Mr Steve Baker. Mr Speaker, I beg to move that this House is considered the subject of money creation and society. The methods of money production in society today are profoundly corrupting in ways which would matter to everyone if they were clearly understood. The essence of this debate is who should be allowed to create money, how, and at whose risk. One of the most memorable quotes about money and banking is usually attributed to Henry He said, It's well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. Well let's hope we don't have a revolution Mr Speaker because I feel sure we are all conservatives on this side. How has it done? Well the process is so simple, the mind is repelled. Whenever a bank makes a loan it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account thereby creating new money. a'r rysg fyddion ar y cyfle dda i'r cyflwyno'r byddai'r cyflwyno'r dda. Felly, the institution of money is a human social institution and it can be changed. It has been changed and I believe it should be changed further. Even before QE began, we lived in an era of chronic inflation, monetary inflation, unprecedented in the Industrial Age. I see that some went into commercial property, there were some went into personal loans, credit cards and so on. Actually the rise of lending into real productive businesses, excluding the financial sector, was relatively moderate. But overwhelmingly where this new debt went was into mortgages and into the financial sector. But the point I'm making is this, if a great fountain of new money gushes up into the financial sector we should not be surprised that we find that the banking system is far wealthier than anybody else. We shouldn't be surprised if financings, housing, London and the south-east are far wealthier than anywhere else. Indeed I remember when QE began, when QE began, house prices started rising in Chiswick and Islington. The point is this Mr Speaker, that money is not neutral. It redistributes real income from later to earlier owners, that is, from the poor to the rich on the whole. Now this distribution effect is key to understanding the effect of new money on society. I think it's the primary cause of almost all conflicts revolving around the production of money, the relations between creditors and debtors. Given that I think it raises the question at the heart of this debate, I mean who should create the money? I just asked this question, would Parliament ever have voted to delegate power to create money to those same banks that caused the horrendous financial crisis on which the world is still suffering? I think the answer to that is unambiguously no. Against that background there are solid grounds I think for examining, and this is where I do come to my proposal, the creation of a sovereign monetary system, as recommended by several expert commentators recently. Martin Wolff, who is everyone in this House will know as an influential chief economics commentator of the FT, wrote an article a few months ago on the 24th of April to be precise entitled, Strip private banks of their power to create money. This is a Martin Wolff recommending switching from bank-created debt to a nationalised money supply. Also, Lord Adair Turner, who was the former chair of the financial services authority, delivered a speech about 18 months ago in February 2013 discussing an alternative to quantitative easing which he turned overt money finance, which is also known as a form of sovereign money. Now such a system, and here I will describe its main outline, such a system would restrict the power to create all money to the state via the central bank. Changes to the rules governing how banks operate would still permit them to make loans, but would make it impossible for them to create new money in the process. The central bank would continue to follow the remit set by the Chancellor of Exchequer, which is currently to deliver price stability, which is defined at the present time as inflation target of 2%. The central bank would be exclusively responsible for creating as much new money as was necessary to support non-inflationary growth. Decisions on money creation will be taken independently of government by a newly formed monetary creation committee or by the existing monetary policy committee, either of which would be accountable to the Treasury Select Committee. I think that accountability to the House is crucial to this whole process. Now I conclude that I believe a sovereign monetary system offers a very considerable advantage over the present system. It would create a better and safer banking system because banks would have an incentive to take lower levels of risk since there would be no option of a bailout or rescue from taxpayers and thus moral hazard would be reduced. Second, it would increase economic stability because money creation by banks tends to be pro-cyclical, as I've explained, whereas money creation by the central bank would be counter-cyclical. Thirdly, sovereign money crucially supports the real economy when, under the current system, 83% of lending does not at the moment go into productive investment. I underline that three times. For all of these reasons, I believe that the examination of the merits of a sovereign monetary system is now urgently needed and I would call on the government to set up a commission on money and credit with particular reference to the potential benefits of sovereign money, which offers a way out of the continuing and worsening financial crises that have blighted this country and indeed the whole international economy for decades. This is an issue that has not been debated for well over a century and I think we wouldn't be having this debate if it wasn't for the fact that we are still in the midst of tumultuous times. We had the banking crash, we had the corresponding crash in confidence in the banking system and in the wider economy, and now we have a problem of underlending, partly as a consequence particularly to small and medium-sized business. So this could not be more important and the Member for, when I'm going to say, my noble friend, as we work on many issues together for Alderman Rointen, I pointed out at the beginning of his speech that this is an issue that is not well understood by members of the public. I think he mentioned later on his speech, but if he didn't, I'm going to add that this is an issue which is also not well understood by members of this House, by members of Parliament. I would include myself in that and I suspect most people here would be humble enough to recognise that this is such a complex issue, this banking wizardry we're discussing today, that very few people really properly understand it. If members of Parliament don't really understand how money is created, and I really believe that is the majority position, certainly based on discussions I have been having, how on earth can we be confident that the reforms we brought in over the course of the last few years are going to work? I'm going to prevent repeat-repeat-repeat collapse of the sort which we saw before the last election. My view is that we can't be confident. I think these issues need to be explored and I think it is time for a Monetary Commission to be established and for Parliament then to become much more engaged than we have been. This is a very small step in that direction. I'm very grateful to the sponsors of today's debate. This debate comes following a significant campaign by Positive Money who have been raising some extremely important issues about how we ensure financial stability or how we as parliamentarians and indeed how members of the public can gain a far greater understanding of the way in which our economy works and in particular how money is supplied. I'd also like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Oldham for his good explanation of the Positive Money agenda, which is certainly an idea worthy of thought and I will come on to that. I want to start by saying that money creation is a very important and complex aspect of our economy that I do agree with members is very often misunderstood. But first, I just want to briefly set out why we don't believe that the right solution is the wholesale replacement of the current system by something else such as a sovereign monetary system. Under a sovereign monetary system it would be the state, not banks, creating new money. The central bank via a committee would decide how much money is created and this money would mostly be transferred to the government. Lending would come from the pool of customers investment account deposits held by commercial banks. Such a system would raise a number of very important questions. How would that committee assess how much money should be created to meet the inflation target and support the economy? If the central bank had the power to finance government's policies, what would the implications be for the credibility of the fiscal framework and the government's ability to borrow from the market if it needed to? What would be the impact on the availability of credit for businesses and households? Wouldn't credit become very pro-cyclical? Wouldn't we incentivise financing households over businesses because in the case of businesses banks would presumably expect the state to step in? Wouldn't we be encouraging the emergence of an unregulated set of new shadow banks? Wouldn't the introduction of a totally new system untested across modern advanced economies create unnecessary risk at a time when what people need is stability? So in conclusion, this government's belief is that the current system, modified and improved with far greater competition, is the one that will serve the economy best.


