The world is recovering from a major shock, a global pandemic that has put a halt to traditional internal and international mobility patterns. But while we are all preoccupied with response and recovery to COVID-19 over the past several decades, climate change and environmental degradation has emerged as what I could say the defining issue of our time. Slowly the impacts of this change on migration and mobility has moved into the spotlight. Our awareness and knowledge of the challenge have expanded tremendously. Just as the impact for migrants displays populations and broader communities have proliferated. Our objective today is to call on the governments, partners and experts gathered here today to accelerate action on migration, environment and climate change through strong partnerships and innovative initiatives.


The study shows that the BiG2 alloy is a suitable substrate for organic molecules due to its inertness and lack of interactions with the molecular films, resulting in the preservation of spin-orbit split surface states in BiG2 and the absence of significant metallic screening of charged molecular levels in the organic layer. This article was authored by Marin C. Kotkin, Jorge Lobocheca, Johannes Schafert, and others.


The Science Snapshot Competition, also known as the four-stamp competition, is being used by CAMDU as an avenue to nurture the interest among students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM, throughout the education sector. It aims at motivating students to pursue careers in STEM areas by giving them the task of highlighting unsung nationals who have excelled in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Acting Curriculum Officer for Natural Sciences with CAMDU Claudius Attil says students as part of the criteria had to draw and pay into their selected unsung Science hero and submit a biography of the person selected. I am sure that through this competition, all winners here, as well as the teachers and others who participated, that this path has been led, and that we will start a renewed interest in STEM among all our schools. We ask that you continue to support our activities as we continue to bring STEM to each and every household in St. Lucia. Eight infant schools, 35 primary schools and seven secondary schools participated in the competition. Education Officer for CAMDU Gianetti George says the initiative goes a long way in helping CAMDU achieve its mandate. Our mission here is to provide quality curriculum and instructional support services for the promotion of lifelong learning and the development of human resources. So with this in mind, we are proud to announce that this science short competition will become an annual event. The overall winner for the inaugural contest is Pashanti Rathad of the Beanfield Comprehensive Secondary School who also won the secondary category. First of all, I would like to thank my family and my school, especially one of my teachers who encouraged me. I would also like to congratulate all the participants who took part in the competition. The person illustrated in the fourth stamp is a cancer cell biologist with knee injury.  Chief Education Officer Dr Fiona Meyer has thrown her support behind the initiative while at the same time lamenting the loss of instruction that students have suffered during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, our students have had to go through a lot. So we recognize it's hurting us, but it's also hurting them. And so efforts such as these to really bring out some semblance of normalcy is important. We embrace it, we applaud it, and we thank our organizing team, particularly our acting curriculum officer for science, Nebo Samisa Aktil and the team from Camdou. The primary school's competition of the snapshot contest resulted in two winners, J. Anna Lionel of the Fitbotai Primary School and Antoinette Randolph of the Tirochet-Miku Combine, while Abigail Jafilip of the Forsythag Primary School won the infant level. From the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Education, Sustainable Development, Innovation, Science, Technology, and Vocational Training, I am Chris Satney reporting.


Putin imitates Hitler, expert warns of the risk of a repeat of a major war. The risks of another major war are growing. But there is no reliable way to understand what historical period we are in. As Nikolai Beleskov, a researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at the Ukrainian Public Organization, Come Back Alive, stated for Channel 24, Germany needed two world wars with global defeat and occupation to learn to be a civilized country. Would such a scenario happen in the event with Russia when our partners behave extremely cautiously? It is not known. Unfortunately, one of the scenarios that we must take into account is a relapse into a big war, although there are some Western colleagues who believe that we are already going through the stage of a Weimar syndrome and the New Hitler. So if we defeat Russia now, they will begin to suffer what happened there after 1945 in Germany, although any historical analogies are a very changeable topic. The expert said, Beleskov finds much in common in the policies of Hitler and Putin. The Russians, according to the analyst, may crave revenge after defeat. That is, there are different scenarios, different ways of looking at what is happening. We can assume that unfortunately, if there is no such a decisive Ukrainian victory by military means and the fighting ends peacefully in our favor, the Russians will develop resentment and revanchism. Under the stories about, we are betrayed inside, a knife was stabbed in our back, or if we prepare better, develop some more effective method of war, this time it will work. It may turn out that Russia is already going through its Versailles or post-Versailles period with Hitler. No matter how much this analogy was ridiculed after the events of 2014, Putin really imitates the behavior of Adolf Hitler. Beleskov added, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in January of this year that Russia is preparing for revenge and is accumulating strength, but must lose. The head of the main intelligence directorate, Kirill Budanov, suggests that Russia will want to take revenge even after Ukraine's victory in the war.


