So welcome Excellencies and Honourables Ambassadors, admirals, generals, distinguished speakers, guests, and most importantly our very own Naval War College faculty, staff and students. To this, the ninth annual Women, Peace and Security Symposium at the Naval War College. I want to give a special shout out to those of you participating online, whether you're watching from your office or slipped out of the office or watching slipping into bunny slippers. Welcome from Spruance Auditorium here at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island in the United States. On behalf of a rear Admiral Chatfield who just arrived this morning, part of the reason I'm up here is because we thought she may not make it back from a flight so she just arrived this morning drove down from Boston and is here. Welcome back, ma'am. So on behalf of the Admiral and the entire Naval War College team, thank you very much for joining us. I'm thrilled to see so many experts, stakeholders and leaders here in the auditorium and grateful that you are willing to make the trip to Newport. We'd also like to welcome 150 or so guests who registered to attend in person, and over 250 guests online. We're joined in person by esteemed colleagues from the Department of the Navy, the State Department, the Department of Defense and their regional centers, our sister services and PME institutions from the United States and Canada, as well as from academic institutions around the country and the world, including local ones like Salve Regina and Roger Williams. Welcome to you ladies. Scholars and representatives from partner nations in Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe. I'd also like to acknowledge in attendance today our CNO distinguished fellows, typically right down here in the front row welcome admirals. And especially the deans and chairs and faculty and staff who had made this event possible. And speaking of making this event possible at this point, it's appropriate to thank our generous support of our Naval War College foundation who provides us with that margin of excellence that we all appreciate so thank you so much to everyone who planned this from Syrah and the over two dozen people that were on the team that put this together and the support from the foundation. Please join me in a quick round of applause. So I'd like to do four things this morning. First briefly remind us why we're here. Second, do a little humble brag about the Naval War College team. Third, talk about inclusion generally as a concept and the idea of meaningful participation. And then fourth, share some of my own experiences in an effort to demonstrate that more progress has been made and sometimes we give credit to, and that WPS isn't just a woman's issue or a man's issue. It's everyone's issue and most importantly, it's a leadership issue. First of all, the universe universal declaration of human rights and articles two and 23 states that there can be no discrimination basis of gender, the UN Charter also upholds the equality of men and women and all aspects of the human endeavor, and indeed the United States own classic formulation that all men are created equal, we now know means men and women. The United States strategy on women peace and security and the Women Peace and Security Act of 2017 calls upon us to recognize the diverse roles that women play as agents of change in preventing and resolving conflict, countering terrorism and violent extremism and building post conflict peace and stability. That's the law. The framework aspires to increase women's meaningful leadership and political and civic life by helping to ensure they're empowered to lead and contribute, equipped with necessary skills and support to succeed, and supported to participate through access to opportunities and resources. The Department of Defense developed its own strategy implementation with three objectives the first of which is about joint force development and employment. The second is that DOD will become a diverse organization that allows for women's meaningful participation across the development, management and employment of the joint force. So that's why we're here, not only to enact global aspirations laid down in international law, but also codified in US law and in Department of Defense policy. The terms and laws and policies tied directly to the naval war college mission, stated by our founder Admiral Stephen be loose. He envisioned this 139 years ago that the war college would be a place of original research on all questions relating to war, and to statesmanship connected with war, or the prevention of war. That's a good fit. And that's part one. We're here because nations of the world have agreed. WPS is an important topic. The US government has codified WPS in the law of the land and the Department of Defense wants us to increase women's meaningful participation and all aspects of the joint force. So for part two, the humble brag. I'm proud to share that the naval war colleges doing it shared to manifest women's meaningful participation in the national security enterprise. We become the first professional military education institution to hold a women's peace and security conference in 2012 and with few exceptions, we've continued this tradition annually. Special thanks to Mary Ram, founder of the WPS program and former chair for establishing the program in 2010 and for convening thought leaders, civilian and military practitioners and scholars over the years. Our conference this year has been organized by our very talented and hardworking team led by Dr. Sir, I mean, our current ambassador swanee hunt named chair for women, peace and security. She's done so with the support of these two dozen faculty member staff and events audio visual teams and many of them you've already met or will meet soon. I have a key number of you who will remain behind the scenes, but I'd like to congratulate everyone for your hard work and dedication to this conference and to the war college mission. We continue to be a military academic leader in the field and we dedicate ourselves to building future leaders, not as an afterthought, but as a first thought, though this symposium is our ninth. In the meantime, our in resident student body and