What's up everyone? It's your girl Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm repping a couple personal boxes here for Jeffrey H. All right Jeffrey, we've got three boxes in total one at 2021 Obsidian football hobby and two 2021 Panini contenders optic football All right best of luck and thanks for hopping in as always. We're starting off with your obsidian Yeah, doing great Doing great Dan. How are you doing? All right, Jeffrey All right, first up we've got a Darius Leonard and we've got orange Carson Wentz for the Colts orange It's 275 and purple rookie to 100 Ramon Dre Stevenson Up next we've got out of 100 cutting edge patch of tj Watt cutting edge So we've got to 50 on the rookie auto on the green edge terrace marshal jr Panthers rookie out of there. What's up, John? Long time no see my friend Football as well We've got to 75 or a auto of Jeff saturday There's a little legend there another Colton Jeff saturday And we've got two 99 rpa here for the Ravens a Tylen Wallace Tylen Wallace rpa Yeah, I'll do it for obsidian. Let's see some optic fire. Good luck here, Jeffrey Well, sounds like you had a good time then Dan, huh? Sounds like you had a good saturday evening Oh, gotcha. I was going to say I haven't seen you on the live in a while, John First up we have a season ticket of nick chubb rookie ticket of Tylen Wallace Ravens We've got red to 175 terry mclauren scary terry And pink MVP of patrick mahomes the second to 75 on the pink there 32 of 75 nice mahomes Gatorade video. Yep, that'll do it That will do it. We've got to 99 on the blue rookie ticket auto mic stretching And it's a colt. It's a colts kind of day here for you, Jeffrey mother colts auto And then we've got for the bears on the base rookie ticket dad's new sum For the bears Last box here. Good luck, Jeffrey. Get everyone not a long queue at all See some emails. Let me refresh see where we are. I see you. All right, John hopped in after Dan, right? We've got a a baker mayfield base Rookie of Tylen Wallace for the ravens We've got to 50 orange season ticket of staphon digs And we've got pink to 75 round numbers of frank darby and racy mcmath We've got super bowl insert of chris long for the patriots I love these super bowl inserts Very shiny beautiful looking card We go jeffrey And then we've got for the jets hollow rookie ticket michael carter this gives up to have a big year too michael colt carter armilla silver rookie ticket All right, jeffrey that'll do for your three boxes. Congrats on the hits. Thanks as always for hopping in and we'll get these right out to you


What's going on everybody got Kyle here with late in sports cards, and we are ripping this is the legacy of luminance four box NFL mixer Rainham teams number 10 didn't randomize for the break here guys We had Lynn F with the Steelers down to a bud or sorry down to James D with the Ravens Can always find those results on our website guys late in sports cards calm underneath the Results tab at the very bottom Good luck. Good luck here guys. Let's start with the legacy Luminance second see some nice rookies man. There's been some good rookies playing very well this year Rookie's playing very well this year the half-time. I kind of look like they're about to go That's the one second that place that base split even cool Got a rookie silver that's gonna be will Anderson Joe Montana on the legends rookie Bijon for the Falcons Appreciate everybody helping us out filling up so far. That's the mosaic football coming next Or next the fill I should say two's half casers of mosaic, and we've got flawless and one football There's the 299 warren moon for the Seahawks legends Seahawks warren moon Cedric Tillman miles Murphy on the rookies first auto it is gonna be Zach Evans that one's gonna go to the Rams rookie Zach Evans Ram Silver rookie make sure Ram school. Thank you. Shipe grabbing the bills in both of our mosaics My man, there's a blast from the past Marcus Allen LT got rookie mims and a rookie tank bigsby There's a red Austin Eckler under the lights one is 250 nice one there for the Chargers Eckler 50 Trenton Simpson rookie you Matthew taking some pristine some pristine for tomorrow There's a orange to 199 Emmett Smith legends for the Cowboys Alan page Vikings Dalton Kincaid, there's a will Leviss rookie Titans And guys all four of our PYT breaks on sale for today two mosaic half casers one football and flawless all on sale There's a Keshon Boute under the lights silver that one's Patriots and a Quinton Johnson silver for the Chargers Jordan Battles a flowers five to go on mosaic appreciate y'all Don't know very nicely. There's a under the lights Josh Downs Colts rookie Pretty solid for the Colts Jameer Gibbs Your Gibbs got all the touchdowns taken away Wait a second Why is drew lock in the game everybody? Well, why is drew lock in the game? There's a Oh boy, there's a red that one is gonna be the 299 Damian Pierce Kelsey this one will be a run rant or will roll a dice one two three will go top to the chiefs Four or five six will go bottom to the Eagles will be for all of our duels here. We see another one So be one to the top Chiefs will go to the top on all of our duels. They benched Gino No, did they really? At seven three they benched Gino Kind of crazy Quinton Johnson Boute Did they really shy that's great he looks happy with drew lock interesting This one is nice gonna be Mike all-star on the auto to 50 holographs for the bucks Nice one there nice all-star Getting x-rayed. Oh boy. Oh boy Blast from the past Bob Lily Nolan Smith Jordan Addison cheap shot dang Don't like to see that Thank you Tom taking one of our mosaic teams. Oh my god taking the Rams and the Rams Rams and both Is that no offense? Yeah No offense really There's a prize prospects that one's gonna be Bijan Nice one there little Bijan action. There's a Richardson base rookie. No, uh, let's close it. No, I got it There's gonna be the 249 that'll go to on the Eagles generations to 249 Hertz and Cunningham We'll take Del Scoronti take a Ken Walker tutty was a orange many Michael Pittman, Jr. To 125 Colts Evans Chris Gonzalez already guys box to hear of legacy Good luck this our legacy of luminance four box mixer should have noticed our drew lock over Gino Us down Yeah, he was he was a toe in that line man. That was pretty nice run Yeah To 299 we got a to Marcus where or to 199 legends for the Cowboys Sean saying definitely down Alrighty then let's go Ken Walker There's a Clayton tune. This one's gonna be Cardinals on the rookie Silverado Clayton tune got a silver of under the lights Richardson for the Colts Will Anderson Zach Evans keep Gregory taking team in flawless. Thank you sir taking the bucks And thank you Nick taking a spot in the 10 box Tuesday tomorrow me and Sam will be here Hanging out with y'all Xavier Hutchinson. It was Bobo. There's a guy named Bobo there Never heard of Bobo. There's a Warren moon number to 50 the legends that one's for the Seahawks Warren moon Jalen Hyatt rookie Silver is going to be Miles Murphy and a prize prospect Jameer Gibbs Simpson men's Ken Walker Kenneth the minute. Oh man fight. Yeah, boy boy It's like Bobo is getting chippy out there. It's under the lights Joe Burrow Randy moths So we'll have a space for the Titans It's a green a Coye number 200. That's chiefs blast from the past for to go on the mosaic PYT guys. Thank you. Thank you Got our next random team filled up so our mosaic random teams half case or PYT half casers next one's the fill and we got one football and This one's a Sean's boy Devon HN for the Vince orange rookie Otto nice one there to 149 these Six touchdowns already look at the size of them. He's a humongous man. Yeah Yeah, he made some holes. It's a whole Jordan battle Coye The price prospects take del I'm saying tank del prize prospects. Oh, it's for Houston Brian briefs Yeah, Rashi rice Rishi rice that one is going to be the 299 Colts or chiefs rookie Rishi rice. There's a CJ Stroud. This guy's the truth. The Texans rookie. It's already over a thousand yards He is a beast. I think he's well over a thousand at this point been really impressive There's a tandem a key. That's going to be equals under the lights rookie to 125 Eagles backup silver is Darnell Washington for the Steelers Ray Lewis and Anthony Richardson rookie on the back for the Colts Bass this is Already guys two to go luminance And after this we'll have a eight box mixer going I Appreciate everybody. Thank you shite buying a spot in our 10 box Tuesday tomorrow me and Sam will be here for you with you guys I Did see that for Mars. We did see a mr. Jimmy Butler's look today. It's quite interesting Looking like a like a member of fallout boy It's he knows what he's doing man, he was he was setting up for the he was setting up for all the memes and the He knows what he's doing Garrett Wilson that bass there Our first numbered is gonna be Josh Downs to 200 rookie for the Colts This one is going to be 250 points. So random that in And a vestige step on Dix Stetson Bennett this one is gonna be Jalen Hertz orange number 250 nice one there for the Eagles And I see your one auto is gonna be red ink of Stetson Bennett for the ramps Quarterback out of Georgia on the rookie red year one and a savage of Mike Evans This one is gonna be Marvin Mims the 175 rookie for the Broncos and another auto is gonna be Christian Watson second-year auto to 150 Packers Packers second-year auto got a engage of Aaron Donald. I didn't see Stephen A's face when he saw it though That could be funny There's a Bryce young bass rookie and this one is gonna be Jalen waddle on our Jersey Spirit swatches for the Dolphins E and nice Jordan Addison number to 25. There we go vikings Good-looking rookie Addison to 25 and to 150 Clayton tune for the Cardinals Unforgettable of DeMar DeMar Hamlin Alrighty guys one more box in our four box mixer We'll do a random to all for the points and then we'll get moving on to our eight box mixer And guys just four pyt breaks today Two half casers mosaic got one football and flawless football teams are all on sale for those guys Check it out spots are moving very nicely appreciate y'all And one more random team break of the day. We've got um contenders optic basketball tiered random team stuff There's a Devonte Adams to 35 on the blue blue fireworks For the Raiders and nice for the vikings Jordan Addison auto now Had Addison to 25 now. We got the auto on the year one on-card Nice Addison and a uh dynamic of Quentin Johnson. All right. It's already punting it again There's a gold to 250 that one's going to be um Garrett Wilson for the Jets And this is going to be auto rashie rice to 100 for the chiefs Looks like a cubic from um revolution. That's a cool-looking design chiefs rashie cd lamb Eric taking a team in mosaic Taking the Broncos. Thank you Eric Nice CJ Stroud to 175 they go Houston CJ Stroud looking very good so far And fusion auto is going to be robert smith to 100 on the um acetate auto. Let me get a little Filler behind that you can see it better Inscriptions auto for the vikings is going to be robert smith to 100 vikings doing really well on the luminance And a fusion insert jaylen Hertz and last pack Yeah, we've had some good stuff move nothing crazy nothing like World shattering yet, but we've had some really good stuff so far Um Jackson smith this one is going to be brian urlacher brian urlacher there on the uh vintage materials bears Got a camera lot two to 150 This is jaylen hyatt giants the 200 and on the back We got a dynamic of divan han for the uh fence to 50 three numbered cards in that pack Nice one there Alrighty guys that will do it for legacy luminance four box mixer number 10 Let me set up a quick random. Um, we'll random all for the 250 panini points So we'll do all teams Roll two dice again We'll go seven times four and three Seven times. Good luck here guys Again, this is all teams and this will be for 250 panini points. Good luck one two three four five six Seven it's going to be chargers chargers taking home the panini points Alrighty guys now, we'll do a quick hit recap and we'll get going on the next mixer Alrighty guys, we had two jerseys. We had brian urlacher for the bears and um jaylen waddle for the fins Our autos we had number 200 on the acetate auto for the uh vikings was robert smith We had a rishi rice number 200 cubic for the chiefs This one was jordan adison on card rookie auto for the vikings. We had to 150 christian watson We had red on the uh year one auto of Stetson benefit for the rams. We had a divan han That one was a number to 149 dolphins clayton tune cardinals Some was the 50 for the bucks mike allstot and for the rams. We had zack evans rookie base auto Alrighty there guys, that'll do it for the legacy of luminance four box mixer. We got an eight box mixer coming up next


Burnout is a state of physical and or emotional exhaustion that many people have experienced at some point in their life, something that's very heavily characterised in terms of work. It can be a physical state in terms of exhaustion from, you know, perhaps exerting yourself physically too much obviously, going to the gym, working a very manual labour type job, as well as emotional exhaustion, which can come through the roots of work, sometimes can come through relationships, sometimes come through friendships, living situations, a whole host of different possible contributors to it. The important thing here is that it's not a medical diagnosis. It's not something that you can go to a psychotherapist. It's not something that you can go to a anyone really doctor and say, like, OK, diagnose me with burnout condition. It's not something that happens. It's more of a characterisation of someone's mental state.