That is portfolio questions and the portfolio this occasion is social justice. If anybody wants to ask a supplementary question, I ask them to press the request to speak buttons during the relevant questions. As ever, there is quite a bit of interest in supplementaries, so I would ask for succinct questions and responses to match wherever possible. I call question number one. Jeremy Balfour I thank you to ask The Scottish Government what support it is offering to people who recently diagnosed the disability. When someone is diagnosed in a long-term condition, which might mean that they are a disabled person, they may need a range of support. The Scottish government is committed to ensuring that everyone living in a long-term condition is able to access the best possible care, and to support and benefit from healthcare services that are safe, effective and to put people at the centre of their care. The Scottish Government also provides support to y maes ei fod yn ei bod arfer iawn iawn, i gymryd y cyfrifoedd, i gweiriadu'i ffordd y gallwn iawn, i ddweud i rhan fydd ei fod yn ei wneud, yn cyfrifoedd cyf Gracias a yn meddwl i fawr i gael ei hoffiwn.  As always, I'm always happy to meet Jeremy Balfour on this and any other issues, and I hope when he does, that he brings forward proposals and estimates of how much that will cost. Also suggestions about how we could meet that additional cost. 2. Maurice Golden Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to support the third sector. The Scottish Government values the important role of Scotland's third sector. The SCVO's latest estimate is that the public sector invested a record £3.3 billion in 2021 to support the work of the sector, with £840 million coming from the Scottish Government via a range of programmes. We fund and work in partnership with infrastructure organisations such as SCVO, Volunteer Scotland and the TSIs, which support the third sector and create the right conditions for it to thrive. We are committed to developing a fairer funding approach, aiming to provide stability and reduce bureaucracy. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. The third sector is in dire need of multi-year funding settlements and I welcome the earlier statement by the cabinet secretary, but in response to those comments, the SCVO chief executive Anna Fowley said, and I quote, despite similar statements made by previous Governments, progress to date has fallen far short of what is required. Cabinet secretary, will you commit today to move beyond your aspirational statements on the subject and publish a timetable detailing your Government's plans for how you will implement fair funding, including multi-year funding, for the third sector? The question should be through the chair, cabinet secretary. I met SCVO very recently to discuss this and other issues and was very grateful for their time that day. The members will be, again, I hope, reassured that not only was the fairer funding arrangements committed to within the First Minister's prospectus, but again we have made further commitments recently. The on-going volatile economic circumstances have presented additional challenges that make it more difficult for us to provide any certainty over investment beyond the next 12 months. Regrettably, we have not been able to move forward with multi-year funding to the extent that we would have wished for for this financial year, but, as I said to the SCVO when I met SCVO, I am very happy to continue to work with it to see what we can do on that. Indeed, the wider aspects of the fairer funding commitment. In October, I asked a similar question of the previous cabinet secretary and I think what we heard was a very similar answer. It feels like we have consistently the same response from the Government. I am aware that the cabinet secretary has committed to a wider review of charities in Scotland. Will she commit to reviewing multi-year funding as part of that process? Yes, the Government is committed to a wider review of charities, but we are already committed to the fairer funding. The reason why the answers are similar is that we still remain under very volatile economic circumstances that continue to prevent real challenges for the Scottish Government in being able to introduce further multi-year funding than we have done already. However, I recognise the significance of that, particularly to the third sector. As I said in my answer to the member earlier, we are committed to working with the SCVO on the wider third sector to see what more can be done both on multi-year funding and on the wider aspects of the fairer funding commitment. To ask the Scottish Government how it is tackling depopulation in rural and island communities. A key theme within the Scottish Government's population strategy is focused around ensuring that our population is more sustainably distributed so that our communities wherever they are can flourish. The ministerial population task force has committed to publishing and addressing the depopulation action plan in autumn 2023. That will include a place-best focus on areas that experience in depopulation with a discrete focus on rural and island communities. In 2022, the Scottish Government published a proposal for a rural visa pilot to facilitate migration to rural and island communities. Despite widespread stakeholder support for the scheme, we have received no response from the UK Government. The Scottish Government's targets for the delivery of superfast broadband have been missed. Local healthcare services have been cut, suspended or lost entirely. Care packages are often undeliverable because of severe recruitment issues, roads are in an increasingly perilous state and pothole ridden while our ferries network is in lurching from one crisis to the other. There is a shortage of houses of homes to rent or buy. That is often the reality of rural and island life after 16 years of this Scottish National Party Government. Can the minister advise me how they think that impacts on the sustainability of our rural and island communities? We absolutely recognise that factors such as housing, infrastructure and connectivity, which the member mentioned, but is of course reserved, are essential to help to attract and retain people to Scotland's rural and island communities. That is why we have established a cross-cutting ministerial task force to ensure that the broadest range of issues are considered and addressed in terms of our population challenges. There is no quick fix for the challenges that we are discussing and we have to work with regional, local and community partners to ensure that we collectively deliver a sustainable solution to the challenges facing our island populations. Our addressing de-population action plan intends to take that place-based approach to addressing those challenges. I have a number of supplementaries, I want to get them all in, but they will have to be brief, so will the responses? The organisation USTO recently shared a story about a global alliance manager for Hewlett-Backard, who was able to relocate to south-east thanks to remote working. In its policy on addressing de-population, what assessment has the Scottish Government made of similarly increasing remote working opportunities within the civil service, particularly regarding allowing civil servants to live in island communities? I am grateful to the member for that important question. Scottish Government is completely supportive of flexible remote and hybrid working options for our workforce. Our national islands plan makes a commitment to demonstrate that jobs and careers can be sustainable and also successful on our islands. Our islands policy team, for example, includes those who are from or living in islands with specific expertise in islands policy. Furthermore, our carbon neutral islands project is funding community development officers who support individuals to return to their islands. De-population is caused by people finding it too difficult to live in rural and island communities. Very failures are a current driver for de-population. The south-east ferry is being cancelled again for almost the whole of June. In this fall, similar length cancellations in April and May, Thoris Dewish calculated that each day, if the local economy costs 46,285, it cannot afford to lose £3 million. It is criminal neglect. Will businesses be compensated? If not, they will fold, causing further de-population in the ministerate. I suspect that most of that question is for my colleague the minister for transport, but I completely recognise the spirit in which it was asked. There are so many issues that we have to tackle if we are going to tackle de-population, including transport, including infrastructure. The Scottish Government recognises that we have a role to play in that, and that is why we are producing this ambitious delivery-focused plan that will span portfolios to tackle de-population. I have received comments in the almost 1,000 responses to a survey that I launched last week on Serco, Northlink and Northern Isles ferry service. I have outlined the thoughts of some that they may have to leave Shetland