faculty members will be fully joining us and the trail blazing speakers and participants from across the United States and around the world. If you're here in Newport, please meet our students and faculty on the margins and ask about their experience. I think you'll find it interesting and worth your while. The naval war college is ensuring WPS tenants are woven into the fabric of all the college professional military education enterprise. We have introduced in the curriculum across all of our programs the JPME program that's the joint professional military education program, a masters of arts degree flag officer development war games and programs for our allies and partners. We have organized special events to promote an increased awareness and the understanding of a WPS. The program is supported by a steering committee and general committee work closely with Dr. Yameen and myself and the president to advance these efforts. Professor Carol hot and rot the WPS steering committee lead has been instrumental in helping establish and actively contribute to this infrastructure over the past three years. Thank you Carol. I like to pause and acknowledge her with an exemplary dedication to this initiative with some applause. Thank you. We instituted the annual honorable Juliet C. MacLennan essay prize for women, peace and security, which encourages original graduate level publication quality research. In fact, one of our students was the winner last year's WPS essay prize in the national competition organized by Marine Corps University. The National War College also has a number of distinguished women serving in key roles here in Newport. Dr. Pauline shanks corn is our James B Stockdale chair of professional military ethics. Dr. Sally Payne is our William S Sims professor of history and grand strategy. Dr. Chris Demcheck is our grace hopper chair of cybersecurity. Dr. Mary Thompson Jones is our women in national security and diplomatic studies chair. And today I'm proud to publicly announce that this summer, Dr. Mary Beth Ulrich from the US Army War College will join us as our strategy and policy department chair. Finally, as I transition to the next point we recently hired Miss Adriana Gonzalez as the Naval University system first full time chief inclusion and diversity officer. And it's a good segue to the third point, which is to weigh in on the subject of meaningful participation and inclusion as a concept based in equal parts on my own military experience and academic study. So I believe there's a natural intersection between women, peace and security and the more recent and possibly more controversial idea of diversity, inclusion, equity and inclusion or DEI. I saw on YouTube at this conference a couple of years ago there was a panel of experts addressing this exact issue, this connection between WPS and DEI. I wouldn't call myself an expert and either but I have taken an interest in and in some ways been forced to take an interest in both, not only by the aforementioned WPS norms and laws and policy, but also based on 37 years of service in and out of uniform. On the topic of DEI as a 50 something year old white man who was leaving the military and trying to enter the workforce, I realized that while I was, excuse me while I was out serving society, society changed. As I began applying for jobs I was asked to provide a statement expressing my own views on DEI and how I would use it in the workforce. So I had to look it up, the DEI was in DEI at first it was GDI and there's a few other versions of the acronym. On the topic of WPS and WPS and as a military officer with nearly 20 years of service abroad I have been an active participant in the chaining international environment thanks to the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Unanimously adopted in 2009 reinforcing resolution since then the international community has increasingly acknowledged the important role women in creating long lasting peace and security solutions. So WPS and DEI have been on my mind for a while but their intersection was recently offered up on a silver platter almost literally. It Ambassador Swanee Hunts residence in Washington DC where she hosted about 20 of our students, the Admiral and I at dinner. She gave a presentation before dinner on inclusive security. It struck me at that moment that diversity equity and inclusion dialogue which has permeated American human resource agendas as conceptually intersected with Ambassador Hunts version of WPS. In fact, I can imagine Ambassador Hunts saying that WPS really ought to be I WPS, including women in a peace and security agenda. Now perhaps some of you are growing uncomfortable in your seats or your bunny slippers, ready to point out that DEI and WPS are not the same thing provost and that's exactly what Dr. You mean has cautioned me on don't fall into the trap she said, please hear me out. I don't pretend or want to make them the same I'm simply suggesting that when it comes to military and security related workforce issues. There is an intersection, a shared space, a Venn diagram if you will, that connects WPS and DEI. This is not DEI in corporate America or higher academia writ large. We're talking about opportunities for women into defense diplomacy and development space. In that shared space I propose the operating principle is inclusion. And I think our program over the next two days will bear that out. You'll see it in the agenda for example that we'll be looking at women's roles in combat and examining gender perspectives and strategic planning processes, and that's awesome. So, including diverse perspectives in the security sector workplace is very much aligned to the notion of including women in peace and security dialogue to achieve enduring sustainable solutions we know this. Studies show this study shows, for example, that in innovation that more frequently ideas are generated in open societies where they can flow freely and many voices are included in the dialogue. In fact, somewhat obscure book that I studied Matthew evangelist's book on how innovation developed during the Cold War, and the arms race between the Soviet Union in the United States clearly demonstrates the value of open free societies. In business school or pop works