The River State Governor Newsom Weke says the all-progressive Congress, the APC, was still divided to have won the governorship election in the state. Weke spoke on Tuesday during a media briefing in Port Haca at the state capitol. Simeone Lai Fubara, candidate of the PDP, was declared the winner of the governorship election in River State. The truth is that the PDP ran an effective political campaign. We went to all 392 votes to sell our candidates who flagged up and commissioned impactful projects throughout our campaign which excited the people. Our people are happy and invested their hopes in the PDP because it performed and it did not impossible to advance the state's development. We delivered impactful projects after projects across the state. There is no local government area which would not impact the infrastructure revolution. Indeed, we performed to the extent that we are joined by President Buwari and the former government as the best state government in infrastructure delivery. We did not advance because of an agony. Calabari, I grade them. We are for a reverse government. We are for consolidation and continuity. Ushime said it resonated and inspired the people to vote for us. Thank you for speaking loudly and clearly that diversity belongs to the PDP. I thank you again for trusting me. Thank you for not disappointing me. Thank you for acting on our request to return the PDP to consolidate and continue for where we will stop. On behalf of our party, I assure you that we will fulfill every campaign promise to the people of the United States. We are also willing to work with the PDP to move the United States forward. I have also received assurance from the Governor-elect's office willingness to work with the PDP to advance the interest.


Hello, everybody. Today we're going to be talking about API Gateway and Ingress Management. My name is Marco Paladino. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Kong. And this presentation is divided into two different sections. One, we're going to be talking about Ingress, understanding what Kong is and how we can use Kong on Kubernetes.  So we're going to be seeing running it in action. You see, if you take a step back, we're entering a new world for software. And this is a new world that has been with us for a few, for half a decade now. In 2013, 2014, with Docker in 2013 and Kubernetes in 2014, really we are building applications in a new way. And of course, as we are transitioning to this new world, we're distributing our software and we're adding more and more services. We are decoupling our monoliths in more and more services that are going to be connected to each other and we're going to be deploying across the world, across different regions in order to be able to run modern microservice applications. And as we do that, of course, we gain something. We're able to decouple our software. We're able to decentralize not just how we run our applications, but we're also able to decentralize how the teams are building these applications. But as we do that and as we increase the number of services, we're also going to be reducing the simplicity of running everything in production. Of course, the monolith had many problems, but one thing the monolith had, it was simple. It's very simple to conceptually think about it. It's one thing, one thing only, we deploy it and it runs. Then of course, it's hard to scale, it's hard to deploy, it's hard to contribute, but it's simple. And as we decouple our services, of course that simplicity goes away, but we gain something else. It's dynamic. It's much faster. We can increase and improve the business at a much rapid pace. Running all of this would be very problematic if we didn't have a platform like Kubernetes. And so Kubernetes comes to the rescue. We can use Kubernetes to deploy our new services, our new applications in a very easy way by leveraging the abstraction layers that Kubernetes provides. Now, Kubernetes abstracts away our infrastructure, but all the workloads that Kubernetes is scheduling in the underlying virtual machines do not live under a rock. We still need to be able to access them from the outside. And in order to enable this use case, Kubernetes provides us with a few different resources that we could be using in order to make this happen. So there's three different ways. Actually, there is a fourth way, which is Qproxy, and I'm not going to cover that today. But primarily, there is three different ways that we can access our services from the outside using Kubernetes. We can configure a node port. We can configure a load balancer. We can configure an ingress. So let's go through all of them and deep dive into why ingress seems to be the best way to allow external traffic to enter our Kubernetes cluster. So let's start with node port. Node port is perhaps the most primitive way for exposing a service in Kubernetes so that external clients can consume it. It's a very simple concept. With node port, we're going to be opening up a port that's bound to the non-AP address for every service that we want to expose. That means if we have 10 different services, we're going to be having 10 different ports for each one of them. It's quite primitive because, of course, it's bound to the node-AP address. It's one service per port. And even the port range that we can use, it's quite limited. So if we want in production to allow clients to consume our services within our Kubernetes cluster, perhaps it's not the best way to do it. There is going to be another entity called load balancer, which allows us to expose a service via effectively a load balancer functionality that usually the cloud vendors implement with their own load balancer implementations. So we have our services. We want to be able to provision a load balancer. And this will effectively create one load balancer per service. The problem with this is that the cloud vendors are going to be charging us for every load balancer that we're starting. And if we do have many load balancers, this can get very expensive very quickly. Therefore, we're going to be looking at the ingress resource. So this is an independent resource. So this is not attached to our services, but it's independent. Whereas node port and load balancer were attached to the service object, to the service resource. This is independent. Therefore, it makes this resource quite decoupled and isolated from the services. It's like this additional obstruction layer that we are placing on top of our services. And this layer, this ingress allows us to put all the routing rules for all our services in one place. So we don't have them decoupled across each service, but they're in a separate place all together. The advantage of ingress is, you know, ingress is a spec and there's going to be different implementations that are going to be running on top of the ingress. Ingress abstracts away the basic routing functionality, but it still allows for ingress implementations to be able to provide higher value features on top of this layer that we can then apply. And we're going to see this in the case of con. We can then apply on top of our services. Now, the ingress, you know, doesn't change the IP address. It's the same IP address. We can expose our ingress to pretty much consume any service we have inside of our cluster. Like I said, the ingress, it's quite, comes in quite handy because it allows us to centralize all the routing rules in one place. Therefore, we can decide from that one place what services we want to expose and how we want to govern them by using the ingress implementations that we want to deploy, as well as in the case of con, these allows us to apply some of those higher level features in a quite, quite easy way. So, for example, by using a con ingress con, it's an open source and it's an open source API gateway. As a matter of fact, it's one of the most widely adopted open source API gateway in the community. You can find it on GitHub, of course. And we can apply authentication authorization rules. We can apply rate limiting rules, tracing metrics, observability. And the interesting thing about con in particular, you know, different ingress implementations have different feature set. Con is an L4 and L7 ingress, which means that we can use con, not just as your traditional, not just as an ingress used as an API gateway on top of our Kubernetes clusters, but we can also use it as a lightweight router to enable cross cluster communication across multiple Kubernetes clusters. So if we have some, you know, services running in one cluster, some services running in another cluster, and those services may not be APIs, HTTP APIs or GRPC APIs, but maybe, you know, for example, databases or Redis connections, whatever it is really, any TCP connection, con can route and enter within the cluster. It also supports K-native, if that's something that you're adopting. So con makes no assumption, effectively, as to what the underlying service is. It can be an API that we want to expose to our external developers or internal teams in the organization. It can also be a service that we want to consume from another service in another Kubernetes cluster. So it's quite flexible in the way it provisions this ingress functionality. Con, it's open source. You can deploy con on from GitHub. You know, it has been running con was created in 2015 and up until now, con has built not only adoption, but also quite of, you know, engaged community that helps us making the gateway better and better over time. It provides 100, you know, we, not only con, con right now has 1.5 million instances per month running across the world and, you know, was born in 2015 from another company before being the CTO and co-founder of con, CTO and co-founder of mesh shape, which was the largest API marketplace in the world back in 2015. Mesh shape, you know, was a marketplace that allowed the developers to either find the APIs to consume or publish their own API for, to allow other people to consume it. And so, you know, we needed ourselves a gateway that could run on Kubernetes that could run in a distributed way. And back then in 2015, there wasn't really anything like that. So we built it ourselves and we built it in a very, in a very lightweight and fast and fast way. The performance, the ease of use, the performance and the portability of con really are the three pillars that identify the project. And, you know, we built it for ourselves and then we have open-sourced it. And the con gateway adoption was so much faster than the mesh shape adoption that in 2017, we made a call to divest the marketplace mesh shape and focus fully on con. And since then con has been, you know, growing. We have 180 plus core contributors, 50,000 community members. And it's being adopted by not only community, but also organizations from all over the world. So it's quite of a stable and feature-rich gateway. And we also provide more than 500 plugins across the world that the community has built to enhance what the gateway can do. And of course, all of this feature set is available out of the box as an ingress on Kubernetes. I know that I'm seeing there is some questions about service mesh and gateway. I'm going to be addressing those questions later on at the end of this presentation. Born in 2015 from ash shape, Agnostic and Kubernetes naive. You can configure con, we can configure con by using Kubernetes CRDs. You know, hundreds of