choice is called competitive advantage, right? Value privacy. So again, this is what's happening. The new normal is the software model with open has changed and now with cloud, certainly anyone can start an apps business, but can they scale across business process? This is what you're saying. Yeah, and if they used to some of this, because most of the people who have been building applications used to this platform, like our middleware, for example, has been around for many years. We have more than 150,000 customers that use it globally, right? So they are familiar with it. So it's very easy for them to move to a similar platform in the cloud without, again, have to learn something completely from scratch.  Plus, everybody in the global 2000 runs Oracle. Database, man, that's, you know, you can run a different database if you want, but people choose not to. And it works well. It's trusting. So I got to ask one final question coming from the crowd chat. We have Werner Griff, who asked the question, what regions can expect Oracle Cloud Datacenter in the future? Maybe we'll have a point question that might not be in your wheelhouse, but it brings up the question of regions. Multi-cloud, multi-regions, certainly in disaster recovery seems to be a big, under the cover's details, whether it's Hurricane Sandy in New York City, which decimated some big banks. What does that look like from your perspective on integration? So we have a very, very well thought out and already executed a strategy for doing rollout around the globe, right? So you'll hear some of these things in Thomas Curry and his presentation today, later in the day, where he talks about the data centers we have invested in, how many we have globally, and we keep on adding more and more capacity in pretty much every region you can think of. So today we are present in North America, we present in Europe, we present in Asia, and we present in Latin America. And we keep on adding more and more centers in pretty much most of the key cities and areas we need to. Miss, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We're pre-gaming the big Oracle announcement. Larry Ellis is going to come on stage all the topics that is laying out, the big cloud announcement on momentum, new stuff, new services. So stay tuned, it's theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.


Good afternoon, everybody. So my presentation this morning was covering essentially the results of our projects. So with this shorter presentation, what I was, is this the right one? Yeah. I can't see. Can we put it on the full screen? Whereas, yeah, I wanted to take an embrace sort of more about what the project is doing overall about trying to change the way farmers are managing Fall Army 1. So we have sort of several projects are covered, if you like, by the Fall Army 1 program, because it's, although the sort of core funding was provided by this NORAD grant, we've now also got the global trial and the work that I've been involved with with the Fall Army 1 Global Action that's run by FAO. And then also looking forward to where we want to take this work in the future. So we've already covered this. It's a pest of cereals native to the Americas that invaded the old world in 2016, quickly spread across the old world. Within two years, it was in Asia. And we had these initial predictions of very large crop losses. But as a generalist feeder, it's also attacked by a very large number of natural enemies. So the potential for control by natural enemies is high. So the NORAD Fall Army 1 project is this collaboration between C4 ICRAF, the Sandbin Agricultural Research Institute, and the Department of Agricultural Research, Malawi. And the aim is to conduct on-farm trials of these different agroecological interventions. So it's very specifically just certain agroecological practices, specifically intercropping and soil amendment treatments. And then to associate these trials with household impact assessments. And then there's a whole range of policy and communications activities associated with the project as well. So these are the landscapes. We covered this this morning. We have 12 landscapes across three districts per country. The districts were selected to cover the whole range of rain-fed conditions for growing maize, so that we go from the very wet in the north there in the south down to the very dry in Kazangula in the south. The impact assessment, we had a baseline assessment of households and then post-harvest assessments in four years. So we did the same 180 farm households as the on-farm trials. So across those 12 landscapes, we're actually doing trials on 180 farms. So we surveyed those farms and an additional 720 farms that were randomly. So another four farmers, for every farmer that we're doing the trial with, we selected an extra four farmers from the same village randomly from the village household list. So that we get both the group that we're working with and the group that we're not working with to try and understand how they understand impact and how it's changing through time. In terms of outreach, we've run quite a number of trainer-of-trainer workshops. These tend to focus on more broadly on integrated pest management rather than just on agroecology. I mean, agroecology practices. And we've also been doing a lot of field days with farmers and also local things like agricultural offices and so forth. And we're currently running a very large number of farmer-fueled schools through this season. We're not doing the trials in this season. So we've kind of replaced the effort in trials into an effort in farmer-fueled schools. We've had several policy briefs and white papers out, mostly focusing on the SADAC region. And with the SADAC countries, this is really an FAO initiative, but that we've been using this project to contribute to. We've been working on the national IPM strategies for the SADAC countries. The idea being that because the tendency at the moment, as I sort of mentioned this morning, is that the countries just sponsor farmers to use pesticides and often pesticides that are not only very toxic, but often not actually that effective. And so the whole point of getting it as a strategy in the country is that hopefully they will then follow that strategy. And at least the technocrats within the country will have something to sort of fall back in, to push back a little bit, perhaps, at their political masters. We also produce, or are in the process of producing communication materials. So we have a couple of animated videos that we're doing. We're doing some podcasts and our farmer radio. Also a couple of documentary videos and technical manuals. So with the technical manuals, what we've found is a lot of there's both the national manuals for their own extension agents. And also what we've found is a lot of the NGOs that work with farmers have a manual on sort of how to manage your farm or something like that. So what we're trying to do is put a chapter in many of these different manuals so that we can try and get out to people more about how to manage full armyworm. Particularly focusing again on IPM rather than strictly agricultural practices. And then in terms of sustainability, we've also trained some students there, including one who was sponsored by the TPP, came from Benin and came down and studied in Zambia. We've also tried to communicate to large numbers of other scientists working on the topic. So we held two online conferences, one this earlier, sorry, in October last year and one the year before that. This was actually sort of because of COVID, we had planned a much, much smaller in-person workshops with policymakers. But with COVID we had to change our strategy and we actually found it to be much more effective. We had these two online conferences, they were attended by more than 650 participants with something in excess of 60 papers presented over the two days. And in both years we ran a SADAC regional workshop for the plant protection committees, which was a process to developing the IPM strategies. However, I have to, as I mentioned this morning with Zambia just suddenly deciding it's going to give out free pesticides. There's this persistent problem, even where you've got the technicats within the country really supporting the IPM approach, you still get this persistent problem of political interference because giving out something for free to farmers is politically expedient. And I'm not quite sure exactly how we can really tackle that. I mean, developing the strategies is a way of creating some mechanism for pushback, but I don't think it's the complete answer. So I'll move on to the global trial. This had a version one and a version two to it. So under the version one, it was just a group of people, particularly myself and a couple of colleagues at CIMIT decided that trying to do a trial of these limited agroecological practices across a wide variety of socioeconomic and biophysical environments was really important because the outcomes are context dependent. So we set up a platform to take the data on the trial and we then sort of put the word out to people, could they join in? But the truth was that although