like friends Johansson's book, the Medici effect, we find similar insights. He posited it advances in 15th and 16th century European Renaissance movement came from the de Medici's family sponsorship and intersection bringing them together artists, artisans, architects, stone cutters, sculptors, the original, the OG multidisciplinary undertaking. Now for the fourth and final point on this principle of inclusion, particularly the inclusion of women. Inclusion has relevance my own personal experience, and I had the good fortune to be raised inside the US military that has established policies and performed missions abroad that were more diverse and included more meaningful participation for women that maybe sometimes is given credit. So I've got a few visual aids that I hope will help us out. This picture is my very first basic training platoon where our number one graduate was Carol Jones and that was 1984. This picture a few years later, we see my first, my first company executive officer lieutenant and Forrester muska one of the first women, first classes of women to graduate from West Point. And this picture she shown my platoon star and it's okay to have a Mickey pop in the office. Oops. Here, you'll see Colonel Jan Edmonds and Colonel, then Colonel and Dunwoody, although Colonel Dunwoody peers off screen. Dunwoody went on to be America's first four star general, and Major General Edmonds is currently the chairwoman of the board of directors for the women in military service for American Memorial Foundation. That's the first female superintendent of the Naval postgraduate school rear admiral Marsha Evans awarding me my master's degree in Monterey 1995. Ten years later and fies about Afghanistan I attended this segregated school opening. It was a big event with a fair amount of tension in the air men seated and women and girls over by a stone wall. Once petty officer, Jane Pizzi and I entered the crowd the mood lightened and her presence, obviously changed the quality of the engagement for the for a time at least it also changed the quality of these people's exposure to being involved in maintaining sustainable peace and security. In my small role helping stand up the US Africa command I participated in a money exercise a money Africa and out of Subaba, Ethiopia. I observed a structure for the African standby force brigades and visited the East Brigade, the Eastern Brigade headquarters. I was surprised to learn that these brigades had military police and civilian components, and this photo clearly shows who's the boss. Joining a fellowship at Harvard, two of my fellow fellows were Nancy pull attend from the US Refugee Agency and Shadia Marhaban a member of the free Ache movements peace and negotiating team in Helsinki. And at the National War College I co taught in the Africa regional studies program with a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Africa man to Dory and Ambassador Makilah James, we took students to many places in Africa me to Rwanda, in the area of Russian Brotherhood in Ethiopia. We learned firsthand that the role that women played in understanding economic productivity and societal security, this woman in Ethiopia explained the way that the valley worked and the way that water flowed in the way that how we had gotten it wrong in the past and and working with USA ID, how it could be better. So a spot of green and a drought stricken area. to meet Rwanda Minister of Gender and Culture, Aloysia Nyumba, who took us to a village for a unique ceremony. Now the session was a takeoff on the uniquely Rwandan concept of Gachacha, where after several minutes of song and dance, the women of the village determined the fate of a young man who had been orphaned during the genocide. At the other NWC, the Naval War College, this is where I read the Sea of Sameness article by a Naval War College professor emeritus Joan Johnson-Freeze and our incoming strategy and policy department chair, Mary Beth Ulrich. I commend it to you still. And before arriving as provost, I was dean at the NATO Defense College, where I was proud that Lieutenant General Christine White Cross from Canada, the first female commandant of the NATO Defense College, called me her battle buddy, particularly as we battle to keep the college open during COVID. And of course, here at the Naval War College, I'm pleased to serve with alongside and for Admiral Shoshana Chatfield and to call her ma'am. So it continues. But now let me do a quick poll. I know Sire is going to do a poll. But let's see a show of hands. How many of you have a partner, mother, sister, daughter that has served or is serving? Awesome. My hand is up. And that's my daughter. So for this last part, let me just share that opening chapter of my favorite badass. She enlisted in the United States Army and went to basic training to become a linguist, but she ended up going to officer candidate school and then chose, excuse me, field artillery as her branch, because not all branches of the US Army were open to women at the time. She went on to be one of the first women to graduate from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, one of the few places where US officers are allowed to wear the uniform of another country. So that's her as a member of 10 platoon or I kid you not girls platoon. That's what they call themselves without any sort of problem. That picture is not very ordinary or it is very ordinary, but this picture is extraordinary. And to me, it demonstrates in a blink of an eye the unique characteristics that the role that women play in peace and security organizations. She became the first, one of the first female fire support officers in an infantry company in the fabled 82nd Air Force. She jumped out of a perfectly good airplane into West Africa into Gabon to be precise and then unexpectedly by speaking French with the non-English speaking Gabonese drop zone team and transport ship captain, led her company doing their best Captain Morgan to happier days. News traveled fast. The US ambassador caught wind of this extraordinary event and invited her to the embassy. And that was Ambassador Cynthia Aquetta. So Elena also deployed sorry to Iraq for the battle of Mosul. She was not allowed to perform her role as a fire support