due to capacity issues and the inability to travel on their preferred date. Will the Scottish Government meet me to discuss the outcome of the survey and the role that transport plays in tackling de-population? Again, I suspect that I would be giving a commitment for a different minister to meet Beatrice Wishart, but I am more than happy to take on board any specific comment that she has around tackling de-population as we work on the plan. Thank you for asking the Scottish Government what action it is taking to reduce child poverty in Cymarach and Irvine Valley. We are providing a range of support that will benefit families in Cymarach and Irvine Valley and across Scotland, including investment in the game-changing Scottish child payment, 1140 hours of funded childcare, free bus travels for under 22s and the Scottish welfare fund. Our five family payments, including the Scottish child payment, could be worth over £10,000 by the time an eligible child turns six and over £20,000 by the time an eligible child is 16 years old. We are also continuing to support free welfare, debt and income maximisation advice services with funding of at least £11 million allocated this year. Willie Coffey, I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. When you come to a place like this, one of your key hopes is that you will make a difference to the lives of people that you represent and what a difference a Scottish child payment is making for families in my constituency. Instead of deliberately driving more families into poverty like the Tories do, the Scottish Government is putting hard cash into the hands of families and helping around 4,000 youngsters in my constituency to escape poverty. Does the cabinet secretary agree that it was crucial to extend the eligibility and the value of the payment to reach out to as many families as possible? Will the Government continue to do everything that it can to lift more families and more youngsters from the scourge of poverty within the lifetime of this Parliament? I thank Willie Coffey for that question. Indeed, modelling public in March 2022 before the most severe impacts of the cost of living crisis, estimated that the Scottish child payment would lift 50,000 children out of poverty and reduce relative child poverty by 5 percentage points in 2324. Statistics published this week show that, as of 31 March this year, 303,000 children are now benefiting from the Scottish child payment with more than £7.2 million paid to clients living in East Ayrshire since the payment launched in February 2021. That is a game-changing payment that we are pleased that we have been able to provide. What a shame, Presiding Officer, that the UK Government continues through its welfare regime to push children and their families further into poverty at the same time. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its work to improve the lives of LGBT plus people in Scotland. We are committed to advancing equality for LGBTI plus people and promoting, protecting and realising the rights of every LGBTI plus person. We are funding a range of projects to tackle inequality, working closely with organisations to provide service improvements and support, as well as research and engagement with the community to ensure that their voices are heard and rights are realised.  I thank the minister for her answer.  The culture war being raged against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is clearly not victimless. At the beginning of this Pride month, does the minister agree that anyone stoking hatred against the LGBTI plus community, however subtle they may be, are ever a bit to blame? Can the minister confirm that she will be pressing ahead with the manifesto commitments and implementing reforms to the gender recognition, as well as a full ban on conversion therapy for all LGBTI plus people? That was very well put from the member. The Scottish Government unequivocally condemns any form of hate crime and in March we published our hate crime strategy, setting out our vision for Scotland where everyone lives free from hatred and prejudice. As I've said, we're committed to ending conversion practices and also plan to establish a Scottish conversion practices helpline, recognising the impact that this debate may have on those who have experienced conversion practices. We remain committed to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill 2 and, as the member knows, we've taken the decision to defend the democratic will of this Parliament by challenging the UK Government's unprecedented use of a section 35 order, which was used despite the UK Government not raising any concerns or asking for amendments throughout the nine-month passage of that bill through Parliament. Brief supplementary, Mark Ruskell. Community spaces are vitally important for LGBTQ plus people and the Cury Creative Social Enterprise in Stirling is leading the way, especially with their close alterations project for trans and non-binary folk. Will the minister join me in welcoming the work of this incredible project and congratulate Cury Creative for their upcoming summer residency at the V&A in Dundee when they'll be working with many disadvantaged groups across the city? I'm happy to do so and I'm grateful to the member for bringing this to my attention. Inclusive community spaces, which allow LGBTI plus people to feel safe and supported, are so important, which is why the Scottish Government is providing over £3 million to organisations who promote LGBTI equality in Scotland over 2021 to 2024. This has included community projects such as the LGBTI Rainbow Mark, a sign that is displayed in social safe spaces to increase positivity, visibility and reduce isolation. We also support initiatives that ensure LGBTI plus voices are heard, such as LGBT Youth Scotland's youth work projects and LGBT health and wellbeing's age project, which is a programme of social opportunities and self-advocacy work with older LGBTI plus people. Question 6, Ivan McKee. To ask the Scottish Government what processes it has in place to identify and act on any concerns raised by clients of Social Security Scotland to ensure that the system meets its aims of putting dignity, fairness and respect at the heart of all its actions. Cheating people with dignity, fairness and respect is at the heart of Social Security Scotland's approach. The social security charter sets out what people should expect from our system. Anything raised will be dealt with following Social Security Scotland's compliments, complaints and suggestions process, which can be found on mygov.scot. If details have been provided, clients will be contacted. Social Security Scotland used feedback through this process alongside feedback from their client panel and responses to regular surveys in performance reporting to identify what needs investigation and action. They used that to inform continuous improvement and business planning. Ivan McKee. Constituents have raised concerns with me around long timescales for dealing with claims up to 28 weeks in some cases and difficulties with the process for interacting with professionals, providing support and evidence for claims. Concerns have also been raised about the treatment of applicants. That suggests that more work is required to ensure that the system fully meets its aims of dignity, fairness and respect. I have written to the cabinet secretary with the details of that, and we welcome her reassurance that there is a robust process in place for identifying and addressing such issues at route, and we welcome the opportunity to engage directly with Social Security Scotland on those matters. I am very happy to receive from Mr McKee or indeed other members from the chamber case studies with the client's permission to ensure that the agency is ensuring that we are learning from cases as they come in. Average time for ADPs is around four months. Some cases, obviously, are taking longer than that, and therefore are taking longer than they should be. I can reassure the member that Social Security Scotland has undertaken significant work to speed up decision-making process and are seeing a rise in the number of applications where a decision is reached each week, while still holding firm to the dignity, fairness and respect agenda. There are a number of areas where they are making improvements, and I would be happy to provide them to Mr McKee in further detail when I receive his letter, or indeed the agency would be happy to provide that with Mr McKee. Did the cabinet secretary not recognise that the current delays to benefit processing, especially adult disability, are unacceptable? What has been done to ensure that decision times are met and that the current standard does not meet the mantra of dignity, fairness and respect? I think that I covered a fair amount of that during my original answer. What I will perhaps do is give some specific examples, while also stressing that people who are eligible will be paid from the date that they apply. However, to give some examples of the work that is going on, Social Security Scotland has introduced an additional measure to ensure that there