millions of downloads. It's been used in production and mission critical use cases in pretty much every industry. You know, everybody's moving to Kubernetes. Everybody needs an ingress. It's built on top of engine X when it comes to the networking, non-blocking networking IO. And we have extended engine X with Lua and Lujit. So if you're familiar with the Lua Lujit stack, that's called OpenResty. OpenResty effectively is a framework that allows us to hook into the request and response lifecycle that are, you know, that are being processed by engine X and it allows us to extend it on a very extremely fast virtual machine implementation of Lua, Lujit, and we've built, we've built an ingress and a service mesh. So I'm going to be talking about service mesh later on, data plane that can be deployed pretty much anywhere. In Kubernetes ingress, it's only one of the deployments. There is 20 plus different deployments. You could be downloading this on a Raspberry Pi and make that part of your cluster. So it's very simple, lightweight, but also quite extensible. The concept of plugins, it's a very important concept in Kong. You know, Kong without plugins, it's a pluggable framework, but it doesn't do much. Plugins really are the features and functionalities that we can adopt on top of our APIs. And some of these plugins are built by Kong, some of these plugins are built by the community, and there is a plugin SDK that allows pretty much everybody to build their own plugins if they want to do so. You can build plugins in Lua, in C, in Golang, so it's quite extensible. Plugins can do all sorts of things. Plugins can provide authentication and authorization features. Plugins can provide security, traffic control, integrations with server less, integration with monitoring and analytics solutions, transformations, logging. There is, I believe, more than 60-plus plugins that are bundled with Kong and are available out of the box. And then, like I said, there is a community of 500-plus plugins on GitHub that we could also be using on top of our Ingress. The Kubernetes Ingress Controller, particularly, it was all together in one repository. We found out that that doesn't really scale much well when it comes to the issues and pre-request management, so we decided to separate the Ingress Controller aspects of Kong into a separate repository, Kong slash Kubernetes-Ingress-Controller, and we also provide a set of guides and tutorials that will help you getting up and running with setting up a very flexible Ingress, the Kong Ingress, on top of any Kubernetes cluster on any cloud, and then being able to apply plugins on top of it. So in the demo today, we're going to be seeing security plugins, we're going to be seeing rate-limiting plugins, we're going to be seeing observability plugins. So let's not waste any time, let's go straight into the demo. But before I go, so there is a question, does Kong support service mesh, like Envoy or Istio? Do you need a service mesh with Kong? You can use Kong. Kong doesn't make any assumptions to what the upstream service is. It can be a service mesh, and we have integrated it natively with Istio and with Kuma. Kuma is a service mesh that's open source and has been donated two days ago to the CNCF foundation as a sandbox project, and it integrates natively with Kong. So you can use Kong as an Ingress to enter a mesh, you can also use Kong as an Ingress for a mesh, and we can apply our plugins not just in the Ingress capacity, but also in the Ingress capacity. So it can work pretty much with all sorts of things. We can also use Kong in front of, for example, AWS lambdas, we can also use Kong in front of Kafka. We provide Kafka transformations to automatically transition a service to service request into an event-based request. So the plugins that Kong provides are extremely powerful. Today, in the demo for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to be showing some very simple plugins, but you can take this as a starting point to go and experiment with more plugins, plugins that do request a response transformation, all sorts of things. So today in the demo, I'm going to be sharing my screen now. I'm going to be running a mini cube cluster on my computer. I'm going to be deploying a very simple service that I'm going to be using for the demo, and I'm going to be deploying a Kong Ingress. Then once I have the Kong Ingress deployed, I'm going to be configuring a few plugins on top of the Ingress so we can all see how it works with plugins and what Kong can do. And this is really meant to give you a look and fail of the project. So I'm going to be sharing my screen now, and if everything went well, you should be seeing my terminal. Right now I'm running an empty cluster, so this is an empty Kubernetes cluster running on top of mini cube. There is really nothing going on here, so the first thing I'm going to be doing is deploying a simple service that we're going to be using for our demo. First and foremost, all these instructions showing my browser now, all of these instructions can be found in the documentation, so in the docs directory we do provide a set of guides and tutorials that you can follow, and really it shows just some of the things that we can demonstrate on top of Kong, but then of course all of these all of the plugins could be used in an ingress capacity, so we're talking about many different plugins and many different integrations that can use out of the box on top of Kong. So let's go ahead and install a very simple service I call it the echo service that's going to be echoing back every request I'm making. So this service is quite simple, it's a service, it's a deployment and it echoes back pretty much every request we're sending to the service. So if I look at the name space, I'm sorry at the pods, we see that we have a new echo and if I look at the services that have right now deployed, we see that there is an echo service. So if I port forward the echo service we can make a few requests to it and as you would expect, this is a very simple service that just echoes back the request that I'm making the request headers, the request body and so on and so forth. So it's very simple and it's great for debugging purposes. Now I'm connecting to this service using port forward, but that's not the point of this demo. The point of this demo is to use an ingress to be able to consume this service.  So if you go if we go back to the homepage of our repository there's different ways that we can install ingress, we can just use a YAML, we can use Helm Helm charts for this presentation I'm going to use the YAML and this will create a few resources in our system including a con namespace. So if we go and explore the con namespace we see that the ingress is being created right now this is a blank, it's a brand new minicube so it's going to download the container and then run it. It shouldn't take that much there we go, now it's running I'm waiting for it to be fully fully ready and there we go. So now that we have our ingress running what I'm going to be doing is applying a very simple ingress configuration that is going to be exposing our echo service on a on a slash path. So what this does it's quite simple. I'm echoing back a configuration that creates a new ingress resource called demo we can configure annotations in the ingress in this case I am going to be stripping the path with con, I'm setting up an HTTP rule, every request to a root will go to a service name called echo on the service board, quite straightforward if I apply this configuration we do create an ingress and if I now expose, if I now go to the IP address of minicube which is here I'll be able to access the ingress and access my service so let's go there and there we go this is the service being consumed through the ingress like I said this ingress doesn't do much it's a simple ingress, it's a simple router that runs on top of an HTTP service there is no functionality whatsoever running on top of this right now but let's change that let's go ahead for example and look at some of the plugins that we can apply on top of ingress so let's say I want to protect the ingress with a key authentication protection so this allows us to effectively have an API key to access our services, if I go on the key authentication plugin like every plugin provides a few things it provides a name that's unique in this case it's the key of plugin and provides a configuration I can configure many things here but I'm going to be using the simplest configuration I can possibly have for this plugin and that is just a name so I'm going to be creating a new plugin resource this ships with the ingress I'm going to be assigning a name to this resource and I'm going to be specifying the name of the plugin that I want to use I could be using any plugin in this case I'm using the key op plugin and you can find the names of those plugins by clicking on the plugin hub on you know but anyways let's go ahead and apply this plugin so I'm creating a plugin configuration that it's going to be available to the ingress but in order to make this work with the ingress I also need to update my ingress resource with this new annotation which determines what plugins are going to be running on the execution path of the ingress and in this case it's this new plugin configuration I've just created so if I do this I update the ingress object and if I go back and consume my service this is not going to work anymore so this is not going to work because the ingress will receive the request it will determine that there is a plugin enabled in this case key authentication and it will determine that I didn't set any key in my request therefore I am not outrised to make the request in order to be able to provision a key I need to create a con consumer a consumer in con it's like I'm a client or a developer and a consumer can have multiple keys so you know with con we can implement quite complex and this is just for key op but we can implement quite complex rules to what consumers what users are able to consume what services and how they are going to be managing the keys so in this case in order to move forward I need to create a consumer object in con con consumer named marco and then I need to be able I need to create a key that the marco consumer will use in order to be able to consume the service and this key as you can imagine one second this key is going to be a Kubernetes secret so I'm going to be creating a Kubernetes secret marco api key of con credential type key op with the following secret key the credential type it's key op because we want to create a simple api key but it can be you know different authentication plugins are going to be having different types so if I do this I create an api key and associate the api key to the consumer to the consumer by updating the consumer object and adding a new credentials array that determines what keys belong to this user so in this case I want the marco consumer to be associated with the key we have just created and that is secret one two three so if I do this we have an ingress we have a plugin we have a consumer and we have a key so let's go ahead and now make a request with the api key secret one two three and this request will now work again if I enter a wrong key the request will be blocked quite simple now of course you know being able to secure with an api key it's probably one of the simplest things