officer advising the Iraqi army because she was a woman. Instead, she worked in the headquarters in the ops center as a targeting and strike officer. And it turned out okay. She was able to brief Naval War College graduate Mark Milley on operations in the battle of Mosul. And most of these opportunities were available to her due to all the work that you have done in the steadily changing policies in the United States and throughout the world. Although in this last couple of examples show there's still work to be done. So WPS and DEI are not just women's issues they're leadership issues. And they're also parental issues. And so this picture is of her mother welcoming her home and this picture is of her surrounded which you cannot see in the picture by dozens of women, colleagues, military officers and senior diplomats all women over two dozen in total organized by her father. Now, the purpose of this walk down memory lane was twofold. First to explicitly state that my daughter and I have benefited from the work that many of you are involved in. I offer you my personal and heartfelt thanks. Second and more importantly is to demonstrate that the United States and its allies have made remarkable institutional progress and WPS policy and implementation. But despite the success, there's obviously more work to be done and connecting back to the very first point that's why we're here to do more work on the topic. It's my personal hope and professional expectation that as we mature and implement inclusive policies for gender perspectives during periods of relative peace that your work will prove worth, prove it's worth in periods of war and to paraphrase to our Ferenbach when we are putting our young men and women in the mud. On behalf of the Naval War College team we sincerely hope that all of you will take advantage of this opportunity at this symposium to engage in Frank and candid dialogue. Please do not shy away from uncomfortable conversations on perspectives on war fighting, crisis management and post-conflict transition. You are hereby authorized to jump in the intellectual mud. Thank you very much everyone. And at this point, I'd like to turn it back over to Dr. Sire Yamine, our woman peace and security chair.


How's it going everybody, Datodoy here with some more online ranked matches for Dragon Ball Fighters continuing on with Gojira week and I know while this looks like a team that is just comprised of top tiers with Gojira, Gojira actually fits on this team very well. You've probably seen this clip on Twitter or the simplified version of the combo I got here but thanks to how Gojira's wall bounce works on his assist you can actually get a solo spirit bomb set up with Goku GT and it's just amazing. So that's why I've decided to play this team today. Alright, I don't know if we're going to get that combo to hit by the way but that would be sick. Oh, I'm the Bardock on the right, I almost Bardocked the wrong direction, that would have been embarrassing. This is like Bardock, the match, I couldn't get it there in time, you have to have a Bard to do that. If you don't, just don't have it, I'm dead, not dead, whoo, blocked the low, looking mad nice, sorry cancel out, I'm not here to stay, ah no bar for that, oh the beam keeps him down, that's why Goku GT is sick. Down heavy did not work, I thought I could down heavy that, I just kind of got stuff. A reflect probably would have been the safer alternative. Toss around, where's the vanish, oh you don't have to vanish afterwards, I forgot.  One because you don't see him often and two, it's just tricky, this character does damage and this is, oh we still, small size game, oh we slipped past the defenses but got right back in the trap, it's time for an early spark, ah you hate to be on this wheel train, what the reset I didn't, I wasn't watching, I wasn't looking for a reset, I thought the dragon rush would hit, why would you, I think that was just a drop, drop opportunities out here dude, I cannot afford to miss an offensive beat, because once I do it's a snap city, I guess I could play defense, I guess I will, in alternate universe I could play defense, Jesus, we are getting sent for a ride tonight, okay, backstab, level one, level one, level three, yep, at least Android 21 is out of the picture so we can get back to work here, what a day, let's get it, all right back at it, back to work, I'm just gonna level three right here, I don't need to be fancy, I got nothing to be fancy for, does the early spark to save Bardock, I think he kind of would but I'm not in the business of reading, he does early spark, oh god I'm dead, oh never mind he missed the light jab, okay we got down to Bardock assist, that's a little less defense when Android 21 comes back to play, he knew it was gonna come, he knew I was gonna Bardock, all right well we had to see, we had to test the waters at least once, that's good, that's good knowledge for next time, okay do not do that, that was the knowledge we needed, can Goji to come back, I don't know, I mean it's not like we've been using a ton of assists this game, okay we're in it, caught by the overhead, dude I'm so afraid, that overhead has got me fearful, I think we're dead here, level one, level three, is that the only option, it'll be close but I think it is gonna kill, yep it wasn't even that close, well it was kind of close, oh dude that was a good first game, I kind of just got snapped a bunch but I also played terrible defense after the snap and we got reset off a drop, holy moly stealing some tech from me, which Bardock, got him, all right that's good because my assists were both down, I was gonna lose neutral, got him with the dragon rush, had him mix up the offense, hit him with the level three, just keep spending the bar, force him to play defense, remember how it felt when I was just blocking like crazy, missed, when you miss a dash like that it feels so bad because that just means you forfeited off him, we missed the air dash and now it's snapped, oh that was a poor reaction, I panicked because I he didn't do any pressure so I was like let me just super dash, we're back out of it, what I did not click a button after the vanish, level four bars three, oh god we're dead, we're dead, we're actually