is a quick phone call back to a client where an application has come if there is extra information needed so that delays can be avoided. The agency is also drawing on the expertise of in-house health and social care practitioners who are now available to support case discussions earlier, and that has resulted directly in allowing staff to reach decisions quickly. Those are but two of the many processes that have been put in place to ensure that we do speed up the decision making, because I absolutely agree with the member that it is taking too long, and he has my reassurance today as we did when we discussed this previously, that this has my full attention. To ask the Scottish Government what proportion of those previously accommodated on MS ambition are now in settled or permanent accommodation. All guests on the MS ambition successfully disembarked the ship by the end of March. A great deal of work was undertaken by the Scottish Government, Glasgow City Council and other key partners to support guests into suitable alternative accommodation, and I thank them very much for the collegiate working on that. Although we do not publish data specifically on those matched from MS ambition, since the beginning of the supersponsor scheme, around 6,000 individuals have been matched or rematched to accommodation in Scotland with around half into social or council housing. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. The supersponsor scheme in Scotland is a significant success, but rapid demand for housing is an understandable consequence in relation to that with some staying in temporary accommodation for long periods of time. Can I ask the cabinet secretary given that it is right that people can move to more permanent forms of accommodation across the country? Will the Scottish Government commit to prioritising easier access to the private rented sector and appropriate locations to help to provide families the space and certainty that they need? I thank Bob Doris for that question. He is indeed correct that welcome accommodation, including ships, are intended to provide immediate place of sanctuary, and our priority is for settling people into longer-term accommodation. We do know that displaced Ukrainians can find it difficult to access private rented housing, and that was part of the review of the supersponsor scheme published in November. Myself and the Minister for Housing are looking at a range of options that could include further support that will enhance existing local interventions and will help people to be able to access the private rented sector housing. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the progress of its plans to bring empty homes back into use as affordable homes for key workers in rural areas. Minister Paul McLeanie. Good quality affordable housing is essential to attract and retain people in rural communities, particularly key workers, making available up to £25 million for affordable homes for key workers. It is one of a range of actions that we are taking to support the delivery of 110,000 affordable homes across Scotland by 2032, with at least 10 per cent in remote, rural and island areas. We will meet with Scotland Housing Network in June to share further information with local authorities on the fund and will include details on our remote, rural and island housing action plan, which will be published shortly. I thank the minister for his answer. Job vacancy rates in NHS Western Isles continue to increase, and with many young local people unable to find an affordable home locally, we of course risk potential additions to the workforce moving elsewhere. How does the minister anticipate that the Government can help tackle this issue of NHS social care and other essential vacancies in island areas specifically? We recognise the challenges in increasing key workers in rural and island areas. The fund has specifically been put in place to support the broader work that is undertaken by local authorities to meet the housing needs of key workers, including through the affordable housing supply programme. We fully expect local authorities to engage with public sector local employers, including NHS Scotland and others, to identify properties that could be purchased or targeted at key workers, either directly or through leasing arrangements with employers. After 16 years of this SNP Government, the number of long-term empty homes in Scotland has more than doubled to more than 27,000. SNP and Green ministers are presiding over a housing crisis and do not seem to have a plan to fix that. When will the Government bring forward emergency legislation to put in place compulsory sale orders to make sure that those unoccupied properties can be once again lived in? As I said, we are looking at the rural housing action plan and will be published shortly. We continue to fund the Scottish Empty Homes partnership, which is very successful at the moment. As we move into phase 2 of the project, we want to develop a more strategic approach, taking more empty homes back into use and embed this in the partnership and its delivery partners. That will help us to deliver on our aims of making best use of existing stock, as previously mentioned in the answer before, and increasing supply of affordable housing for those who need it. People in the East Nuka Fife are desperate. Key workers are desperate for a home that they can afford. What work has he done to promote the use of the rural housing burning mechanism, together with the community housing trust, that is successful in the highlands but has not been spread to the rest of the country? What work has he done on that? I think that Mr Rennie and I have met and discussed this on a number of occasions. As I said, he mentioned the rural housing action plan, and it is not around about the remote parts and rural parts of Fife, as well as we will publish a remote and rural housing action plan very shortly. That concludes portfolio questions. There will be a brief pause before we move to the next item of business to live from Benches to change. Thank you. The next item of business is a debate on trustworthy, ethical, and in point of order, Cricoy. I am aware that, under the standing orders rule 13.1, it is permissible for members to make personal statements, conditionals upon your agreement and, of course, subject to scheduling by the bureau. In the interests of checking parliamentary procedures are followed correctly, can I ask you whether you would grant the First Minister a personal statement if he asks you for one to correct the record and to explain why he used misleading language? Speaking in response to my colleague Douglas Ross on April 27, the First Minister, when discussing scandalous bonus payments, at Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow, said this, and I quote, We and I share that anger at the fact that bonuses have been paid, those bonuses relate to a decision that was made by Ferguson Marine's Renumeration Committee without consultation with the Government in November 2022. I asked for those bonuses not to be paid, but the advice that came back is that they are a contractual obligation. He went on with regard to any future discussion about or consideration of bonuses. I have made it clear that bonuses should not be paid in relation to vessels 801 and 802. The chair of Ferguson Marine will take forward that work, and the First Minister said that it is my expectation and the Government's expectation that the chair of Ferguson Marine knows this very well, that there should not be bonuses in the current financial year 2023-24 in relation to vessels 801 and 802. However, at a meeting of the Public Audit Committee this morning, Andrew Miller, the chairman of Ferguson Marine, confirmed that bonuses would indeed be paid this year when he stated, yes it is because they are contractual, they are points of law and they do exist, and it is very difficult to say to somebody that we are just pulling that from your contract. When I pressed Mr Miller to respond to Mr Hamzaeus's comments that bonuses would not be paid this year, and the chairman of Ferguson Marine knows that, Mr Miller added, no, he is making a statement. However, we have to pay due regard to the contractual obligations under employment contracts set up many years ago. Despite the assurances of the First Minister in this Parliament, there would be no bonuses that clearly will be. I seek your advice as to how Parliament can get straight answers to straight questions from a Government that is increasingly seeing the truth as an optional extra in this Parliament. Can you say whether or not the First Minister has sought your permission to make a statement so that he can set the record straight on this vitally important issue? I thank Mr Hoy for his point of order. Firstly, I would advise that, as far as I am aware, there has been no such request made. Secondly, the chair is not responsible for the content of members' contributions, including ministers, as I think the member is aware. Thirdly, I would say that there is a well-known and well-established corrective mechanism should the member wish to pursue that route.