we put a lot of effort into setting up the platform and everything, we got very, very low uptake. So we did get a couple of groups in a couple of places coming forward and saying that they would do it, but it was more a case of sort of everybody thought it was a great idea, but then people tended not to follow through. So we were a bit stuck there, but then we moved fortunately through FAO, who were one of the groups that were trying to help us, they saw this opportunity because they actually got funding to sponsor countries to do trials. So they then said, well, let's make the global trial part of this global action. And so that's just starting. We have eight countries, three sites per country. So if this goes ahead and it's full implementation, we'll have 24 sites where we implement this trial. It is also because we had to negotiate a little bit with the protocols, a broader trial, it's looking at the agroecological ones, but it's also tying that with comparing, depending on what the individual countries wanted to do, some pesticide treatments, some biopesticide treatments and so on. The only thing that I would say is a disadvantage is that they, it has moved from being a on farm trial, which was the original version one to a on station trial because I think all the national implementers, they don't want to be doing it on farm, they want to be doing it on station, which is a bit of a shame, but at least we will still be testing this across a wide variety of, at least biophysical contexts. We've had a number of publications out and this year we're trying to write up the results of the main trials that we've been doing so that we should have a bunch more come out this year. Going on to future ideas, unfortunately the funding stream that we're getting from NORAD is not being renewed and so we don't have an option to go back to NORAD to persuade them to give us another round and it finishes in June. So within this project, we're just trying to develop the IPM recommendations and the communications material and then that project will wrap up. We have the project, the short, the small project with FAO to implement this global trial, which we're now at the point of just, you know, getting the actual work implemented through these eight countries. So that's, that'll start and that'll run probably over about the next 12 to 18 months. Just coming up, we have a workshop with a project that was funded in the UK. Their project is also coming to an end, but they have an opportunity for extension funding and we want to link landscape features to pest control services. So I think that this will be an interesting opportunity to look particularly at broader things like, you know, the amount of forest you've got and forest management policies and so forth in how you control pests. And then I think, you know, we've got an opportunity to discuss ideas more. I think really when we're looking at, looking to the future in this kind of project, we need to broaden from looking just at full army women, just at Maze to a much more broader idea of how agroecology and a lot of people have also been obviously talking about the other aspects of the agroecology, the system thinking agroecology and so forth. And I think thinking, well, where does pest control and so forth fit into that? And we haven't had any presentations on pollination, which of course is a major important ecosystem service that, you know, agroecology is often promoted as a solution to. And so I think that these are things that we can talk about. Thank you.


Srikanth Wodeyar, sign of a long line of royals, now ascends the Gaddi, or throne of his forefathers, but once a year on the Shera Day. Maharaja had about four cars, first time 1907. At that time we had two cars, then later on four. Sometimes palace requires car, they used to get our car, they used to get our drivers. Now you'll see thousands of cars and lakhs of two wheelers. Born much before independence, this old patriarch had once rubbed shoulders with the royal family, but found his true vocation in the service of the people, and later in politics. In acknowledgement of his efforts, he has a locality of Mysore named after him. Though they now mostly house government offices, the palaces and buildings of Mysore present the visage of an early 20th century princely city. The civic architecture of Mysore is a blend of Indo-Sarsanic and the classical European, but there is one building in Mysore that stands apart from all else. A neo-gothic structure that acts not only as a landmark visible from far and wide, but one which stands testimony to the secular nature of Mysore. Close to the imposing bulk of Saint Philomena's cathedral, Ishmael is busy working in his small one-room factory. Like the erstwhile rulers of Mysore, Syed Ishmael too has a long lineage, but it was not riches that Ishmael inherited, but the tools and knowledge of his forefathers, for he comes of a line of craftsmen who over centuries have created poetry out of wood. The huge and ornamental Brindavan gardens were laid out below the embankments of the imposing Krishnaraja Sagar. While over the years the face of urban Mysore underwent a gradual change, there are areas and activities in and around the city that seem untouched by time. In small hamlets surrounding Mysore, life remains connected to the pale yellow cocoon of the silk worm. The whole family participates in the daily chore of rolling the fine silk thread that would one day be woven into the famed Mysore silk saris. But life in Mysore had been irrevocably changed sometime in the first quarter of the 20th century, when a small, sweet-meat shop inaugurated their latest offering, and Mysore Park was born.


Wel, wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs, a ddod i'n ffrwng i'r ffrwng. Yn ymchwil yma, yma'r ddweud yma, ymweld yma, er fyddwn ni'n rhaid i'r ffordd, yma'r ffordd yn ymdweud yma'r ymddangos o'r prifysgol o'r ffroedd yma i'r holl, o'r edrych yn Arland. Roedd yma yma yma yma yma yma yma, yma yma yma yma, yma'r yma yma arweil, arweil yma arweil yma, But professional development is one of the key elements of the work plan for a forum. And our plan is that over the next three months, we will consult with the sector. Over the summer, we will be pulling together all of the submissions. In September, we'll put out a second document for comment and consultation. And our view, our ambition is to have a framework that we can pilot at the beginning of 2016, a phobl iawn i'r amddangos, gyda'n dweud yn achos dweud am gleidiol, sy'n defnyddio y document yr hynny. Oherwydd, y forum yn amlŵn y versiwn o'r lleoli byddech chi'n ystod o ath Newsgrif, ydych chi fath o'r ysgol. Y cwrs, y cwrs dy meddwl gyda'r hollion yn datblygu i ffordd y gallwn fy ffordd i'r llwosodon yn aes i'r llwosodon, i rydych chi'n hyn ac i'r llwosodon. I'r llwosodon yn ddod o'i cyfrifiadau, i'r llei cyfrifiadau ac nhaid y Pd i'r peidi. I boel o'r llwosodon, i boel o'r llwosodon. Llinawr hwyl yn ymgyrch i ddechrau gael ymgyrchau. Ond ac yn hollnydd yr drosodon, sut i'n ei falch oedd rydyn ni oedd ffareth. A chi ddaeth yn ymweld, ddiddor i'n hollwch oedd yn yrlyniad. We looked at accredited professional skill development. And we worked with the institutions to identify what kinds of courses, what kinds of provision, accredited provision was available for academic staff and higher education. We got lots of numbers, those that know me will know I like numbers. of numbers, those of you that know me will know I like numbers. So we found that there was 62 courses and all that had been offered in 2013. 450 people graduated from 58 of those courses. 10 of the courses were delivered entirely online. The rest of the courses, there was an even split between fully face to face and what was termed blended. 45 of the courses were certificate courses. Normally somewhere between five and 30 credits. 