dead, wait, oh we're not dead, no no no no no, come on dude, oh what, this game is rigged, this game is rigged to the death of it dude, this game is so rigged right now, got him, catch up, catch up, oh my god this game is rigged, save from gojita, don't even talk to gojita if you're not on the same wavelength, don't talk to gojita, you don't talk to gojita, oh no you can talk to gojita now, one two three four five six seven eight, I dropped it, actually that kind of looked like a reset, oh god I hate my life, that's it, that's it, give me back Goku, that's fine, he knew I was coming in for the stagger, good stuff, this may play defense, I like it, I like that, I hate the, I mean I can't play defense myself, so I gotta respect level three, hard knockdown, ooey spark, I think so, I think it'd be worth, get him off of me, reset the pressure again, no I shouldn't have backed that, should have just held block, oh mistakes we make and then instantly regret, damn we're in the other corner now, down tech like crazy, that's the case of a perpetual drop, I regret, regret holding tag, I thought he was gonna come at me, the raw tag is always so good if they come at you, but when they stay back like that it's certain doom, this might have to be gojita's game from now on, I'll see what gojita can do, why did I do that, why did I do that, oh no, the water, I'm joking, water, how bad do you have to be as a player, no way that went over all the, that went over every single part of the beam, one character left no assist, it is a dangerous world to live in right now, what character is it that you can connect with a beam there, because I blame them, whoever I was playing where you can connect with a beam there, it's Goku isn't it, it has to be Goku, oh no okay how do we get out of this, first we need to play defense, look for the dragon rush, I'm afraid of a dragon rush, I forgot android 21 can cross up like that, oh no, oh no, oh no that down heavy was bad, I don't even know what the score is, did I win a game, I don't think I won a game, I think I just felt like I was going to win that one, oh did I win a game, I have no idea, what's the score, it has to be 2-0, it can't be 2-0, I felt like I was winning that one, oh I should have kept it going, I don't want to drop block strings like that, okay who do we switch out, the beam assist, I think the beam assist would be smart, oh I'm coming for you, I'm coming for you, I can't believe that assist stuffed me, get him to the corner Gojita, that was pretty sick, you can't do that there, you can't do that there, still learning, I just felt so confident about it, oh can't do that there, okay that's good, that's good, oh come on, you wouldn't hit a level 3 after a man misses a level 3, that's just bad manners, bad manners in the club tonight, oh no, I think I, get there, get there, no blocks, I'm sad, I also suck, I was gonna say I suck, 6M raw, wow that was nice, I was not looking for a 6M raw, nice, I definitely did not mean to do that, but whatever, we saved bar in the end, definitely did not mean to do that though, come here, come here for your daily Gojita lesson, bup, bup, end up, end out, I love ending with that super, it just looks so cool, maybe I should have gone level 1's, that could be argued, that's fine, thought I had an assist, that was very brave, 2M there, I was running up like a madman, okay understandable, we should probably not be as stupid as I was being though, I was being very like, I don't know how to describe it, okay, level 3, that was good, decent amount of bar built, and we get a level 3, let's go Gojiti for ya, now can we just get in there and do our thing, you hate to see a miss a dash, oh command grab, I forgot that was what it was, oh you hate to miss a dash like that, you thought I was playing fair, I'm Bardock, oh I was gonna try something there, that was bad, I probably should have just staggered into a medium, level 3 won't kill from this range, ooh Sock'em Boppers, let's go, very quiet that match for me, but I was really focused, that was like, I'm not trying to blow this again, I don't know if it's 2-1 or if it's 2-2, let's be real, I'm just going until she gets the third win, I'll say that's my first win because I think it is, I really just think the second round went on for really long, bad luck, bad luck and also bad play, down tech, no drops, I still want to down tech just in case, where's my, oh I got snapped out, so my assists were enough, I hate that about snapbacks honestly, it's like come on bro, can I get some assists please, because like it'll last for a long time, so it's like if you keep taking actions while you're still in the snap out state, it'll prolong it, or would I, I've never really looked into it much, but it is harsh sometimes, like you're like, I'll forget I got snapped out, no tech, like genuinely I was like what's happening, are my assists down, did I use them already, that sucked dude, oh yeah who's in the corner now, you, me, it's me, it's me, okay, oh boo, it's not me anymore, it's me, no way, come on, let's stop the, let's stop the whole area, that's just Bardock, but he took on a whole army, I don't know what I'm doing, that worked out though, come on, I'll take it, okay, that's fine, I'm switching, is it a little obvious, are cancel, we're working them, oh I couldn't get it, no way that medium hit, ah two overheads and I called out Gojita, he's dead, it's a wash for Gojita, goodbye, goodbye my soft friend, my dead friend, god down and out, god Gojita was so important this match too, like really important, okay that's fine, this has been a good match, I just gotta, there we go dude, I didn't do the optimal, but whatever, that was about what I wanted to see, I'm just gonna go all out here, like all out, I got too much bar, I might as well bring it down, so every time I do that she always matches down light, so that time I just did it to him, because I have been doing that all game, so it's time we make adjustments here, what the, fat finger, that's so bad, I meant to run up through it down light, and somehow I got a quarter circle forward motion, Gojita hold on, oh no, you don't even have spark to heal this, level three, oh it hits, and it is block or be killed, everybody's favorite game