that we can do another thing that we want to be able to perform on top of an ingress is visualizing what are all the requests that are coming through and for doing that comp provides a native Prometheus and Grafana integration so if you go to analytics and monitoring we can see that it provides we integrate with a few different providers but Prometheus is one of them so what I'm going to be doing is creating a new monitoring namespace where I'm going to be downloading Prometheus and Grafana and then I'm going to be collecting metrics from the ingress out of the box and I create a new monitoring namespace and then within this monitoring namespace I am going to be installing Prometheus and you know the values and the configurations all of these examples are available on the GitHub repository for the ingress so I'm going to be installing Prometheus and I am going to be installing Grafana as well so if I do this obviously there is a new monitoring namespace then I can look into the monitoring namespace monitoring and I can see that we have a few different services running and initializing so this is going to take a while because it's downloading Prometheus and Grafana for my mini cube this is where the fan on my laptop starts turning on and increasing in speed I can hear it and we are waiting for Grafana and then once we have all of these running we should also be able to see a few services here and that is the Grafana service which I am going to be using to load to load the dashboard and see our monitoring information now Prometheus is running, Grafana is running again this is not going to work until I install the Prometheus plugin the Prometheus plugin is a plugin with name Prometheus that determines that I am going to be able to make all the metrics available and so if I go back to my terminal I am going to be running the Prometheus plugin on top of I am going to create this new resource ConqPluginPrometus on top of my Kubernetes cluster and if I do that now we have enabled metrics collection from our rengress so let's go and load the Grafana the Grafana service so if I go look at the services I have here monitoring there is going to be Grafana before I do that let me get to the Grafana I will extract the Grafana password that we are going to be using later on to connect and login into Grafana and now that I can do that I can port forward service Grafana monitoring namespace I am going to now expose it on port 3000 so now that we have that I can go on port 3000 this will start Grafana admin, the password is the password that we have retrieved from the Kubernetes secret and I should be able to login and that's great I am inside Grafana right now as you can see Grafana with the example I have executed it ships with a Kong official dashboard so I am going to be loading this dashboard and we can see obviously we can the charts that out of the box we provide on top of the ingress now there is no request being made so what I am going to be doing is generate, simulate some traffic so that this gets a little bit more interesting in Grafana so I am just going to be simulating some traffic in a while through loop on my terminal and by going back to Grafana the last five minutes we should be seeing you know Prometheus I forgot what's the interval but Prometheus fetches every X number of seconds that the matrix and this is configurable at one point here we should start seeing the charts let's see let's wait a few seconds there we go we are seeing we are seeing the first point coming up online and as the next interval kicks in these points should become a line let's wait a little bit longer let's wait I am just refreshing and refreshing so as soon as it pops up we are going to be able to see it there we go so these are the request per seconds that I am generating from my while through loop on curl and it shows the service in this case the echo service it shows the bandwidth it shows all sorts of things of course now you know we have used the key authentication plugin we have used the Prometheus plugin so we can secure and we can observe what the traffic that we are sending to the ingress another common use case for an ingress is to rate limit the number of requests that our consumers can make on con we have this concept of plugins that can be applied globally to every service or every consumer that we are configuring but we can also apply plugins per specific service we can also apply plugins per specific consumer and we can apply plugins per a specific service and consumer so in your typical APN management use case we are going to be having consumers that can make let's say 100 requests per second but then there is going to be some users or consumers that we want to whitelist so with con we can apply plugins for those kind of consumers to give them a higher limit if we want to do so now the plugins can be applied just the rate limiting plugin but any plugin can be applied on each combination of consumer service so if you are going to be trying con ingress and you are going to be running this on your system you can definitely experiment with all of them so let's go ahead and install the rate limiting plugin so I am going to be stopping I I am going to be stopping my request generator here I am going to be stopping the port forwarding for Grafana and I am going to be running another stuff I am going to be installing another plugin that will protect and secure our request so that we are not going to be able to send more than 5 per minute we are going to be using the rate limiting plugin the rate limiting plugin can be quite complex in a sense that it is quite simple to get up and running with the rate limiting plugin we want to even further customize the behavior we have lots of properties that we can choose from so in the case of rate limiting we can choose how many requests per second per minute per hour per day per month we want to use per year we can limit by the consumer by credential so let's say that we want to limit just one APA key not another APA key we can limit by service we can limit by all sorts of things so we can also store if we want the counters in a third party or we also support Postgres and Cassandra as backend stores for Khan for example in the case we want to build a global rate limiting policy that can be shared across different regions and different clusters so I am going to be installing my rate limiting plugin that's global I am going to be limiting by 5 requests per minute I am going to be applying this configuration and then let's make more than 5 requests per minute 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the system will then rate limit the request as you can see it's quite straightforward simplicity is one of the things that we put lots of effort in the past few years to make sure that Khan could be simple to get up and running with simple to deploy, simple to scale and of course there is more advanced functionality and you are only getting exposed to that complexity when the time is right and when we really need it but not to get up and running with very simple use cases I have been doing a demo I will be running this demo for 20 minutes now and we installed the service, we set up an English rule we created a consumer a key, we have set up observability we are now rate limiting all the requests you can see that it's quite straightforward when it comes to configuring these resources so I want to focus a little bit on the service mesh questions Khan can work on top of a very simple service, a very simple API, it can work on top of functions in the case of Kubernetes it can work on top of Knative but it can also work with a service mesh service mesh is a topic that I have been very involved in in the past year in the context of Kuma we do support a Cycler Envoy proxy that allows the Khan Ingress to be able to perform gateway functionality on the Ingress site and then proxy the request to a Cycler Envoy proxy in order to be able to provision the right Mutual TLS certificates that would allow the request to enter the mesh service mesh and we think of the concept of service mesh it's quite service mesh has a very flat view of the world in a service mesh world there are services and it can be anything that makes a request or receives a request over the network and then we're going to be having those service requests that connect these different services together in the context of service mesh any service that makes a request or receives a request like an API database like reddit it is a service so the Khan gateway it's not any different from any other service that we're running in our system the Khan gateway will receive requests and make requests so the gateway is a service itself we can easily deploy a Cycler container next to Khan gateway and by default we support Istio and Kuma and by default that whole flow from ingress to mesh it's completely taken care of so that we don't have to worry about setting it up because it comes out of the box with Istio and Kuma also we've been working with and I've been personally involved with many service mesh use cases with larger organizations that are going to be running multiple meshes for different kinds of businesses or for different teams it's very hard for one large mesh for everybody, for a couple of reasons we may want to start different meshes at different times therefore we don't want to enable too much we don't want to require too much team coordination if they're all working on one mesh especially if they're coming from different lines of businesses and also we want to be able to enforce more security or more isolation across different meshes in different applications so one of the use cases that they've been seeing is using Kong as these hop in the network that would allow to exit one mesh as an egress and then enter another mesh as in an ingress capacity and so it is basically the gateway that not only allows us to accept external traffic to come inside of the Kubernetes cluster but also within the same cluster it could be used as an internal gateway that allows us to exit one mesh and then to another mesh and in between being able to enforce user policies and API governance policies or onboarding policies to determine how those APIs are being consumed if I am in a bank working for a global bank and I'm creating a banking application and there is another team building a trading application for all intents and purposes that trading team needs to be going through an onboarding process in order to be able to access the banking API so even if we work for the same organization I still want to be able to enforce rules on how that team is going to be using my system and I want to expose just a subset of the APIs not all of the APIs that are running in my banking app and so the gateway use case it's perfect for this because I can put a gateway internally expose just the APIs that they want the other teams to consume with no dependencies whatsoever you know when we deploy a service mesh we have a decentralized sidecar deployment that needs to be deployed alongside each one of our services and that sidecar needs to be able to consume the control plane and there is instances where I don't want we can't deploy a sidecar or we don't want the sidecar to connect to our control plane because the control plane is quite sensitive and only our services should be able to get access to it therefore I can use a gateway to exit one mesh, enter