14 of the courses were master's courses from 90 to 120 credits and there was nine diploma programmes. All but one course was actually at level nine. The information and the pulling together of all of this data and what we learnt about it will be available shortly as part of the consultation process on the forum website. What we did then was we said well what are they teaching? So we went and looked at the learning outcomes and we looked at the program outcomes and we did a qualitative analysis to see what was going on. What were the things that people felt should be included in a teaching and learning qualification for staff and John you'll be very glad to hear reflective practice, development of research skills, digital pedagogy, teaching methods and approaches. If I take all of the courses, about 40% of courses are about these teaching, general teaching methods and approaches. About 25% of them it is about reflective practice. About 17% of it or 18% of it is about developing research skills and digital pedagogy was the other 17%. So it gave us a flavour of what was already on offer. But it didn't actually give us any sense about what the non-accredited CPD looked like. And we know from all the institutions that there's a huge amount of non-accredited PD on offer and we did a survey of 20 questions for technology enhanced learning. We had nearly 800 responses from staff across the sector and actually the highlights of that are in a forum insight in your pack. And what you'll actually see and it echoes almost exactly what you said. They talked sometimes about not having availability of CPD or oh yes there was lots of CPD there but we didn't have time to go for it. They talked about once off opportunities. We actually went to it but by that was alright it was nice to know. But by the time I actually got back to using it I had forgotten what I had actually learnt and I had to start all over again. So it echoed a lot of what you were saying this morning John. So what we've done now and we'll have it available for June is we have a research project that's actually going to try and capture a snapshot of the range and variety of non-accredited CPD offerings that are available within institutions because whatever framework that we actually develop it's got to be able to take account of the non- accredited CPD and see we have to find out how is it actually going to match in as well as the accredited CPD. The other thing that we so the other thing that we actually looked at very carefully was our professional bodies and disciplinary groups and again John you mentioned it this morning. You have particular disciplines that are very educate teaching and learning focused and you have then groups like our engineers Ireland to have our professional bodies and they already have frameworks that are in place that support the particular profession. So we've spoken to them we'll do more dialogue with them but we're asking how can we not reinvent the wheel and how can we find some synergy between the frameworks that are available for professionals and what we're actually what's emerging and what's developing. So then we went around the world and we said if we go to a consultation and we sit down and we talk to people about it they can only make a judgment on what they know and for a lot of people what they know would probably maybe be the the UK system maybe their professional body system so we thought well let's look internationally and see what different approaches there are and what we did was we actually interviewed via Skype or by through webinar some of the key people in these countries that we'll talk about and there's much more detailed case studies in the the the longer document that you'll see. So we went to Australia and we talked to in Australia and they took it at sort of a two-prong approach there they had a a promotion that was based on on teaching and then they had a national round table with vice chancellors and and they were trying to answer the question how can we as a sector more deeply professionalized teaching and I think that came up this morning in the palette. They decided that a national framework wasn't for them that wasn't where they actually wanted to be they said disciplines are crucial they said grassroots matter institutions matter and they particularly put emphasis on new teachers we need to build for the future we went to Spain and we got a kind of a different perspective and in Spain and there's a national framework for professional development called Ducencia and it's actually managed through their national quality body and it evaluates teaching performance at a departmental level which is very interesting and it's the same framework for all the disciplines and the departments have got to do a self-evaluation every five years against four key dimensions there's the self-evaluatory part there's an account of activities across teaching so that's the engagement of staff and in conferences and in professional development there's the report from the dean of the faculty and there's reports from the students and their model is more one of sort of standard engagement rather than a transformation of practice and it focuses on the quality of the program at departmental level but unfortunately 98% of all of the departments think they're great absolutely brilliant they all come out as being excellent and as a result they've actually lost a lot of their credibility and that's something I think we need to keep in mind for our professional development framework and one of the things I was interested in was that the way that they set up the framework and the way that they did it was actually influenced a lot by external stakeholders including trade unions and they they had a very strong input in how that was set up and that's something that we need to think about as well in the Netherlands in 2012 the Ministry of Education set up a performance agreement with institutions and that's run through the quality assurance of the Netherlands universities and the response was institutional initiatives and largely driven by their teaching and learning centres and then the institutions report back to the quality authority so the way it works in practice is is interesting so if you take 20 as an example they have a particular pedagogical approach across their campus which is to do with project led learning so any new teacher there must take Tom which is a five credit module on um on project based learning project led learning and that is that is believed to be the the starting point for their professional development but the problem with it is that it's not flexible is that there's a different model in the next university so academic staff can't actually transfer what they've actually got readily to new situations as they as they go to throughout their career and I think there's a lot to be learned from that one of the things that came across as well was that a lot of them don't look and don't acknowledge recognition of prior learning although some do in the UK and it's probably the one across our sector that most people are most aware of and it's managed by the higher education academy in regards to the professional standards but it's owned by the sector and it's it's uh institutional is volunteer to actually become part of it institutions can actually develop programmes to become recognized as as being equivalent in terms of the the framework and it recognizes diversity it's got multiple different pathways and it actually works on a system of a quite a linear system from associate up to fellow and and senior fellow and the the administrative load around it is quite heavy and the second part is and what I actually like is that it's actually monitored and regulated by colleagues as assessors so there's very much an ownership of the sector that other colleagues are actually looking at applications and I think that that's actually quite quite useful and when we put all of this stuff together we actually came up with a typology for curriculum professional development and this is something I think that we need to think about so for Ireland do we want all our staff having to do professional development is this something that we want or is it something that staff can opt in or out of and there's arguments for both should it be led in terms of like a national agency or should it be led at the institutional level should institutions take responsibility should it be membership based should it be informal should it be once off or should should academics be required to actually remain in good standing in some way and should it be a qualification or should you just have to demonstrate engagement with professional development and should we be creating sexual standards or should we working towards sexual enhancement and I would ask you in terms of making submissions to actually try and consider what I'd like to do is to get a pathway through this to see what is the best pathway for Irish higher education so when we put all the models together we said okay what does this actually mean and I stand here and say I'm not sure that any of the models I'm going to show you are models that are going to be suitable for Ireland but there may be aspects of it and I remember very much when we started at the very beginning of this process we said we can't go in and just say this is what we're doing that are we going to look to the UK or look to Australia and say we'll take this model whatever we do has got to be culturally appropriate it's got to be applicable it's got to be usable in the context that we're here in Ireland in higher education so we need to give some thought to what model or what aspects of any of the models actually might suit so this first model is a linear model you go from novice to being expert and it has some advantages there's very clear progression lines and there's a certain amount of kudos about being an expert and it can incorporate accredited and non accredited activities but it's it's on the negative side it's like one pathway fits all and there's no process to remain in good standing and linear suggests that there's a number of skills required at each stage that demonstrates teaching excellence and I'm a little bit worried about what happens when I become an expert do I stop then but what happens if things change so there's there's some concerns about that one the second model is where you have everybody does the same foundation and then people pick a range of specialisms around that