show, block or be killed, block or be killed, no tech, come on, I felt that one of my bones, I felt that tech, all right, Bardock can still make this comeback, you might be looking at the screen like, there's like five seconds left in this video and you write, but I never lied, you didn't check the time code, there's like a whole seven minutes left, two bars kills, I'm gonna try it, oh no, oh no, guys don't look at the time code anymore, I'm not too confident in how long it is, guys please stop looking at that time code, what are you doing, why are you still looking at the time code, look back at the time code fellas, it's our time, I should have spent the level three years ago, I won't make the same mistake twice, I never make the same mistake twice, never again, this is for everything, never again, never again will I make the same mistake twice, Bardock rage on, fight Bardock, let's go, boom, y'all really thought my Bardock was asleep, nah, it's not happening, oh dude, I had that, I was feeling it dude, I felt like she was gonna throw the key blast, I was right, but she vanished afterwards, which was a bad call for me, really bad call, that's gonna be it though, hopefully you guys enjoyed it, we didn't get that combo off, but man that was a pretty fun set, I also got like schnapped seven ways to sunday, but that's dragon ball fighters for you, sometimes you get schnapped, also I played really bad defense, but regardless hopefully you did enjoy it, I keep repeating that, but I keep getting off track as well, down below let me know your thoughts on it as well as hitting the like button and subscribing if you're enjoying the week of Gojida, we're still getting used to them, still showing off some stuff, but man I see a lot of fun, I can't wait to really get them down, other than that if you want to watch even more videos right now, there should be some up on your screen, so make sure to check those out, if any of them catch your eye, especially those Gojida ones, those should be contained to the week of Gojida, but thanks again for watching this video, I have been Dachadoia and I will see you in the next one.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2021, part of the CNCFs, continuing Kube partnership, KubeVirtual here because we're not in person. Soon we'll be out of the pandemic and hopefully in person for the next event. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Ricardo Rocha, Computing Engineer at CERN. Kube alumni, great to see you, Ricardo. Thanks for remoting in all the way across the world. Thanks for coming in. Hello, it's a pleasure. Happy to be here. I saw your talk with Priyanka on LinkedIn and all around the web. Great stuff. As always, you guys do great work over there at CERN. Talk about what's going on with you and the two speaking sessions you have at KubeCon. Pretty exciting news and exciting sessions happening here. So take us through the sessions. Yeah, so actually the two sessions are kind of showing the two types of things we do with Kubernetes. We have a lot of services moving to Kubernetes, but the first one is more on the services we have in-house. So CERN is known for having a lot of data and requiring a lot of computing capacity to analyze all this data. But actually we have also very large community and we have a lot of users and people interested in the stuff we do. So the first session will actually show how we've been migrating our group of infrastructure into Kubernetes and in this case, actually OpenShift. And the challenge there is to run a very large amount of multiple websites on Kubernetes. We run more than 1,000 websites and there will be a demonstration on how we do all the management of the website, lifecycle, including upgrading and deploying new websites and an operator that was developed for this purpose. And then more on the other side, I will give with a colleague also a talk about machine learning. Machine learning has been a big topic for us. A lot of our workloads are migrating to accelerators and can benefit a lot from machine learning. So we're giving a talk about a new service that we've deployed on top of Kubernetes where we try to manage the whole lifecycle of machine learning workloads from data preparation all the way to serving the models, also exploring the Kubernetes features and integrating accelerators and a lot of accelerators. So the one session, it's a large-scale deployment, Kubernetes key there and now the machine learning essentially service for other people to use, is that right? Okay, take me through the first large-scale deployment. What's the key innovation there, in your opinion? Yeah, I think compared to what the infrastructure we have before is this notion that we can develop an operator that will manage a resource, in this case, a website. And this is something that is not always obvious when people start with Kubernetes. It's not just an orchestrator. It's really the API and the capability of managing a huge amount of resources, including custom resources. So the possibility to develop this operator and then manage the lifecycle of something that was defined in-house and that fits our needs. There are challenges there because we have a large amount of websites and they can be pretty active. We also had some scaling issues on the storage that search these websites and we'll give some details during the talk as well. So Kubernetes storage, this is all kind of under the covers making this easier and the machine learning plays nicely in that. What have you, take us for the machine learning use case. What's going on there? What was the discovery? How did you guys put that together? What's the key elements there? Right, so the main challenge there has been that machine learning is quite popular but it's quite spread as well. So we have multiple groups focusing on this but there's no obvious way to centralize not only the resource usage and make it more efficient but also centralize the knowledge of how these procedures can be done. So what we are trying to do is just offer a service to all our users where we help them with infrastructure so that they don't have to focus on that and they can focus just on their workloads and we do everything from exposing the data systems that we have in-house so