another mesh or I can use a gateway to enter a mesh from the edge from a mobile client for example or from external developers that couldn't deploy a sidecar anyways even if they wanted to because we don't want to require them to do that and we don't want their sidecar to talk to our control plane so anyways to answer the question yes con can be used in front of any service mesh in instant human in particular con natively supports an envoy as a sidecar proxy because con like any other service is a service in the service mesh and also con can be used for more traditional APIs as well as con can be used as a lightweight router to enable cross cluster Kubernetes communication when it comes to pretty much any traffic not just HTTP or jrpc traffic but any l4 traffic so it can be Kafka can be mongo can be mysql can be literally anything and we have users using con in all of these different capacities so I hope that helps and I am going to be stop the screen share and go into the next slide so today we have looked at different ways that we can expose our services in Kubernetes not port load balancer ingress we focused on the con ingress controller we've seen a live demo that allows us to secure and protect and rate limit and observe all the traffic that's going through the ingress we went on a dissertation about service mesh and that's all so thank you so much you can download con at cong.q.com slash install I'm going to be connected for the next five minutes just in case you have some additional questions otherwise you can find me online at subnet marco on twitter or you can get involved with con and with the ingress on our community channels that you can find on github you can find on cong.q.com as well and if you're looking for a service mesh that's quite simple to use and it's vendor neutral and it's a cncf sandbox project you can now look at kuma.io as a matter of fact it's the first envoy based service mesh that has been donated to the cncf foundation which is a linux foundation entity and of course the ingress controller natively communicates with kuma and kuma compared to Istio it's much simpler to use it's a turnkey service mesh it scales quite well across the organization by supporting multi-tenancy and multi-mesh support and it can run on top of Kubernetes but also beautiful machine workloads and as a matter of fact there was a new version of kuma yesterday that introduces a quite scalable and flexible way to support multiple regions and multiple Kubernetes clusters within the same mesh of course then you can put an ingress controller like con on top of all of this so you have the full stack end to end ingress and service mesh all connected with each other the api gateway so there is one question how different is it from Istio and this question was asked in the context of the con ingress when I was introducing con ingress the ingress controller an ingress controller like con it has been used in an api gateway capacity and so the question is really if we have to abstract this question away the question is what is the difference between an api gateway and a service mesh you see the api gateway and the service mesh are different kinds of deployments service mesh allows us to so service mesh it's more low level service mesh it's more of a service connectivity concern so we want we're making requests and connecting services together within the application and we want to secure that traffic we want to encrypt it we want to be able to observe that traffic so within the application we're going to be deploying a mesh that does all of that now we want our application to be able to talk to other applications we want to apply user governance on how the users are accessing our system we want to be able to provide a developer portal and a catalog to enter our api in a very specific and we want to do that with a centralized deployment so we do not want our clients consuming apis to require a sidecar in order to be able to consume our services as we know in a service mesh a service can consume another service only if both of them have a sidecar because the sidecar will assign the right mutual intelligence identity to the request that allows us to make that request in the first place if we have external developers outside of the organization we don't want to require a sidecar and most importantly we do not want to require them to connect their sidecar to our control plane which is a very sensitive topic it's a very sensitive system in our infrastructure and so we're going to be having an obstruction layer an api gateway deployed in an ingress capacity that can perform that can allow anybody to consume our services it can perform user onboarding and user governance in a centralized way it exposes only a subset of the apis that we want them to consume and then the ingress will enter the mesh to process that request and you know quite frankly the tracing and the observability aspects of them can be federated together so that we can trace and observe the entire flow from ingress to service mesh you know with a very tight integration in the case of cong that integration is with isio and with kuma can you help talk more about how cong connect to different meshes you see we can use cong as an ingress to a mesh but we can also use cong as an egress from a mesh so if you want to so first and foremost exiting one mesh and entering another mesh means that we are going to be provisioning the right mutual TLS certificates that allow us to exit the mesh and then enter another mesh which is most likely going to be secured with a different certificate authority so what the ingress does what cong do in this case it allows us to funnel the egress requests through the gateway and then the gateway with our anvoy integration will reprovision the mutual TLS to enter the other mesh so effectively the gateway really is this hop in the network that allows us to exit one mesh and enter another mesh there is a blog post that I have written a while ago and it is about the difference between gateway and service mesh this is the blog post that I have written and here I am talking about the difference between gateways the difference between service mesh but most importantly at the end I also show an example of a gateway can be used to enter and exit different meshes so this is a very nice explanation the blog is called the difference between an API gateway and a service mesh that I strongly suggest to read because it really clears all of these up and QMA is the cloud native the CNCF only anvoy based service mesh donated to the foundation that we can use out of the box to create a mesh and then integrate it with a gateway at QAM and QMA like QAM in QAM we have plugins and QMA we have policies that do all sorts of things and we design integration with QAM and of course we welcome more integrations with other gateways if anybody wants to contribute to them I strongly suggest reading this blog post then there is another question would Ingress Controller be a complement or a replacement for the open shift for Ingress Controller? It would be a replacement with Khan we are getting a replacement of an Ingress Controller it's a different implementation that supports L4 and L7, it supports Knitv out of the box it supports a full cycle API management really and it also allows us to exit and enter different service meshes built in either on top of Istio or QMA within our system so it's quite feature rich, it's quite performant and it can cover pretty much all the use cases that normally we would need when deploying an Ingress Controller so I strongly suggest to give it a try and there is a very vibrant open source community that can also help if you get stuck or if you have feedback or if you have questions there is another question, can you integrate with a certificate manager or do you have your own Acne Certificate Management Controller? It can connect with it can provision its own certificates, you can provision Khan, Ingress Controller with your own certificates, we also have integrations with Ashicorp Vault if you want to support at our party PKI so I strongly suggest to look at the plugins because they provide different ways to configure all these different aspects and of course the official documentation by the way we can find that on .com slash docs so that covers pretty much all the different security use cases. We can not only secure with Mutual TLS and encrypt everything that goes through the Ingress, we can also integrate the Mutual TLS of the Ingress with Autoparty Service Mesh we can also install on top of Mutual TLS about 10 plus different authentication and authorization plugins like OpenID Connect Jot Tokens, HMAC, API, API Keys is one of them and basic authentication you know it's quite complex on top of Khan and so we can also have different plugins for different services which is pretty cool that means if we have many different services in our running in our Kubernetes clusters we can secure some of them with OpenID Connect, we can secure them some of them with Mutual TLS only we can secure some of them with API key only so it is quite flexible on how we can manage this entire system and you know also you know something that makes me very proud about Khan, Khan has been used by hundreds of enterprise organizations in production for mission critical workloads so when we're looking at Khan, we're not just looking at an open source Ingress or gateway that does all of these things but we're looking at an enterprise grade gateway that really can run in all of these capacities in pretty much any enterprise environment so Khan can also sync up for example a very more complex use case would be being able to manage multiple Kongs across different Kubernetes clusters, across different clouds and for example integrate all of this with an on-premise data center. Khan can do all of the above so this demo today was quite simple but Khan supports all of these modes as a matter of fact it's quite of a portable system and Kuma, the service mesh that we are also contributing to it's also quite portable. It's a service mesh that can run on service mesh and Kubernetes and we can integrate both together by abstracting away the service-to-service connectivity between a virtual machine workload and a Kubernetes workload so if you're looking for a service mesh that can span across all of your environments I also suggest looking at Kuma. It seems like we're coming up at the top of my time so again if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer them online. You can find me on Twitter, you can find me on GitHub so keep them coming. Thank you so much for coming to my talk and I hope all of these is clear and exciting enough for you so that you can get up and running with it very easily. So thank you so much. You can find Khan at again www.KongHQ.com flash install. I'll see you online. Thank you.


Have you ever said to yourself, I wish I read more? Let me give you three ninja hacks from a power reader. Number one, reading the shower. Let me explain what number two, use audio books. Set the books to between 0.75 speed and 2X. Set the phone right outside the shower, don't get it wet, obviously, prop it against some towels.  And then number three, always keep a stack of at least three books next to your bed. Use books to also help you fall asleep. Kill insomnia and you read more at the same time, but don't read anything too fascinating at the end.