Welcome to the CUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024, live from Paris, France. Join hosts Savannah Peterson, Dustin Kirkland, and Rob Stratche, as they interview some of the brightest minds in cloud native computing. Coverage of KubeCon cloud native con is brought to you by Red Hat, CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. The CUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024 begins right now. Good morning, cloud community, and welcome back to spectacular Paris, France. We're here at KubeCon cloud native con, CNCF's flagship European event. My name is Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be joined by my fellow analyst Rob Stratche. Rob, did you have any pastries this morning? I did not. I did have a baguette, though. You had a baguette this morning? I had a baguette this morning. That was my breakfast, so. I'm actually a little jealous. I'm not allowed to. It was fantastic. You didn't want to bring a baguette for the rest of us? It was on the walk. Oh, it was on the walk. All right, all right, all right. Well, at least I'm virtually having a baguette right now, because we're talking about virtualization on this next panel. Very excited to welcome our two guests, Alice and Fabian. Thank you so much for being here. How y'all doing? All good? Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Do you like, is this show a big event for you? Yeah, sure. You've gone, it's like the event. It is the event. Yeah, we're also really big, super deep nerd fans. Fabian, you were on stage today. Yeah, indeed. Tell us about that. Tell us about that. Tell us about that. You're on this stage now, and we want the highlights. It was, you're like, I feel, you know, it's great, right? To have that opportunity and to have like such a great co-speaker who can't be here right now, but like, it's amazing, right? So you have somebody, they've adopted Kuber, it solves a problem to them, and then you can get into such a stage. I mean, it's like, wonderful. Well, it was Goldman Sachs who was on, talking about how they're using Kuvert to actually move virtualized machines, or virtual machines into their Kubernetes environment, which I think is, I kind of talked about it yesterday, how I was surprised we hadn't talked about it, and I totally forgot you guys were coming on today, but now we get to talk about it. Or did you forget, subliminally, I think you were definitely teasing this interview the whole time. I may have been teasing this interview the whole time, but I think, again, it's such an important, topic, I think, and a project in general, because of the changes that are going on in the industry, with Broadcom buying VMware, there's a lot of service providers, for instance, that are looking for other options, for doing hosting of virtual machines, and things of that nature, because of the contract changes that have gone on underneath there. Do you see a surge of people being interested in Kuvert since all of this has started happening? Sure, I mean, even here at KubeCon, we got many questions, how people can transition from VMware to Kuvert, if Kuvert is stable enough to be using production, so we have seen a lot of interest in the last month. So. I know, I bet you're not surprised by that. I'm not, I'm not. So, what's new with Kuvert? What's been going on? So, right now, Kuvert is like reaching kind of maturity, so we are focusing more in cleaning up the code, get more people involved. So, there has been many initiatives to improve the code base, to clarify more the ownership. There has been also a lot of improvement in the user guide. Many people are joining the community, this is of course the first entry point for the users. As Alit just said, right, so we're working a lot, like, you know, Kuvert, with Kuvert we had a race, right? I mean, we, you know, with Kuvert we want to provide, we are providing a virtualization solution based on Kubernetes. And just one addition to what you said about like Goldman, like, you know, important is, you know, Kubernetes is becoming the infrastructure and VMs become one workload that's being run there, right? And Kuvert is enabling to do that. So we've been working on Kuvert right to enable all these features that you expect from, you know, these virtualization systems that are out there today. And we've achieved much of that over the past few years, like some big things like hot plug, perceived memory resources are still, you know, they need to GA, memory over commit, higher density, that's something we're working on. But we're switching to, you know, being even more stable, right? We provide seamless upgrades, but we want to be more stable. We're working on, you know, making it easy to maintain, because if you switch to Kuvert, you can rely on it, right? And that is, that's what we want and have to live up to. So we're changing focus a little bit, while not, I mean, while continuing to focus on innovation as well, right? You know, new features have to go in, but the foundation needs to be solid. Yeah, another interesting thing is, usually, virtual machine are hard. They have many options. So we have tried to simplify the deployment. So there is a new feature. Super important, everyone wants to decrease complexity. Yeah, so for example, we got so many questions about Windows, how to deploy Windows VMs, so you can define actually, if you want to run a Windows VM, there is like something called Instant Types, and this helps users to deploy a virtual machine, so this kind of template that will set all the options for you. So this is, again, to make it easier for users to deploy VMs. Everyone wants that easy button. We talk about it a lot, and especially when it comes to Kubernetes, especially when we're talking about AI and everything else. You know, you and I were talking about your daughter's senioritis earlier, and thinking about graduation. Where's the project maturity right now? Fabian, I'm going to go to you on that one. Yeah, so, you know, I think we joined the CNC of incubator, Sandbox in 2019, incubation 2022. 2022, yeah. And that was always a good reflection of the project's maturity, I would say. So I think it's just, you know, the natural next step to now work on graduation. It totally aligns to what we're doing, like on a day-to-day basis, like working stability, finishing the, as I just said before, right? So yes, graduation is definitely something we're working on this year. We're working actively to reach out to, to end users to more platform providers, like we have a lot of platform providers who are using Kubernetes and offering Kubernetes on top as a service or, you know, using it by themselves. So we're working with them to simply complete that whole graduation. It includes security reviews, involves governance, and involves end users and other adopters. How many contributors are on the project? We have 150 contributors.  And I'm even more about the companies because the company ratio increased over time and it's always good for a project, right? To not rest on a few companies. So it's great to see that more companies become interested, regularly contribute to Kuvert. So that's just great to see. Do you see people can, what's, I guess, the ratio between people who are vendors contributing versus non-vendors that are contributing to this, do you think? I would like to take that offline and work with you to digest the data. That sounds good. I think, like, you know, Kuvert, Kuvert is for sure very interesting to platform providers. So vendors, what you could say, and they are for sure, I would say they are more dominant, right? And now we're going to be... But some end users are also contributing, right? And where are kind of the requirements coming from? Is it people saying, hey, this is what we've seen in KVM, this is what we've seen in VMWare, these are the things that are missing. How is that working with the community? So, I mean, of course, people coming from traditional virtualization plus what they expect, certain feature to work. Like, for example, hotplug as Fabian mentioned, but we are also getting requirement like from container perspective. Like, I don't know, like setting certain environmental variables or passing certain kind of files. So, I would say it's kind of a mixture, but yeah, a big part of the requirement is for sure coming from virtualization, the virtualization. And it's leveraging, one of the other keynotes, this morning they were talking about the storage aspect and it's leveraging CSI to be the connection back to storage. And is that, are you being able to leverage a lot of the different things that have been done for more ephemeral container types, but for something that needs to be more persistent? Yes, definitely. So, Kuber doesn't make any difference between storage provider. So, if you have a CSI plugin, you can work with file system and you can also work with block devices. So, yeah, generally, if you have your CSI plugin, it can perfectly integrate with Kuber. And can I just add something? I think that's true for so many aspects, right? I mean, why did we build Kuber and Kubernetes at all, right? Because Kubernetes is providing so much, right? From an infrastructure perspective, CSI, CNI, but also all these other tools, like patterns for observability, patterns for our back, right? Policy enforcement, such that stuff. That's why we built Kuber on top of Kubernetes to leverage it. Why should we reinvent it again for VMs? How can we build such a wonderful ecosystem that we have with the CNCF ecosystem? Yeah. We could not build that for VMs only, right? So, like by embedding VMs into Kubernetes, we can simply benefit from that ecosystem. That's providing so much, it's like. I mean, it makes sense. Yes. Everything makes sense. So, what's next? What are you going to build next? What are the contributors going to make next? What sort of features can we expect? What's on your roadmap for this year? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, give us the preview. So, live update of resources is of course a big topic. So, we just added CPU and memory hot log. So, we were already supporting storage and network interfaces. So, we can expect also in the next future to have additional features in this direction. Do you see different workloads coming to Kubevert that are non-traditional VM workloads, like some of the AI stuff, some of the database stuff would make sense to me, which is not a, I know you can do persistent databases on, and I sat in a Postgres persistent database talk, provide data on Kubernetes Day on Tuesday. Do you see those types of workloads really being driven to Kubevert as well? Go for it. I mean, we really see user using GPUs, so we can expect that they want to run AI workloads. I don't think we have many feedback if which kind of workload runs inside VMs, but yeah, the interest in GPUs is of course there. Yeah, like the end user feedback, like sometimes it's difficult, but I know for sure that like, this is finding its way into Kubevert, right? I mean, in the beginning, there was like uncertainty, how does it behave, but KVM is old, right? I mean, it's been used in OpenStack, it's been used in other projects out there for years. So what I want to say is, yes, we see AI mail workloads running in VMs because there's some benefits to it as well. We see tech workstation use cases being reduced, databases, everything, and you know, the nice thing is it's run as before, right? So you get the same stability, the same compatibility that you, you know, have another KVM based stacks. It's just that you manage it differently and we see that. I mean, just to conclude that like, with all the preferences and instance types that we've been doing, like Windows, for example, is like a common workload in VMs. And it's being used. We have complaints about not being able to automate as much, which is difficult with some operating systems, but that's a good sign, right? Because we see that those workloads get into Kubevert. Another interesting use case is deploying Kubernetes in Kubernetes. So Kubevert is like the deployment where you have maybe additional cluster, nested cluster. So this is also another perfect use case for virtualization. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. Actually, I want to dive into the AI side of things. What sort of trends are you seeing in terms of how people are using Kubevert to manage those workloads? AI will rule the world. Yeah. And... Enough said, soundbites sorted. Kubevert can be decided, right? I think AI is finding its way into, you know, into an operator's daily life. Like, I mean, AI is approaching us from all sides, right? It's helping operators. It's helping us with data, big data, right? To analyze it. All the large language models, they're about big data. But we also have it as a workload. So I think, like, we will see AI, you know, approaching Kubevert from many sides as a workload, but it's from the Kubernetes side. Like, everything that's like AI and integrating with Kubernetes, we're expecting it, you know, at least touch Kubevert as well to some extent. But we need to see. I'm not aware of anything specific related to Kubevert in AI at this moment in time. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts? I think, as I said, then use of GPUs, really I think it's the result of the interest in AI workload. And I mean, NVIDIA is one of the main contributors to Kubevert, so definitely people are interested in using AI workload with VMs. I was going to say, they were on stage yesterday talking about the APIs and things of that nature. So is that a big direct input into how Kubevert is using the GPUs and the hardware underneath? So a big shout out to them. I mean, they're really taking, it's really serious. They do a lot about scale and performance in Kubevert. Yeah, they have a zig scale, right? They're driving it, that's great. And yeah, they optimize it for their use case, including GPUs. Yeah. How are things go from Kubevert to being in OpenShift virtualization? And what are the benefits of that? Because I mean, again, you are here from Red Hat, so you can put your Red Hat on for a second and talk about that. How should people think about that and how close is it to Kubevert? So I mean, usually installing and managing Kubernetes is hard. So you can really think Kubernetes as Linux and the same Red Hat to OpenShift. So OpenShift really gives you the entire package and the installation. And we work very closely with the OpenShift team, so it's very well integrated. So when you do enterprise, you probably want to have a food solution. And this is the benefit that you got with OpenShift and Kubevert and cloud native virtualization. So it's just part of the whole package? Yeah, you can install it through the operator hub and it works like every add-ons from OpenShift. Yeah, like, first it's very close, right? I mean, for sure, like, Kubevert is built. Like, I mean, we build it as Red and chip it with OpenShift. And it's tied into the user system because the reality is Kubernetes alone and Kubevert alone, you seldomly see it, right? But it's with any other project, right? You need that ecosystem, right? You need observability, you need storage, you need networking. And OpenShift, after all, OpenShift by itself is an enterprise Kubernetes platform that is giving you, like, this boilerplate, right? To focus on what is bringing value to the user, right? About running the applications. And OpenShift virtualization is just benefiting from this, right? We have OpenShift as a solid platform and we add virtual machine support as part of OpenShift virtualization and it ties naturally into what the admin is already doing, right? So they don't need to re-skill it, so they can use what they know, working with Prometheus, right? Working with Loki. There's nothing they need to learn, new excitement, except for working now with the VMs as well. But that's just another workload, nothing. Just another workload. Just another workload. Love the whole ethos. You've had some great soundbites, both of you today. Last question for you as we wrap up. What do you hope you can say at the next KubeCon that you can't say today? Ooh, good questions. The next KubeCon that we can't say today. Yes. Where do you hope we're progressing? Or the project's progressing, or? So definitely getting more contributors, that will be a great achievement. I like that. I think seeing that I would, now, switching forward to 2021, it's great to see that finally people realize that Kubernetes can be, it's a compute platform that can be run on bare metal as well. It's not only for application developers. It can also be a tool, and that's fantastic, being on bare metal, used to automate your work. I mean, containers are not just a tool to drive applications. We need to understand, as an administrator, I need to administer my infrastructure, and the term operator is coming from the fact I'm codifying operational knowledge, right? So why can't we codify an administrator's knowledge to operate our infrastructure? So I would love to, I'm expecting, no. I'm looking forward to see that Kubernetes is recognized as such, right? It's a compute platform, right? And that is running multiple workloads, so as a tool for administrators as well. I love it. That was great. You're both absolutely fantastic. Thank you for joining us this morning, making the time and your busy schedules between keynotes and everything else. Rob, thank you, as always, for your wonderful insights and questions. And thank all of you for tuning in to our three days of live coverage here at KubeCon Cloud DatavCon, CNCF's biggest European event. My name's Savannah Peterson, here in Paris, France. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.