that they can do access to the data and data preparation and then doing some iteration using notebooks and then doing distributed training with a potentially large amount of GPUs and then storage and serving up the models and all of this is managed with a Kubernetes cluster underneath. We had a lot of knowledge of how to handle Kubernetes and all the features that everyone likes scalability, the reliability, auto-scaling is very important for this type of workload, this is key. Yeah, it's interesting to see how Kubernetes is maturing. Congratulations on the projects. They're going to probably continue to scale. I remember this reminds me of when I was coming into the business in the late 80s, early 90s with TCPIP and the OSI model. You saw the standards evolve and get settled in and then boom, innovation everywhere and that took about a year or two to gestate and scale up. It's happening much faster now with Kubernetes. I have to ask you, what's your experience with the question that people are looking to get answered which is as Kubernetes goes the next generation as the next step, people want to integrate. So how is Kubernetes exposing APIs to say integration points for tools and other things? Can you share your experience and where this is going? What's happening now and where it goes? Because there's no debate. People like the Kubernetes aspect of it but now it's integration is the conversation. Can you share your thoughts on that? I can try. So I would say it's a moving target but I would say the fact that there's such a rich ecosystem around Kubernetes with all the cloud-navig projects, it's like a real proof that the popularity of the API. And this is also something that we, after we had the first step of deploying and understanding Kubernetes, we started seeing the potential that it's not reaching only the infrastructure itself, it's reaching all the layers, all the stack that we support in-house on premises. And also it's opening up doors to easily scale into external resources as well. So what we've been trying to tell our users is to rely on these integrations as much as possible. So this means like the application lifecycle being managed with things like Helm and GitOps but also like the monitoring being managed with Prometheus. And once you're happy with your deployment in-house, we have ways to scale out to external resources including public clouds. And this is really like, I don't know, a proof that all these APIs are not only popular but incredibly useful because there's such a rich ecosystem around it. So talk about the role of data in this. Obviously the machine learning piece is something that everyone's interested in as you get infrastructure as code and DevOps and DevSecOps as everything's shifting left. I love that narrative, day two operation. All this is all proving maturation. Data is critical, right? So now you get real-time information, real-time data. The expectation for the apps is to integrate the data. What's your view on how this is progressing from your standpoint? Because in machine learning, as you mentioned, acceleration or being part of another system, caching has always done that with say databases, right? So you got, now as databases get slower, caches are getting faster, now they're all the ones. So it's all changing. So what's your thoughts on this next level data equation into Kubernetes because stateless is cool but now you got state issues. Yeah, so yeah, we've always had huge needs for data. We store and I think we are over half an exabyte of data available on premises. But we kind of have our own storage systems which are external and that's for like the physics data, the raw data and one particularity that we had with our workloads until recently is that we call them embarrassing parallel in the sense that they don't really need very tight connectivity between the different workloads. So if we deploy say tens of thousands of jobs to do some analysis, they're actually quite independent. They will produce a lot more data but we can store them independently. Machine learning is posing a challenge in the sense that this training tends to be a lot more interconnected. So it can benefit from systems that we are not so familiar with. So for us, it's maybe not so much the caching layers themselves is really understanding how our infrastructure needs to evolve on premises to support this kind of workloads. We had some smallish, more high-performance computing clusters with things like Infiniband for low latency but this is not the bulk of our workloads. This is not what we are experts on these days. This is the transition we are doing towards supporting this machine learning workloads. Just as a reference for the folks watching, you mentioned embarrassing parallel and that's a quote that I read on your CERN tech blog. So if you go to techblog.web.cern.ch or just search CERN tech blog, you'll see the post there. And good stuff there.  Is it going to get to the point where automation is a bigger part of the cluster management, setting stuff up quicker. As you look at some of the innovations you're doing with brooch machines and Kubbert and databases and thousands of other point things that you're working on there. I mean, I know you got a lot going on there. It's in the post but we don't want to have the problem of it's so hard to stand up and manage and this is what people want to make simpler. How do you answer that when people say we want to make it easier? Yeah, so for us, it's really automate everything. And up to now it has been automate the deployments in the Kubernetes clusters. Right now we are looking at automating the Kubernetes clusters themselves. So there's some really interesting projects. So people are used to using things like Terraform to manage the deployment of the clusters. But there are some projects like cross-playing, for example, that allows us to have the clusters themselves being resources within Kubernetes. And this is something we are exploring quite a bit. This allows us to also abstract the Kubernetes clusters themselves as Kubernetes resources. So this idea of having a central cluster that will manage a much larger infrastructure. So this is something that we are exploring. The GitHub's part is really key for us