Welcome to the 30th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm your host, Steve Patterson, and I've got an awesome interview for you today. We're talking about Buddhism. Some of the most difficult questions in philosophy have to do with the nature of the self and consciousness and personal identity. These issues are central in Buddhist philosophy. I had a wonderful conversation about these topics with a professor at Harvard while I was in Boston. My guest is Dr. Janet Gyatso, who is the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard. She's the author of many books, including Apparitions of the Self, which is the topic that we're talking about today. Before we dive into it, I'm happy to announce that Square One, the Foundations of Knowledge, my first book on philosophy, is now available for pre-sale. The book will be officially released on Cyber Monday. That's the 28th of November, but you can reserve a copy today. Go to stevedashpatterson.com slash books and you'll see the link for it. It's by far the most important thing that I've ever written, and I'm going to be referencing it for the rest of my entire life, so if you're interested in logic and epistemology and foundational questions and you want a clear answer to the question, can we know anything with certainty, then that's the book for you. I'm also happy to announce that Patterson in Pursuit is going to be back on the road starting December 6th. My wife and I officially got tickets to New Zealand, and then we're going to go to Australia. There's a mathematician down in Australia that I can't wait to talk with, so about a month from today we will be leaving upstate New York and continuing our international journey. 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So I hope you guys enjoy my interview with Dr. Janet Ghiazzo, and this is another interview very high on my list when I get to recording some more interview breakdowns. Enjoy. So first of all, I want to thank you for sitting down and speaking with me today. Sure, no, it's my pleasure. I am perplexed by one phenomenon I keep thinking about and I don't have a good answer for it, and it's my own consciousness. So I like the idea of the physicalist worldview. I think it's very simple, it's very easy to understand, there's nothing remarkable going on, and I can explain a great deal within the physicalist framework, but when I think about myself, when I introspect, and I'm aware of my feelings, I have a very difficult time putting that into the physicalist worldview. I say, well, it seems like I am some kind of a being, or some kind of person, or my consciousness doesn't seem like it itself is some physically-existent thing, it doesn't seem like it's a particle, or some assortment of matter, and so I was wondering what the Buddhist conception of the self is, and could it be fit into the physicalist metaphysics, or does it imply something bigger than the physicalist metaphysics? Well, okay, so there is a lot of parts of that question. And first of all, just the notion of the self, the self is a very important term in Buddhism, and it's one of the sort of key doctrinal insistence that the self is generally a construct that we create, and it doesn't have, it doesn't refer to anything that exists independently in the world, but rather it's dependent upon how we construct it, and many things go into its construction. And so one of the biggest points in all of Buddha's thought is that we need to be aware of this fact, because the ensuing attachment that we have to any idea or definition that we have of ourselves as a self gets in the way and leads to a lot of problems. In fact, it's one of our worst problems, and this problem then gets connected to what is usually often translated as essentialism about any given thing, so it's not only the self, but any given identity of anything, be that in the physical or mental world. So the question of the physical and mental is a different question than that of the nature of the self, and certainly definitions of the self can be myself as my body or whatever, and that would be a physical definition. Myself is a kind of personality or a set of propensities, it's a kind of set of emotions, and so on and so forth. So the question, the relationship between mind and body that I'll just say is one of my big interests as well. And I share with you a kind of desire to really privilege physical existence in and I do think that in some ways everything does boil down to physical existence. But the so there's two things in kind of classical Buddhist doctrine, there is a clear distinction between body and mind, these are terms, Namarupa for example. And so lots of formulations are put in those terms. And so they are clearly seeing that these are two domains that are not completely collapsible. However, when you do the kind of work that I do in Buddhist studies, I find many sorts of instances where we really see one being an epiphenomenon of the other. And that's, you know, I think asking that question in the particular terms we're asking it now, you know, is we're maybe asking those questions a different way than they did. But, you know, but if we use Buddhist philosophy as a resource to think about these issues and they thought about them a lot, actually, and in many different domains, I think there's a lot more to be said about it.  So I guess for me, when I think of the self, it has this very intimate connection with the mind, with consciousness, but it's almost one layer deeper that there is, it's not just the phenomena of consciousness, it's my consciousness. I feel like I'm this being who is experiencing these things, it's not just the experience is happening, it's that it's my experience, that me part. So that me part, you're saying that's a construction, can we dive a little more into that? So what does it mean for something to be a construction? Is it an illusion? Is it something that doesn't actually exist? Is it something, is it a concept that we think actually has some kind of independent existence, but really it doesn't? No, it is a concept and it does exist as an illusion.  I'm teaching my intro to Buddhism class and we're talking about all these questions. But the my part of the my consciousness has a lot of different means and in what that my consists and what its status is with respect to consciousness could be quite different. It's not obvious exactly what that means. And Buddhists would say that yeah, it doesn't, there is no independent existence of this entity that would allow the genitive pronoun my to stand on its own other than an idea that we create or a way of explaining things to ourselves. So it's at least conceivable that there could be some type of conscious goings on without that possessive. Absolutely, that's kind of one of the things that they play with. So is that a state of mind that somebody can experience? Is the being the conscious without the being the being or being the person? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now again, what that means is very various and complicated, but yes, and at the minimum even if you could say that the minus, the status of the my or the ego or the cogito or whatever doesn't dissolve 100% but to the degree that it's sidelined and reduced is the degree to which we're able to empathize with others and the degree to which we're aware of reality around ourselves and the degree to which we're less attached to identity issues and can function more ethically, more creatively in the world. So when you said we can't entirely get rid of it 100% Well, I'm not saying that, I'm saying even if, so whether we can or not is itself a question, whether I believe that or whether that's what Buddhists say or any particular Buddhist school says that, I Buddhist schools do come out with statements that you could entirely get rid of it, but then when you look closely at what exactly do they mean by that against complicated, but on the surface they will say yes, you can get rid of it, but I was saying that even if we don't have to like talk about that. Okay, so let me ask you, because this is when I experience phenomena as I interact with the world, I have developed this explanation for what's going on that I don't know how it can be compatible with what you've just presented, which is it seems like there is a point of perspective that I have or my perspective, we can put that in quotation marks, but I also believe that you, or at least what I'm referencing when I use that term, also have a perspective and it's the same, and it's very similar in the sense that there is this perspective and that perspective and they're not ultimately the same perspective, doesn't that imply some kind of a self or at least some kind of a true metaphysical difference between the perspectives? No, not at all. For one thing, your perspective is always changing and my perspective is always changing first of all, and that's a really important part of this, the sort of logical proof that is given about the self is that it's always changing, it doesn't remain the same, and so at the minimum you have to say that any kind of such conception is a shorthand for what in fact is always in flux. And so once it's always in flux, going back to Aristotle, something that's always in flux undermines its ability to have an essence. And the main Buddhist critique is about this notion of essence, and the idea that you have a perspective and that I have a perspective, even if both of them are in flux, the very fact that we're able to communicate shows that there's important ways that our perspectives overlap. And there also are extremely important ethical capacities to take on the perspective of others. You may not be able, again, you may not be 100%, but we are able to do that, we try to do that. It's a very important part of what we do, actually as human beings in the community of people. So would you say then the claim could be something like this that what exists is not a bunch of selves with fundamentally different perspectives, that there's one type of thing that's out there, one type of consciousness, and it's artificially broken up between them? No, no, we're not going there either. So that would be to hypothesize a one consciousness. Okay. So any, the aim, the target that the Buddhists are aiming at is the hypothesization or the essentialization.  The problem with all of it is not to see that every single one of those things is constructed out of many different parts and those are constantly shifting and the way that we name them depends on what particular perspective we're taking at any one particular moment, which itself is always changing. And so there are, there's energy, there's phenomena, things are happening, but none of them have an essential identity or essential essence. So when you say things are happening, but if they don't have an identity, then they're not really things, right? No, that's the whole point is that things don't need an identity in order to be there. So what are you referencing when you use the term things? I'm always referencing it from whatever particular angle that I'm taking. So, you know, you do need to give things identity and common human communication and you do that all the time, but those again are products of our conceptions, our set of concepts, our set of constructions and they don't necessarily belong to the thing as such. So there is no thing per se? No, everything's in flux. Everything's constantly changing. But there is everything, but there's not one particular thing. There's not an everything either. So you're just, then you're just moving to making this one big thing in the sky or something. So no, there isn't, the universe is infinite. And so if you were to think of the world as, or just take the room that we're in, everything in the room is constantly in flux. It's constantly changing. It's constantly moving. And if we were to see this on a screen, it would be constantly morphing. Nothing would be standing still. And to say, okay, there's this thing Steve over here and there's this Janet, we would have to like cut out a picture and freeze frame, but that would be itself artificial. Okay, so that's the point. So when we say that, it sounds, so when I think this just in common language, it seems like you're saying really nothing exists, in a sense. We're like, there's no thing. Well, yeah, so it's the thing-ness, but it depends what you mean by nothing exists. It's not the blank nothing-ness. It's like, that's one of the problems with language is any word I use to talk about what does exist is gonna run into trouble if you put it under a microscope. So the word thing I was using as a sort of provisional term to try to get a handle, but actually any such term that when we look at closely, we're gonna see that that too is a construction. That still doesn't mean that there's nothing. Okay, so there is something, there's not something, there's something. Yeah, put it that way. Okay, so this is the kind of language game you have to get into, and that's what the Buddhist texts are always doing. And they use language that way to try to break down our habits of thinking to open up new modes of thinking. So for that something, is it, does it have any constituent parts to it? Yeah, but each of those parts themselves are made up of constituent parts down to an infinite regress. So there's no base anything. No. Okay. You take a deep breath. Yeah, I have to think about it. So if it's true that at some level, there is something or there is constituent parts, it seems like it would require that ultimately that you don't have an infinite regress, that you can't have something made up of a lot of