particular foundation and the single means that the single entry means that it might work for the sector and you could have a kind of a level of teaching expertise that could actually be applied and it incorporates the specialist options which are good you can incorporate accredited and non accredited that's no problem and the pathways in terms of career development aren't that clear and there's a lack of the hierarchy might cause problems for some senior staff the need to do the foundation entry might cause problems for some senior staff and you'd have to you have to develop as a result you'd have to develop recognition of prior learning rules through the framework the next model is a staged specialist and this takes some of the best of model two some of the best of model one so what you have you're combining the linear and the specialist module and it allows for specialist options at certain levels but it also allows that when you get to the expert level to be able to take supplementary awards or other modules it writes it gives that flexibility i think that's needed within a framework and you'd have to there has to be some way the remaining good standing is built into it and and if deciding which level that you'd actually need to be at before you can up to the specialist options would also be have to be thought about but it's an interesting model the third the fourth model it gives institutional freedom that you get nationally agreed standards and it minimizes the need for central resources to manage it and a concern may be that the standards that you'd have a one set of standard for diversity of roles that would need to be looked at and it probably focuses a little more on institutional quality rather than the individual cpd and career pathways may not necessarily be evident so there are four models i'm sure there's lots more but i do think that they give us some some thought something to think about into something say well i like that or i don't like that we have something to react to now and in your submissions back to us i really would encourage the reaction and saying well what kind of model for you personally for your teams for your staff or what aspect of this would you like really incorporated into an Irish professional development framework and i'll just say one word about the recognition of prior learning we have the forum currently has a research focus project on the recognition of prior learning that's going to look particularly at how we can develop a framework that can actually sit alongside our professional development for our higher education there isn't there's a whole variety of methods that are used currently for recognition of prior learning and a lot of work needs to be done and one of the challenges that i see personally is that within our institutions for our students we we're slow as a sector to recognize a lot of work-based learning to actually capture learning that isn't accredited and yet we will now be the workplace person we will be the people with our work-based learning looking to get accreditation perhaps on the professional framework and i think that's something that we need to think about and hopefully this this research that we're doing and will actually help to inform how that actually might happen within higher education so when i think and all of this is actually said to us we have to make sure that the framework that we deliver has we actually have highly regarded recognition we do not want something that people don't value in the long term this has to be something worthwhile we have to be inclusive there are so many different people who teach in higher education now that we have to provide options for we have to be very clear about what it does and what it doesn't do it has to be sustainable if it requires a huge national resource it's probably not going to work so whatever model we come up with must be sustainable it has to be flexible it has to enable people that are already in the system to be able to map on to it it has to enable our engineers or medics that have already got their own profession to be able to map on to it people should be able to take what they've already done and find a way to position themselves on our framework it has to be research informed and it has to be connected to practice so as of now the consultation process is open and you can actually access the consultation on our website on the main page and Colin is going to put it up right now about there's an interface here on the main page of our website under the tab that says professional development consultation the consultation is actually opened now until the middle the middle the 10th of June we're putting we're putting the consultation documents that you have in your pack they're actually up there and what we'll as what we'll do as well as any further consultation documents or other reports that we feel will be interested we'll keep populating that part of the website now we're not going to we will take email submissions podcasts videos we will take them in word we'll take them we have an online interface here that you can actually use but what we would really like is that if if institutions or clusters are having a conversation about professional development and they would like to invite the team perhaps to contribute to the conversation we would be very keen to be invited to as part of the consultation to really hear from institutions from heads of departments from heads of uh from staff what how how this can actually develop to meet their needs and i look forward to having loads of submissions here and just to give you an idea of some of the questions if you and then the back of the um this has come up pardon me so some of the questions that we're asking you to consider and we've put the questions up we put four kind of overarching questions there's sub questions you can see in the back of the the document but these are just the high-level ones that we've put in what kind of professional development is needed to meet the needs of those teaching and higher education that's the first one what do you think the second question is that based on the models is any of them have any of them any aspect that we think that should be incorporated into the irish professional development framework how can the framework integration recognize the the existed accredited and unaccredited provision or existed professional work-based learning because we're going to have to set up a framework that does both and what management structure would help make the professional development framework sustainable and give it ongoing credibility nationally and internationally and i think the role of of the institutions and and the approach of institutions is going to be very important because i don't think all institutions will want to approach this in the same way and that's why i would be encouraging everybody to have their voice to to share their their ideas to share how it actually needs to work for them so we can actually incorporate into the framework that that's coming through and i'll finish by by by using your quote that says extant teachers are made not born they become excellent through investment in their teaching abilities not everybody would agree with that but i think even the best teachers benefit from reflecting and from looking at what they're doing and learning from it thank you very much are there any questions good timing


as I talk, but go ahead and get started. My name is Gabriel Hurley, I am the PTL for Horizon. I've been working on Horizon for the past couple releases and put a lot of work into it. Happy to be here. A little bit about me, I currently work for Nebula Inc. I previously came from NASA Ames, so I worked under Chris Kemp there, not directly with the same team that originated NOVA, but shortly thereafter. Before that, I was an open source web developer, I'm a core committer for the Django project. It's a Python web framework for those of you who don't know. I have sort of a strong background in open source in general. So, as most of you know, here to talk about Horizon give you a little retrospective of where we came from and where we're going. So, first off, Horizon. I think you're probably gonna all be familiar with this, but it's the OpenStack dashboard project. It was first included as a core project during the Essex release. So that means that this is our second release and it has about 50 contributors from a whole bunch of different companies. While a few people, as with most of the projects, do a lot of the work, we actually do have a very diverse space. And one thing that is not immediately obvious is that Horizon ends up being the consumer of every API in the OpenStack ecosystem. So we feel all of the pain. If you hear me yelling in API sessions, this is why. Looking back to where we started and to Essex, I like to take the view of principles. I really like this quote, the think simple as my old master used to say, meaning reduce the whole of its parts into simplest terms, getting back to first principles. And the first principles that I laid out for Horizon back in the Essex timeframe were core support that Horizon should have built in