to, it's something that eases the transition from people that are used already to manage large-scale systems but are not necessarily experts on Kubernetes. They see that there's an easier path there if they can be introduced slowly through the centralized configuration. You mentioned cross-playing I had to saw him on earlier. He's awesome dude, great guy. And I was smiling because I still have flashbacks and trigger episodes from the Hadoop world. When it was such so promising that technology but it was just so hard to stand up and manage to be like really an expert to do that. And I think you mentioned cross-playing this comes up to the whole operator notion of operating the clusters. So this comes back down to provisioning and managing the infrastructure which we all know is key, right? But when you start getting into multi-cloud and multiple environments, that's where it becomes challenging and I like what they're doing. Is that something that's on your mind too around hybrid and multi-cloud? Can you share your thoughts on that whole trajectory? Absolutely. So I actually gave an internal seminar just last week describing what we've been playing with in this area. And I showed some demo of using cross-playing to manage clusters on-premises but also manage clusters are running on public clouds, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. And it's really like the goal, there are many reasons we want to explore external resources. We are kind of used to this because we have a lot of sites around the world that collaborate with us. But specifically for public clouds, there are some motivations there. The first one is this idea that we have periodic load spikes. So we really have international conferences. The number of analysis and job requests goes up quite a bit. So we need to be able to like scale on demand for short periods instead of over provisioning in-house. The second one is again, coming back to machine learning, this idea of accelerators. We have a lot of CPUs. We have a lot less GPUs. So it would be nice to go and fish for those in the public clouds. And then there's also other accelerators that are quite interesting like TPUs and IPUs that will definitely play a role. And we probably, or maybe we will never have them on-premises, we'll only be able to use them externally. So in that respect, actually coming back to your previous question, this idea of storage then becomes quite important. So what we've been playing with is not only managing this external cluster centrally, but also managing the wall infrastructure from a central place. So this means making all the clusters, whatever they are, look very much the same, including like the monitoring and the aggregation of the monitoring centrally. And then as we talked about storage, this idea of having local storage that will allow us to do really quick software distribution but also access to the data. What you guys are doing as we say, cool and relevant projects. I mean, you got the large scale deployments and the machine learning to really kind of accelerate, which will drive a lot of adoption in terms of automation. And as that kicks in, I mean, you got to get the foundational work done. I see that clearly the right trajectory.  And yeah, when TCPIP came around, that really opened up this interoperability, right? And Basam and I were talking about this kind of cross cloud connections or inter-clouding as Luke Tucker and I talked at an open stack in 2013 about inter-networking or inter-connections and it's about integration and interoperability. This is like the next gen conversation that Kubernetes is having. So as you get to scale up, which is happening very fast, as you get machine learning, which can handle data and enable modern applications, really it's connecting networks and connecting systems together. This is a huge architectural innovation direction. Could you share your reaction to that? Yeah, so actually we are starting the easy way, I would say we are starting with the workloads that are loosely coupled, that we don't necessarily have to have this tight inter-connectivity between the different deployments. I would say this is already giving us a lot because the bulk of our workloads are this kind of batch embarrassing parallel. And we are also doing like co-location when we have large workloads that meet this kind of close inter-connectivity, then we kind of co-locate them in the same deployment, same clouds in region. I think like what you describe of having cross cloud inter-connectivity, this will be like a huge topic, it is already I would say. So we started investigating a lot of service mesh options to try to learn what we can gain from it. There's clearly a benefit for managing services, but there will be definitely also potential to allow us to kind of more easily scale out across regions. We've seen this by using the public cloud, some things that we found is, for example, this idea of infinite capacity, which is kind of sometimes, it feels kind of like that, even at the scale we have for CPUs, but when you start using accelerators, you start negotiating, like maybe use multiple regions because there's not enough capacity in a single region and you start having to talk to the cloud providers to negotiate this, and this makes the deployments more complicated, of course, and so this inter-connectivity between regions and clouds will be a big thing. Yeah, and again, low hanging fruit is just the kind of existing market, but I was throwing the vision out there, mainly to kind of talk about what we're seeing, which is the world's a distributed computer, and if you have the standards, good things happen. Open systems, innovating in the open really could make a big difference. It's going to be the difference between real value for the society or global society, or are we going to get into these siloed worlds? So I think the choice is the industry, and I think CERN and CNCF and Linux Foundation and all the companies that are investing in open really is a key inflection point for us right now. So congratulations, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, Ricardo Rocha, computing engineer at CERN here in theCUBE coverage of the CNCF, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.