and every time I feel like I know who the founders are or I know the founder or the founder's just passionate about their brand, it makes me want to shop from them so much more. It's also good for feedback. Like you're also collecting information in real time. Of course, yeah. And we do that speaking of collecting feedback, we have thrown so many events, probably like 100 plus.


Oh that last minute's always the longest. All right. It's 11 o'clock Welcome everybody to the UX functional update. I haven't done one in a while Last one fell right on top of GitLab summit and there just wasn't much time to fit it in So I'm gonna do some updates here particularly on OKRs And on a new format for our FGU moving forward And Quickly for anyone new to the company. This is the UX team You can reach out to any of us on the team if you have questions about issues curious about how UX works Coffee chat But this is the team so let's start with OKRs today So we have some some really important OKRs this time around I'm really excited about them The first of which is to document GitLab standards and update the style guide The current GitLab UX guide is a little bit outdated Designs change often making manual updates to this guide has proved to be a pretty time-consuming task The current guide is largely text-based and does not provide detailed visuals of patterns and components for either other UX members or front-enders working on an issue So the goal here for this OKR is to make sure that we're documenting standards and providing a visual guide for Internal as well as external in the community So doing so helps us increase usability and user adoption So visual standards and style guidelines provide consistency within an organization and with end users It speeds up our overall process So the availability of proven design solutions allows designers and product managers alike to solve problems quickly without reinventing the wheel Once we have these patterns established, it's perfectly reasonable that a PM or even somebody in the community With an idea could take one of our existing patterns as the solution and start from there And it's a little bit less Need to involve UX once those are established Also provides clear communications across disciplines and time zones. So referencing patterns from our own library allows For quick clear communication of visual concepts So a lot less ambiguity and back and forth on issues trying to understand what it is we need Also retention of organizational knowledge and efficient training of new team members and In the end hopefully improved UI polished Using reusable code based on patterns requires less testing time than a product that doesn't leverage patents I know Phillipa has been working on stuff like that lately with us Making some patterns that we use quite a bit So that's kind of the the the main crux of our OKRs right now is to really establish this guide Completely flesh it out and get those visuals and the rest of the OKRs you'll see are really supporting this overall goal So our first step in building more accessible documentation is through the implementation of a proper design pattern library So after a lot of trial and error with sketch Native options as well as third-party plugins freebies everything that we could think of to try We did settle on brand AI as the best tool for the job And just to understand a little bit about why brand I brand AI was the best tool For designers and for anybody else context switching is a productivity killer and What the brand AI plug-in allows us to do is viewer assets and styles side-by-side with the design when we're working on them So there's no switching pages or browsing to a reference site The plug-in polls from a central sketch file, but designers never have to open that file They never have to add remove or update any design elements. So it allows us to Work with those elements through the pop plug-in update simultaneously automatically It allows us to always see the most up-to-date version of our design system without having to retrieve a new version We have the ability to search the library and multiple designers cannot make automatic updates to that library So in short for us the pros are consistency across files a single source of truth Upkeep is automated and that burden is taken off designers Automatic style guide generation and then it's significantly speeds up design time We've seen quite an increase in our ability to to kind of get through designs so that's something we're actively using right now and If you look at the meta issue I've linked to you'll see that there's a whole list of all the patterns that we need to define What we're doing there is we're not only getting them inside of brand AI so that we can use them when designing But we're also documenting in each of those issues the usage the do's the don'ts Everything you need to understand how a component should be used should be rendered the different active states everything for that and That information is going to actually feed into another one of our okay ours Did I skip one? Hold on one second. I totally did. There we go I knew that didn't look right. All right Clicked it twice So this Component library while that's something that design is using to increase our productivity and then improve our process it it is going to Cascade down and enable us to launch the first iteration of design dot get lab dot com and what that is is it's a place for designers to collaborate More efficiently with the team and the community So therefore our goal here is to replace the existing static UX guide We talked about in the beginning with this living documentation using storybook So you can add stories to this Storybook each story is is basically an area in this you can see this one is buttons So the the story is buttons and each component is a piece of that story And what that enables people to do is you're working on something You're not sure which button what the what it should look like how it should be used You can come here and reference it quickly. You don't need to ping the designer. You don't need to wait for anybody It's already established. It's already there. You can even grab the code snippet This is still uh experimental Uh, we're putting it together. This is phase one So we expect there to be quite a bit of of things that we need to work out But the goal here is not only to include components, but also to include List of again do's and don'ts And all the documentation that we need for our UX And with all of this work that we're doing as we strengthen polish the user experience and interface of get love Um, it's really important that we share our successes process with team members and the greater community So sharing case studies and best practices allows team members to understand the work going into the issues that matter most to the company Hopefully it will also give greater insight into what goes into the UX process and how everyone can contribute On the flip side it allows our customers and community to see that improving user experience is a high priority And that we listen closely to their concerns And finally sharing our processes as thought leaders in the area of UX will help us to attract talent from around the globe Now my favorite part Hiring abby you're smiling. I mean we're making so much work for you So gitlab has grown Significantly, um, it's been amazing just in the time I've been here to see um all the