out-of-the-box support for every core project in OpenStack. It should be extensible so that not only core projects can be in Horizon, anybody else can add their project and build on it. It should be easily manageable for developers. The core code base should be simple, easy to navigate, all makes sense, nothing's tucked away or weird structures that you're not gonna be able to figure out. Should be very consistent in terms of the presentation to the end user. All the visual design should be very familiar. Shouldn't be any jarring changes from project to project. Your Nova panels shouldn't look different from your Swift panels, et cetera, et cetera. And that's actually a big problem that we had in the very early days because it was all kind of copy-paste from one piece to another and little changes would creep in and things would be slightly different from place to place. And it should be stable. Basically, from my previous background in OpenSource, I really believe in backwards compatible APIs and in version to version stability. Lastly, needs to be usable. If it's not usable, we're just failing it being a dashboard. So, we wanna make an awesome interface that everyone actually enjoys using, not just sort of slogs through because it's there. So, how did we do? Where are we now? Core support. I think we're doing really well on that one. We've got full support for Nova, Swift, Glance, Keystone, and Cinder. And as of the Folsom release, we have support for Quantum as well. The Quantum support is a very new thing as is the project itself. But we got that in there, do some great work by Akihiro Motoki. I hope I said that more or less correctly. And we're gonna continue making it better. There's a lot more work to be done. There's a session on Thursday to plan out how we're gonna integrate some of the things like load balancers of service as that comes in, do the various L3 networking. Really make that an awesome experience. Hopefully get some great interaction in there too. Point number two, principle number two, extensible. Basically, we took what the project originated as, which was just this huge copy and paste from piece to piece to piece. It was thousands of lines of boiler plate that needed to be reduced. And we've taken that and turned it into a really elegant framework that basically anybody can come in, take the pieces off the shelf, put them together, build their own dashboards from them. And not just open stack dashboards. You can actually build a dashboard for anything with an API from it. I myself have built dashboards with it to interact with Amazon services and internal Nebula APIs. I was shown earlier a dashboard that works with Nagios monitoring. There's cool stuff you can do with it. It really is reusable and extensible. So I also wanna highlight that the quantum support that I mentioned was added entirely by the quantum team. I gave them some guidance, but they were able to come in, put it together, figure it out. They made the whole thing happen. So I consider that a win on the extensibility as well. That with our documentation and the examples, they got the whole thing working on their own. And moreover, heat and salometer, the two projects that are kind of up and coming that everybody's excited about right now are both looking at horizon integration and have even started on it and largely aren't have any problems with it. So we're meeting our goals there. And as far as manageability goes, as of the first two commits in Grizzly, I am actually extremely pleased with this. I think there's a really clean separation between the horizon framework code and the actual open stack dashboards. One of my goals here is to actually create, is to take horizon to being that completely generic framework for building dashboards. Like I said, you should be able to build dashboards for anything, not just open stack with it. And part of the importance of this clean separation is making sure that somebody who wants to build a dashboard for something that's not just a direct open stack core project, doesn't have to import all this open stack code just to make it run. The two still live together and the open stack dashboard is the whole point of this project for the open stack community. It will always be a first class citizen there. But in terms of maintaining that code and making it navigable, keeping them in a logical structure is really important. So as I said, cleaned it up in Grizzly. Stability, I think horizon might be the only project that can actually say that it is fully version to version compatible. Essex to Folsom, 100% compatible. Everything should work. There are a few features which are triggered by the Keystone service catalog like quantum support, which quantum didn't exist in Essex. So if you turned it on somehow, you are gonna get some weird results because you don't actually have quantum. But otherwise, if you actually had a properly working Essex stack and you put a Folsom dashboard on top of it, you're good to go. Very proud of that for the whole team. We all were very diligent on that one. The API for developers also remained fairly stable. There were a few backwards incompatible changes. Some methods got renamed, things like that. Those were all noted in the release notes. So I think we did pretty well there as well. We kept the settings changes for deployers minimal. I think that's the area where we need to be most vigilant going forward. I've seen a lot of talk on the mailing lists of people referencing settings that haven't existed in several versions. And that's a problem with blog posts and lots of people writing documentation and lots of different places. Things creep in and when we rename them or remove them, they end up not working anymore. People get confused. So I think we can do better there, but we're doing all right. And lastly, usable. In Folsom, we added what we're calling workflows. So basically these are more complex interactions that may span multiple services or do some multi-step task that would normally you'd have to go to your one place in the second than third.  Launching instances and attaching volumes and assigning floating IPs are a great example of this. Now you can kind of do all these things in one place. One step, one button. If you notice that I'm not demoing a lot of these things, it's because all you have to do is walk out into the main hall and you'll see these everywhere. Every booth has horizon up on the screen. And I think that's a phenomenal win for the project. I think that really, that shows more than anything that we're doing the right thing. People are using this. People are showing it off. People are taking advantage of it. So that's my apology for no demos. If you wanna see it, I can show you anytime. But on the usability, we can do better. People definitely call out horizon as being fairly generic, being fairly kind of plain, boring, very resource-oriented view of the system. And I think that's where the usability needs to step up. That's the next stage for horizon's development. So we've gone through the principles. What does it all mean? Horizon Res, it is, presents just the capabilities of the OpenStack platform. And that's useful, but it's very limited. That doesn't really give you anything interesting. That doesn't grab attention. And the other point is that OpenStack, as a whole, is still very infrastructure as a service-oriented. We're not quite to the point of getting to that platform layer or that software layer. And that's where everybody wants to be. I mean, nobody's kidding themselves about that. That's where the fun happens, especially in a dashboard layer. But we're not there yet. And so horizon reflects that fact. We still have to be very resource-oriented.  You still have to launch your VMs one at a time. Seeing things like heat come out and salameter come out, those are gonna do a lot for us in terms of being able to add meaning to the user's experience. And especially in terms of things like salameter and other projects like that, really differentiating the experience for different types of users. And admin could go in and much better understand what's happening in their system. I will certainly be the first to admit that right now the end-user project dashboard and the admin dashboard pretty much clones of each other. The admin dashboard, you just see everything. We can do much better there, and we will. That's one of the focuses for Grizzly, which I'll talk about later. What we're also doing is we're providing that platform for all of the ecosystem projects. Back at the Essex Summit, which was in Boston, that was my first summit, I heard a lot of people going, we want to be able to get into Horizon. How do we get our project into Horizon? What can you do to get us into Horizon? And Horizon was looking like a bottleneck. There's no way we could get all these projects integrated. And I think we've answered that question in spades. I talked about it earlier, as far as extensibility goes. Projects are building their own dashboards, their own panels. People in the community are building all sorts of interesting little drop-ins that you can use. So that's definitely gone really well. People are working on the integration. As I said, we're not the bottleneck anymore. And more importantly, we're not the decider on what gets to be included. I mean, I laid out that core projects should be supported out of the box, but it would be a disaster if that was all you could ever get into it.  