nothing. Because it depends on what you mean by nothing. So nothing doesn't mean blank slate or total darkness, blackness. It just means that nothing is hypothesized. Okay, this is an excellent segue then because a lot of people, especially in the West, when we read Eastern ideas, I think a lot of people take them, I think they interpret them the wrong way. They take them very, very literally and I think it causes all kinds of problems. Like for example, sometimes it says nothing exists. I think a lot of people take that to mean, oh, literally nothing. No, it's nothing that exists. Exactly, which I don't think that's what the Eastern. No, I'm not saying that. So what appear to be paradoxes, is it nothing exists? Well, that's not literally true. What is the Buddhist take on paradox or even logical contradiction? Like are these things that are meant to get a deeper premise to get us to realize our constructions about the world or do they accept, look, there are some paradoxes that are actually there and you just kind of have to deal with it. It's the former. The former. Okay, so for logic specifically, would you say that in Buddhist thinking there is any acceptance of actual logical contradiction? You can make a logical contradiction. You can make it all the time. It depends what it means and how you're using it. So if I say something like, I exist and I don't exist. You can say that, but it doesn't make any sense. So then, we're not gonna bother with stuff that makes no sense. You can say that. And every utterance depends on its rhetorical context and what you're trying to do with it and how you're using it. And so any one single utterance taken out of context can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. And that's another major part. It's very similar to what I've already been saying that our notion of ourself, it depends on what perspective we take on it and the same thing for language. So that you certainly can construct a paradox, but what's the status of that paradox? Is it an artificial game or whatever? I mean, the thing about paradox in certain kinds of Buddhist texts, it is the former of the two options you gave that a seeming paradox requires us to maybe move to another level to understand certain assumptions that we're bringing to that paradox. Yes, I think that that makes a great deal of sense. And I can refer also to the law of the excluded middle, which is like saying, either I exist or I don't exist. I've actually worked on this topic a little bit and the law of the excluded middle depends on a faulty presumption that there's a clear dividing line between exist and doesn't exist or yes and no. And it's a bifurcated line, which yeah, that's a paradox if you accept that assumption. But if you don't accept that assumption, the whole thing falls away. So would you say something like that specifically on the law of the excluded middle that it presupposes identity or it presupposes that there are boundaries? Exactly, the meaningfulness and absoluteness of boundaries. Yes, that's right, absolutely. So in my conversations that I've had with a lot of people, especially maybe if they haven't heard this perspective, the idea that in Eastern philosophy, they embrace actual logical contradiction. This is just an error. It's not supposed to come in that way. No, not at all, no, right. They're not idiots. We'd have to examine a particular case, what is this contradiction and how's it being used and so on and so forth. But no, not at all do they embrace those contradictions. If anything, they'll say, oh, on one level, it's yes and on another level, it's no. The contradictions are difficult to understand. I was just teaching a very important Buddhist text today in my class two hours ago which really stops the brain and on the surface appears to be blatantly self-contradictory, but it isn't. Actually, they're trying to make another point and they think that the exercise in figuring that out is gonna be very beneficial. This is another excellent segue. So my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong here, my understanding of the Zen cones and it has a similar goal as something like meditation which is it is trying to get people to calm their mental constructing, it's trying to quiet that down so that you can just exist and have a more true understanding of what exists by relaxing those boundaries, if you will. Is that accurate? Yeah, it's not only relaxing them but it's also seeing through them and understanding them. The koan thing's a little different, it's less about calming. The koan is a tradition of confrontation between master and disciple in which they're posing a seemingly contradictory paradox or they say something that's very outlandish and the contradiction or the situation bears reflection and by virtue of reflection one gets to a state where one is able to either transcend the seeming contradiction or something happens to our habitual thought processes. So it's not only a thing of calming but calming is certainly part of it. When you say they get to a state of transcending can you unpack that a little bit? What does it mean to transcend I don't mean transcend in the usual way of like a transcendent philosophy but it's more like sometimes a contradiction will be posed in order to get the person to realize that the point of it is to expose the inability of a certain kind of propositional statement to ever be exactly correct. So the transcending is a transcending between like a particular proposition and to look at the larger phenomenon and that makes the proposition possible which is the very functioning of language and so it's to draw your attention to the function of language rather than assuming that language has an obvious unproblematic reference. Okay so I have two more questions for you. One on this line has to do with the term the unity of opposites. I've seen this term come up a lot. Can you explain what in Buddhist thinking is the unity of opposites that maybe you can't have black without white or you need in order for something to appear as a thing it has to be in contrast to a background or in contrast to something else. But would it be fair to say that the central idea or one of the central ideas in Buddhism is to reject or to see past that boundary that we're saying there's some objective distinction between this and that that ultimately that is a dualistic bifurcation that doesn't actually exist or that it's artificial? Yeah but I'm worried about the notion of unity. I would say the relativity or the interdependence rather than the unity and it depends on which way they're unified. And by no means you have this common phrase that students all think is what Buddhism means is all is one. And I've never seen a statement like that in Buddhist texts and because once again if there's first of all they're not trying to erase difference there is difference even though it's always relative it's not absolute but it is relative and they're not posing some one big fat one out there. I think that's a more Hinduistic idea. Well yeah and I'd be careful also using the word Hindu but you can say in the Upanishadic literature which is one early branch of what's now called Hinduism would be the way to put that. The university here we have to be precise with our things. Okay so the last question that I want to ask you is going back to consciousness and also it has to do with this seeming distinction between things. That theory that there is a seems to be a unique difference between the contents of my awareness the contents of my consciousness the feelings that I'm having and yours. Is that a objective distinction? If I had a theorize of any meaningful objective distinction that isn't relative that seems to be absolute and talking about something in the world that would be right up there probably number one. It seems to be that even my perspective even from the sense of like I'm looking at you from this side of the table you're looking at me from that side of the table though the actual awareness isn't that something that would be a non-relative distinction. Well that's one of the hardest things for anybody to explain is the so-called existence of other minds. And that was a debate that was taken up at a certain point in Buddhist philosophy and I don't think was satisfactorily dealt with. But one thing I would distinguish first of all is the nature of awareness as such and the particular contents of it. So I think that the ways in which the habits of thought and the ways that awareness is constructed between you and I are probably shared in many ways. We're very much constituted by our shared language our shared historical knowledge our shared cultural knowledge. There is a way nonetheless I agree with you and I think about this too there is a way in which if I'm thinking of a number right now in my head I can do it and you won't know what it is. And I'm not sure that that's because there's some kind of fundamental difference between my mind and your mind. But there's a way that the kind of continuum of psychophysical aggregates that you kind of collect around a kind of point over there and the one that I have over here is doesn't have access to everything. So you don't know everything there's also there's a lot of other things you don't know as well you don't know what's inside my bag. So it's not only a question of one mind and another mind. So the way that we try to understand that particular problem I agree is a really interesting question. I'm not sure that Buddhist thinkers have fully worked that out. I mean, Buddhists do depend on an idea that there's many ways in which one can know the thoughts of others actually. And I think that it that hasn't been explored either it's one of those fields that that's out in La La Land because nobody believes that we really can read other people's minds. I actually think it's a very interesting question because I think it's not like a magical mysterious thing it's just by people's bodily positions by other kinds of perceptions you can tell a lot more about a person than is immediately evident. And I think that Buddhists were interested in developing those skills. I don't think, however, that it's at this very abstract level of I'm just thinking of a number right now and you don't know what it is. I think that would be very hard. What? No, it was three. And then I thought of two, 43 years. But I have to make it harder for you. But that's an extreme that they lay out there's a number of debates about how omniscient is the Buddha or not and does the Buddha actually know every single fact in the universe or is it that he understands the principles behind every single fact.  So there's lots of things that we don't know. Okay, so let me ask you, maybe this is a better way of phrasing it. Is the claim that distinctions between things are relative? Is that an absolute claim? Is that saying there is no circumstance in which you have a true absolute distinction between things that isn't a construction? Yeah, because whatever the thing is itself can be deconstructed. So would this be a circumstance then with the existence of other minds where it would seem like that distinction is not conceptual or constructed. It seems like we're talking about things separate, in a sense separate. The distinction is separate from our minds, our conception of it. Would that be an example of a... I'm not so sure because you're trying to pose them as opposites and I'm not sure they're opposites. And I think it would be really important, first of all, to think about the question of your mind versus what's in my purse. So I think we're mixing two different problems. One of them has to do with the nature of consciousness and one of them has to do with the nature of things and absolute difference. Okay, so maybe we can get around this... I don't know if this is a way to get around it, but what if I say, okay, forget differences in consciousness, what if I say the contents of my own perception, I'm talking about my visual field, there is kind of a tan blob here and there's kind of a blue blob there in my visual field. Now, they have some constructed relationships. So for example, if this, that blob is over here, that blob is over there, that only makes sense kind of as a together, as they're relative to one another. But the actual feeling or the actual qualitative experience of these things seems to be different, seems to be meaningfully different that it wouldn't be a construction. We found a non-relative distinction in my own conscious experience. Say the difference between the experience of blue and tan, for example. That's a much faster way of looking. Yeah, so they're different, but they're on a continuum with each other. The continuum being? Color. Color. Okay. Thank you very much for telling me this has been a great conversation. You're welcome. Yeah, that's been fun. All right, that was my interview with Dr. Janet Guillazzo. I hope you guys enjoyed it. You'll notice with this interview, we have a fairly abrupt ending. That's just because we had a hard deadline, but I'm hoping to have Dr. Guillazzo back on the show because there's so much philosophy to break apart here and she really knows her stuff. In my own examination of metaphysics, trying to investigate what types of things exist in the world, I found that the central issue, really in all of metaphysics, has to do with boundaries. Where are the objective boundaries in the universe, if any? However you choose to answer that question has gigantic implications on the rest of our world view. So I've got a lot more to say about the topic. Thanks for listening, and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day.