awesome new people We've been bringing on board and and the gearing up for the roadmap for 2018 and I'm really excited And I'll be more excited when I have enough people to help So we are um to keep up obviously with this ever-increasing demand for UX research and UX design. We're growing our team So please help us spread the word Um, there are links here to the UX designer opening and UX researcher. We're actually hiring two UX designers Intermediate Open open to to maybe A little bit lower a little bit higher. There's not a real Not a stickler for the level. It's really more about The work and the fit And the researcher position is a junior position And you can see the awesome stats and this is from Yesterday, I know that there's even more stats now. I saw a bunch of applications came through But people ops has been rocking it going through 23 applicants for the UX designer and 18 for the UX researcher and I swear it's been under two weeks I don't I don't even think it's been that long. I personally have four interviews. I'll be doing this week So thank you everyone for for helping with this. This is very important for our team So moving on usually what we do in our our functional group updates is we kind of Do the what what's coming up in the next release? What are the some of the issues we've been working on then we talk about issues that are in progress And then we talk about UX ready issues we'd like to have scheduled And we're slowly going to move away from that format um one because I think that What's coming up in a milestone is is covered quite well in the kickoff And I don't want to repeat Information especially as other functional groups give their talks We're all working on a lot of the similar stuff obviously So my focus here is going to be really today talking about UX ready issues that we'd like to prioritize And then moving forward on process And other things and I'll touch on that at the end but for right now I'm going to talk about some UX ready issues So there's a quick overview. There's a total of 183 open issues in CE and EE Where the UX work is complete and that don't have any milestone attached to them So these are things sitting out there that UX has worked on collaborated with front end back end whoever was involved It is ready to go but for one reason or another has not been scheduled Often they've been scheduled and then pushed back or pulled pulled aside from from a milestone And this is just a quick breakdown by product These are UX ready issues by area with no milestone attached whatsoever So when iterating on a feature we ship the smallest change possible with the intention of improving the UX over the next several releases Unfortunately, these improvements don't always happen for a variety of reasons shifting priorities lack of capacity these things do happen And definitely not every UX ready issue should necessarily be scheduled But moving forward the UX team will be making it a priority and a point to evaluate And prioritize UX ready issues during release planning Doing so will help us to make rapid improvements to existing features while closing out of date issues It's also going to help us in our effort efforts to get ahead UX ideally would like to be a little bit ahead of platform and a little bit ahead of front end and presenting UX ready issues to them So Using these UX ready issues will give us a little bit more leeway inside of each release to to work on other things Again, this is something that we'll be doing prioritizing going through and making sure that If it's something that's been UX ready for over a year and is out of date It gets closed out at that point. It's probably not worth doing But there might be some really easy wins that we can get in there and make some rapid improvements And UX bugs this is another one So there are currently 56 issues labeled with bug and UX with no assigned milestone In order to reduce waste of time UX does not typically work on an unscheduled issue Doing so creates a backlog of UX ready issues that may or may not ever be implemented like the exact exact scenario I was just talking about So it's one of those things in terms of how we handle bugs. It might be something to look at an opportunity To maybe better handle bugs and get them on the schedule and get them out there There are 10 issues labeled with bug and no assigned milestone that are UX ready So we do need your help In order for the UX team to prioritize these issues, we have a blocking bug It's really annoying So currently when trying to reorder items on the boards, these items can only be moved up by a maximum amount of the height of the viewport So for example, if you have 100 items on the backlog and your current browser size is only showing you 10 You can only move the bottom 10 up 10 at a time So when you're reordering large lists, it makes it really really difficult You have to really remember where things were and what we're actually trying to do is is prioritize these UX ready issues in a list So that we can start knocking through them closing them out and getting them scheduled So if anybody's interested That bug is there And then as I said improving the UX FGU Past UX FGUs have focused mostly on works in progress And I feel have maybe been a little repetitive simply because we're all working on the same things So future FGUs will focus on sharing UX process Standards and the evolving vision for design at GitLab We would love your input and ideas for what like you'd like to see and learn in the FGU if you want to learn more about practices About techniques the different ways that we do Design and research for how we ideate We'd love to show you that so just let us know And Questions, okay We go to the chat See if there's any questions Yes, Cortland. So Cortland says what about design on the marketing side? Uh, I think that we'd want marketing designers to benefit from these same style standards um Dimitri says here, there's a separate repository But I do know also that in the outline for design dot git lab dot com We have a marketing section and we've been working with luke on that Luke has been awesome about collaborating with us. He jumps into our meetings Comments on the issue and he's keeping an eye on the work we're doing So he's definitely involved in this and I agree coreland. It makes total sense for us to collaborate on this Um, um, let's see. I know filipa. I know it can't happen fast enough for me filipa Um Let's see. Oh and I see tori already answered. Thanks tori. I should have known all right So and pager did say design dot git lab will also serve as a playground for fv and ux to improve and try out components Absolutely. Yep Awesome. Are there any other questions? Is there anything else I can answer? going once going twice Last slide Huge huge. Thank you. I've said it once. I'll say it again people ops. You rock um We're just all amazed at at the lightning speed. You're you're going through candidates and and getting people Screamed and over to us and scheduled and chloe helped me get all kinds of Um, really long tedious interview questions loaded up into templates, which was unbelievably helpful um So thank you for that and then winnie and simon have been invaluable in helping us with design dot git lab dot com Without them we would be nowhere right now. Um, so thank you. Thank you for all the work you did at the summit and since then And with that I will let you go Thanks everybody. Have a good day