And at this point, you can download any piece of code that's written for Horizon that you like, get it off PyPy, get it off GitHub, wherever, put it in your list of installed apps, and you're good to go. And as I said, we try to offer guidance to other projects and developers. Anybody who wants to build something, happy to talk to them directly, email the mailing list, and we'll help you build.  That's what the core Horizon team should be working on. Because if we build it once and build it well, then everyone gets to take advantage of it. Everyone wins. And there are some pieces like that that I'll talk about later too that I wanna see coming down the pipeline. So in the near future, that's Grizzly. So the first thing I wanna do is I wanna make sure that all the crud, the create, retrieve, update, delete, trivial, you shouldn't have to write any code for that. There's no reason. Even looking at the code right now, 90% of that code in the actual OpenStack dashboard is just templating for that crud. Laying out those views, laying out those API routes, laying out those templates, it could all be auto-generated. So there's no reason with a reasonable definition of what this API resource looks like that you'd have to write any code for it. So I wanna make all of that as dry as possible. Developers should be focused on the bigger picture, the complex interactions. What can you really do with this? What makes this unique? And I think if we get all of that out of the way, it will much better encourage that type of behavior. That is a perfect segue into those user-focused workflows. And part of that is also about differentiating the workflows that an end user needs versus a project administrator needs, versus a system administrator needs, versus say an executive needs or someone like that. And there is a whole section on what I think those should look like. But that's where we're going in Grizzly. I really wanna see file uploading work. This is not a simple problem, both from an interaction standpoint of providing progress indicators, things of that sort. Or from a backend side of what do you do with these files in the intermediate transfer when they're actually going out somewhere else to glance or to swift. There are some solutions in some projects, but we need to get that consistent. We need to make that work because it's a really important piece of the puzzle right now. For an end user, it's very frustrating to not be able to upload an image to glance without having to type this truly arcane command line set of arguments and confuse it the heck out of me even. And I know what I'm doing with it. So that's gotta work. And the quantum support, as I mentioned, there's a lot more coming in quantum in Grizzly and there's a lot more in quantum already that we don't have. And we're gonna make that awesome. That's a really critical piece of the puzzle as far as open stack goes. So that needs to be really well represented in the dashboard. The not so near future, future plus plus. We're basically, we're starting to get to that inflection point on the curve where new projects are actually coming along much more quickly than they used to. We've seen a lot of new things coming out being announced just this summit or in the last few weeks. Cylometer, heat, synapse, the Comcast guys with their CQS and CNS is people announcing things left and right. So as those keep coming down the pipeline, some of them may be core, some of them may not, but we wanna make sure that they're all useful and well integrated in the dashboard, that those workflows that can span multiple services should encompass these in ways that if they are enabled, if these services do exist in your deployment, that you can do really cool stuff with them. Making that easy and flexible and seamless to the end user as simple for the admin as possible, that's the goal. I talked a little bit about the platform as a service and software as a service earlier. As I said, we're not there. We've got a lot of competing solutions right now, all the cloud foundry stuff, the heat project, open shift, everybody is trying to get there. There's, I mean, by the end of Grizzly we'll probably have a dozen different projects that are all doing pieces of the puzzle. And as such, there's no standardization. Nobody's picked one, nobody, no project is one and that makes it nearly impossible for Horizon to support one. Horizon can't lead the charge in that arena. As much as we would like to, because we're so user-driven and users want this, we have to be patient. It's unfortunate but true. But just because there's no standardization doesn't mean that there can't be a common interface to them and if we can achieve that common interface as a community, then Horizon can start building on it. Then we can start taking advantage without having picked one winner or without excluding everyone else. And we will support it as soon as the community is there, as soon as there is that interface, as soon as we're not shooting ourselves in the foot by picking one or blessing the wrong project, that's what we wanna do. That is obviously the future. We're all gonna get there and it's gonna be great. I'm so excited for it to happen but not there yet. And the other piece is that I wanna make it as useful for the various people who use it as possible. As I said earlier, it's pretty generic between project and admin right now. There's no real differentiation. And I think basic users, like just an end user, a green field researcher out in their lab, basic like admin, well, I was gonna say admin but that's the wrong, such overloaded terms. The basic accountant or something sitting at their desk, they don't need all these, they have no interest in how do I upload an image and then how do I connect my floating IP to it and all that and no, that's silly. Simple workflows, obvious.  Let's make this simple, walk you through, click by click on what is this, select your, which image you want, go ahead and launch it. Take care of it for the end user. There's no reason for it to be so complicated like it is right now. But a lot of people want that complexity. It's trying, we've been trying to find that balance but in the long term we have to actually allow people to set the degree of complexity that they experience to their own needs. And that is gonna be someone like a project administrator who actually as opposed to launching a lot of instances and doing the individual nitty gritty of the work is more interested in supporting the users in their project. They need some limited subset of admin capabilities. They need to be able to know what's going on in their project. They might want to pre-configure some images for their project, things of that sort. And I will add on a tangent here that this is one of the pieces that I feel is completely misconstrued in OpenStack right now is this idea of these types of roles and particularly admin versus member in all of the projects right now because we have this paradigm where if you are an admin anywhere, you are an admin everywhere. There is no yours, mine and ours in OpenStack. There is the projects or there is public, that's it. And that really, really screws with this whole mentality. There's no way to actually do things just for the subset of users that you are responsible for. And we really need to get that differentiation into Keystone and into the stack as a whole. Hopefully some of the policy and RBAC stuff will improve that, yes, thanks Joe. I see you there. Oh yeah, no, I expect it, thank you. Hopefully we'll get some of that with the policy pieces but I think there is still a fundamental problem of there not being a differentiation between what is mine as a user, what is my projects as a shared pool and what is globally accessible. And RBAC alone doesn't solve that problem so it's a larger issue to be tackled in the long term. So up that next level you have the cloud administrators who are, they really don't care about your images, they don't really don't care about any given VM that you're running. This is the cloud scale view where a list of all the thousand instances running in your cloud is useless. That's just that it's a big table that you can't find anything in. They want to see overall system utilization, they want to see problems, they want to see spikes. We really have to re-envision what that kind of management and what that kind of interaction looks like. I think it probably involves a lot more visualizations and things of that sort. But that's a possible view there. And then there's the role of executives or anybody else who's not technical but they want to know what's going on in their cloud. They need a simple, understandable, at-a-glance interface, probably really robust reporting, tools like Solometer to see what's happening in the cloud but they don't need to be going in launching instances or something like that. If they're greeted with a workflow that says, hey, here's how you launch an instance. That's really, that's not serving them at all. That's silly. I want to provide a lot more just kind of at your fingertips useful capabilities. Things like making the VNC console or on Windows images like a RDP remote desktop right there, easy, make it really work because it's been a very frustrating experience in a lot of deployments that it's flaky or sometimes it doesn't work or you can't get it set up, things like that. If this really just was a simple go in, do what you need to do, that would be great. Like I said, for admins, much better visualizations. I think there's a lot of information that can be surfaced out of this and integrating existing tools that people already like to use is the way to go. Like I said, I have seen integrations with Nagios, I've seen integrations with other monitoring tools. I myself have written visualizations for doing flocking. Jesse Andrews had a really cool visualization where he was doing kind of a node graph to show both project and node health along with an overall view of the system. There's really cool stuff you can do there. And if there's anything that I would love to see the community get excited about, it's contributing those kinds of things. If there is a cool way to visualize the data, that adds so much value to the dashboard. So if I can ask for any one thing, that would be it truly. I really wanna see us get to a real-time event-driven system. Right now there's a lot of polling going on both in the dashboard and in OpenStack as a whole. I know there are talks on the message bus system that's in common right now. I think that one's actually session after this. There are talks about the notification system that Comcast just released. There are a lot of ways we could go here, but we need to get to the point that everything is being pushed up to the client, the client being the browser in real-time and only when things are actually happening.  That's a much more powerful and much more meaningful experience to an end user. That is one that Horizon can't tackle alone too. It's one that we really have to work with the entire stack on because everybody needs to be using a common notification system for that to work. I was talking to Nick Marcette about the Solometer work last night and how they've had to come up with these three different mechanisms for gathering all this information. That is the challenge and we all need to work together to get there. If we can bring this into one setup, that'd be great. And he's worked closely with the Cinder team and the Quantum team to get them to use the message bus and it's starting, it's starting, but put it in your head and when you go out and talk to people from other projects, put it in their heads. It's the only way we're gonna get there. And as I talked about earlier, all these new projects coming along, the more we can support them, the more we can bring them in, the more we can integrate them in ways that don't require them and don't break if they're not there but provide really rich interactions if they are there, that is the future. So what's challenging right now? What I was just talking about, the cross project aspects, being able to do things that don't exactly fit into any one project. One of the real challenges that we have as a management perspective right now is that there are no cross project blueprints. Launchpad doesn't really do that too well, has to live in a given project and you can sort of connect them and target them and things like that but it's very frustrating. So one of the things that I, every summit come here and talk about is getting this consistent set of API features. We need to really nail down things like how do you do pagination? How do you retrieve a whole bulk list of objects? How do you do X, Y, and Z? And I have a talk on that on Thursday. I think I don't remember what time off the top of my head but that's definitely one that, what I wanna see is a sort of a manifest, a design document that just says this is what an API should look like. It doesn't specify the structure of the routes or what data exactly is returned in what form but it says an API should support these capabilities. It should support pagination with these queries. It should support filtering based on the parameters of the resources that you're retrieving. Basic capabilities like that. If we had a common understanding of what they should look like then we could all start working towards getting to that point. It's not about rewriting everything from scratch. No, it's an eventual goal and I just talked about the notification system. That is crucial. Design, that's the other tricky one. That is the bane of most open source projects. The usually the only way that this truly works out for an open source project to have great design is when somebody comes in and sort of becomes the benevolent designer for life, another form of BDFL. Cause someone really needs to own it. Someone needs to have vision for the look, the feel, the texture and that's lacking now. As I said, Horizon is a generic solution right now and I've seen a lot of custom dashboards which have sexy interfaces and stuff like that. I would like to get there. And on that note, I've said this in other talks into individuals. I fully support other projects, other companies having their own dashboards. Horizon is not meant to be the only dashboard. Horizon is meant to be the dashboard that meets the needs of the community. And the community is very large and very diverse and has a lot of different needs. So we have to be the middle ground. We don't get to be the cool dashboard that's really customized for the biotech market or something cause we could be a great biotech dashboard but that leaves everybody else out and that's not what we're doing here. So I just wanted to make that known. I don't have any objections to other people's dashboards. In fact, I love seeing them cause they're inspiring. It's really cool to see like, oh man, that was a great way to do that. It's a great solution to that problem and sometimes those people can contribute those ideas back. They can contribute to the human interaction guideline document that we created in the Essex timeframe to say, you know, that was a good idea at the time but trends in the web have changed. There are better technologies for that now. We can do better. So there's a place for everyone in that community and I know some people have concerns that other dashboards fragment the community or do things like that. I really don't see it that way. So I find great value in them. But back to the idea of design. We've got great contributors adding a lot of really awesome features right now but I do think that it is time to make Horizon sexy. I think we can really make it something that people are excited to use that when they first log in, they get a great experience and that really will help spread OpenStack as a whole. If we can start demoing to our customers, to our users, et cetera, something that really looks good that triggers that like primal, you see it and you want it.  And I think that would be a great thing for the project. It fits really well with Horizon. What I see is Horizon's mission as a whole which is that Horizon is kind of the face. It is the first touch point that most users have with OpenStack. And so we have to provide a good experience for those, for that first touch point. We need to impress people. We need to just work. We need to make it simple. We need to get done what they want to do. I think that's pretty much what I've got. So I want to say thank you to all of the developers. I want to say thank you to all of you who came. And we've got plenty more good work to do. And I'm happy to take questions if people have things they would like to know, ask, hear about. Yes, Nebula actually does employ a interaction designer who has done a lot of design research with actual customers using the OpenStack dashboard. He has done, he created the human interaction guideline document. He regularly contributes to the overall direction of what gets built. He's certainly some of the interactive elements like the kind of browser interface that we introduced for Swift were creations of his mind. I myself have some amount of design background. I've taken some formal design classes and I worked for many years in graphic design. So I have some background there as well. But we need more. We can definitely always use more. And as I said, a great designer who wanted to come into this community and help guide that would be very welcome. I'd love to talk to them, love to hear their thoughts. Somebody who had the focus and dedication to do just that would be awesome. Yeah, visual design would be especially welcome because I think our interactions are not too bad but our look is a little dated and generic. And it's, yeah, it is bootstrap with a few tweaks. So, definitely. Extensible in which type? Yeah, I mean the question was around extensibility of third-party dashboards. Should they be able to just plug in and work? That is entirely the goal. As I said, you can download the code from wherever you want as long as it's on your Python path and you add it to your list of installed apps in your settings. It should appear and work as long as the developer of the dashboard or the panel did things correctly. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that generally exists today. If there are ways in which you need something more that I'd be happy to work on it. But as I said, I have built my own dashboards for my own uses to do all sorts of things and you can just drop them in. Was that, what's quantum features? Quantum features. As far as quantum features go, there's basic support for defining networks and subnets and then attaching ports, creating ports and attaching them to instances. So you can do all the kind of basic L2 networking. I'm not a networking guy, forgive me. That is what exists today. The higher level networking and load balancer stuff and all those pieces are what are coming from my understanding. But as I said, we've got a session on that on Thursday which is actually being led by someone from the quantum team so we'll get a much better view then. But the basic features are there. Two kind of related questions to cloud administrator functionality. Something that I've seen in other dashboards that I think would be immensely useful is resource serialization on each of the compute nodes. What do you mean by serialization? Resource utilization. Oh, utilize, I thought you said resource serialization. I was like, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Versus free, bram, disk, et cetera. Right, the tricky part there is that OpenStack doesn't actually have a hardware layer at the moment. We don't have a lot of good insight into the actual nodes as far as what's going on there. We would need some support from the rest of the project but yes, I agree, that is a great sort of thing to do but it does tend to be deployment specific so making that generic would be the challenge. Dashboard adding some kind of a graphical representation of how much resources are free to run more VMs on each. As far as like the physical resources of your cloud, yeah. Yeah, post-mortem. And the other question was, is there anything on the roadmap for supporting migration of VMs? Oh, absolutely. As soon as that, actually the only reason that didn't land in Folsom is because it turns out it's only supported for the Zen hypervisor in Nova right now. If we can get full hypervisor support, add that in a heartbeat. That is a really high priority feature actually. It's just blocked right now. I thought that was supported in KBM. I believe it's, if the support has been added, that's awesome. When I looked in mid-Folsom, it was not there so it may have landed later on. I could be wronged. I could be wronged, yeah. We can both be wronged. Think there was some other hands, yeah, go ahead. That's a tricky question. The question is, are there guidelines for extending the actual components in Horizon, the data tables or workflows, things like that. There are thorough documentation of the actual components. The Python code is documented in line using REST documentation, Sphinx, all that. But as far as extending them, it's one of those things that there isn't really a way to tell someone how to do that. And without explicitly building in, when they're, okay, let me put it this way. When there are places that we've seen there are obvious extension points where you'd want to have a hook for another callback there or something like that. Those mostly already exist, those are totally documented. We can always add more of those. But as far as how to subclass one of them and tweak it into what you want, there really isn't a guide that I can give you there. That's, it's a challenging problem. I can always help people better understand how something already works or why it is the way it is. But as far as how to get it to what you want it to be, it's mostly a case by case basis. Other questions? Comments? Yeah. Dashboards and panels are both Django apps. Dashboard in particular can contain panels so they don't have to be separate apps. Dashboards basically just are rollups of panels. But yeah, if you, anyone who is familiar with Django should have no problem getting started. If you are not familiar with Django, the Django documentation is actually the way that a lot of people learn Python. It's that good. So go walk through their tutorial. It'll take you like half an hour and you will get it. It's really quite, quite simple. Great thing to know. Great introduction to web programming. If you're not a web or front end person, I really recommend it. I'm only like 50% of the code. Yeah, okay, baseline dashboard or a baseline panel. Like, do all the configuration for you. Like, you set up so that you can start making out the code. We're really hard to make it very easy for people to get involved. So please get involved. And just to add on to that, there are really, there are actually three, I was gonna say two. There are three ways that we need contributions. The first, which I wasn't gonna say is design. But the other two that I actually do wanna highlight are that you can help build the horizon framework that those core components, and those are the really tricky. You gotta get the APIs perfect so that other people can use them. But you can also build, like Trey said, you can build your own dashboards. You can build your own panels and contribute those. There's a lot of value there. There's a lot of territory there that has just not been touched because the core team only has so much bandwidth. So build a dashboard for your project. Build a panel that does what you need. Build a visualization that does that cool thing. That is the wild yonder where anything can happen. So that's the place where there's no, you can't get that one wrong. So jump in. They would like X, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Anyone else? Okay, I think we're pretty much on time. Yeah, right on time. Excellent, thank you. It was great.


Hi, I'm Philip. If you've made it this far through this sequence of videos, you've learned quite a lot about differential equations. Maybe you're wondering, why should I care about differential equations? I'm a machine learning engineer. Well, solving differential equations is a numerical problem. And actually all computations that happen inside of a learning machine arguably are also numerical problems. What happens inside of a computer when you train, when you fit, when you learn a model based on data, is the solution of a numerical problem. It's an integration problem if it's a probabilistic machine learning model. It's an optimization problem if it's a statistical estimation. It requires the solution of differential equations indeed to predict the future, like for example in reinforcement learning and quite often it just requires the solution of a linear algebra problem as the base case for all of these tasks. For Gaussian integrals, for quadratic optimization, for linear differential equations. You've learned in the previous videos that you can think of solving differential equations as a machine learning, as an estimation, as an inference problem. And the same applies to all of these other numerical problems. You can think of numerical computations as the estimation inference on a latent quantity, like the value of an integral, given observations of a tractable quantity, like the value of the integrand in various points. So estimation of a latent quantity based on data, that's machine learning. This means integration is a machine learning problem. Optimization is a machine learning problem. Solving differential equations is a machine learning problem. Linear algebra is a machine learning problem. Isn't that cool? And that means we can phrase computation as multiplying a prior with a likelihood and dividing by the evidence returning a posterior as Bayesian inference. Why is this useful? It's useful because it allows us to use the toolbox of Bayesian machine learning within computation. We can use the prior to encode what we know about our numerical problem to reduce its complexity. We can use the likelihood to tell the algorithm that some of our computations might be a bit unreliable. They might be stochastic. They might be low numerical precision. We can use the evidence as a generic framework to estimate hyperparameters of numerical algorithms, and we can use the output of this process, the posterior, to quantify uncertainty about the result of the computation and hand it forward to whatever comes next in our computational pipeline. This is the idea behind probabilistic numerical computation. It's what a large part of this research group works on, but also what some of our colleagues across the world are studying. If you'd like to know more about our work, then please check out our publications, which you can find on our website. Check out the software library for probabilistic numerical computations that you've already heard about in previous videos and subscribe to this YouTube channel because together with our other machine learning colleagues here in Tübingen, we are publishing and telling you about our work on this channel every now and then. Thanks for watching. That is the end of this afternoon.