ound you You realize fairly quickly that this is all going to be doing the same thing through the entire game There is no subtle layering of new gameplay activity. Oh, you don't find an assault rifle and mow those fuckers down Yeah, I guess we don't yeah We did evolve the gameplay from walking and pressing buttons and reading things.  I guess it didn't I'm sorry. It wasn't a completely different game in every way. I suppose He's after the beginning resulting in a mechanical meandering through an underwater habitat That's of course been abandoned, which means flicking switches experiencing bad timing in the form of it's been abandoned That's what's happening. He has no idea what's going on in this game. He doesn't have any idea He's just like walked through it. He tried to Get this one out. Do you think he knows that there was an apocalypse? Uh, just a second this came out On eight years ago september 21st. Let me look up when summer came out All right, I imagine that this would have come out real close to release. Oh, yeah, that's what I'm looking How to come out for release might have been uh, you know Yes Oh Yep, this came out one day before release on steam Right, so this was one of the so this came out september 21st Yeah, this came, uh, this came out september 21st 2015 And the soma game came out september 22nd 2015 So, yeah, this guy got a review of the embargo.  That's the purpose of the embargo.  I have to have a video out in five hours um Yeah, I uh, yeah, he clearly rushed through it in order to get his review out on time Everything going wrong right when it seems like it should and lots and lots of walking tons of walking Boat loads of walking, but interspersed with occasionally places Man, you know mario. I fuck, you know mario. It's just a lot of running Oh, so much running around and jumping and running. Wow. You know, it's and it never evolves It's always running and jumping and it's always it's you're always going to right You're always going from left to right. What's up with that? That's kind of uh, wow repetitive Stale boring gameplay. This will never stand the test of time And honestly, I bet if the if you didn't do a lot of walking.  You don't go anywhere He just has that kind of like these videos They just bitch about stuff because they never explain why they never say why something's bad They never say what they would do to fix it. They never say what it's lacking It's just it's bad. You just walk a lot as if that isn't most games but Or maybe it's face. It's like a one night stand that way. You can never tell which one Luckily controls good. Why do you get into one night stands with ugly women? I don't understand. Why would you say that?  It's a joke rags. Yeah rags All right, good though. Once you get injured you're a slobbering Shambling mess of a man until you heal up, but it looks cool and though it can be ultimately No, it doesn't look cool because you were bitching about the chromatic aberration It doesn't look cool. You can't you contradicted yourself You were bitching and whining and moaning about how it looks like when you got hurt and now you're like, yeah, it looks cool Oh, you couldn't The script was written in an off to learn The script was written overestimating it It was after 15 minutes it still shows an attention to detail missing in some other you were injured for 15 minutes Damn Other titles where you're fine seven seconds after taking a crowbar to the balls to be honest I was just really surprised about how wrote and basic that the story was and it's He didn't pay attention to the story. He literally I think that what he did was he did actually the kind of the same thing that joseph anderson did Where he had this idea of what it was in his head And at that point This guy even more so than joseph completely stopped engaging with the story I guess because he believed What I think the story is is what oh, this is total recall or whatever and he just stopped engaging You know and then he just walked around and didn't care You know when katherine said drain his battery if you want I'd rather not stay plugged in He walked over to the body hit drain and then left Yeah, because my virtual pal told me so yeah, like he wouldn't he'd be like, what do you think about that choice?  It's like what have we done?  It's just not it physically can't do it This block is in my way. It feels like it's annoying. He's a grasshopper in front of david He doesn't he literally can't comprehend what it is.    What is it? This it's the problem is that there are some people who are just too stupid for soma I think that's the There are legitimately people. It's just like that's just The fedora is growing on your head there.  Well, but that's the actual problem It's not that they couldn't understand this at all It's that they didn't even try like they're playing it like the dark descent which you can kind of play this way Because it's a several sequences in which you need to get the key from over there So you can open the door. There's a spooky monster though, and then it's really terrifying more surface level I guess it's more I guess I'm not even trying to it's more So just soma was like if you went in with the wrong expectations, then yeah, you can really not enjoy it And the story can start to grate on you.  I'm sure these people are capable of understanding what soma was about They just didn't care. They didn't want to know and so that's that's the result we got Reeves whoa, these guys are like starfish and dudes that had a baby Listen folks, this is the last frontier deep dark place where mankind since ancient times felt leviathans rested That has awesome locations like the mariana trench stigian abyss and my favorite challenger deep And yet all this mystery and cool names and awesome locations does nothing the game simply isn't Sorry, what is he talking about? Oh, no, right. So could you pause right when he's about to say the meme? Nothing the game simply isn't scary.  Where are the terrorists? And unlike say the vanishing nebeth and kardor even everyone has gone to the rapture Soma just creaks like an old boat anytime the story tries to get going spring in a leak Just when you think it would and then come talking about Why you sound like you didn't play any of the same game again He'd be like, yeah, but no spoilers, you know, so I just got a I can't provide examples Crashing down under the weight of its own rote gameplay Added that the almost immeasurably small emotional response you get from the characters and you're left with an empty leaking crashing boat It was just utterly disappointing in almost all ways Especially when it comes to doling out the story and well the gameplay fun factor The first hour was actually fun the second less so and by the 8th I could count on my seeing enemy juice and crusted fingers just how How was the first hour fun?  Um, oh, yeah, soma. This is new game.     So yeah, you know some it's not that worthwhile Well, let's see what is what's his fun factor rating if you have I don't even know what I don't even know what a fun factor I feel like that's a terrible metric to have for something that you would apply to every video game ever What's the fun factor of spec ops the lane? What's the fun factor there? You know like not every game is trying to be fun in the in the strict sense of providing positive emotions Yeah, fun is a strictly positive emotion.  So I guess you can of course, but you don't really have fun I wouldn't describe it as fun. I describe it as captivating or enthralling.   Just yeah, honestly going by everything.  This video is worthless. It's no it's worse than worthless. It's actively damaging It's actively detrimental to a really great video game So So now I want to read some of the top comments I'm sure he loved out last I'm sure he thought out last amazing So the top comments on this video first one a very smart and thought provoking game. I loved it. It's like, huh, okay It's very different than the video next one. One of the best game stories ever and well realized How can this be a bad game? Oh, I see there's nothing to shoot at Next top comment I personally love the game love the story and the pacing as well as the exploration The game makes you think about and question what makes you feel uneasy, which I loved Yes, the game has some missteps in areas But I was willing to look past when it came to progressing the story for me eight out of ten And that comment is eight years old by the way All right, so people at the time Yeah, I don't like. Ah, yeah, no good. Next one says I for one love this game Horsen expecting your review to be so scathing. I thought it was beautiful in a depressing way Thank the lord For all of these comments. I know this video is old, but you interpreted the story so different from me You said the AI wanted to end mankind, but I thought it wanted to save it Hmm People being so nice for no reason I love this guy's reviews, but his opinion on soma is 100 not close to bide Well, yeah, you can say like that Uh Interesting I couldn't disagree with you more Soma has been the best game I've ever played at least a few scale games based on how much emotion they generate In fact, I consider it so good that it's basically destroyed most other games for me Everything seems so mediocre in comparison And uh, he responded that's good. Always like people enjoying their games Yeah, okay, dude There you go, acg I totally deep deep deep sale, but hey look, you know, it's cool, man If you're enjoying it, you can just get what you want out of it They go, I totally disagree here This game is one of my favorites graphics are all there to set up a specific mood They aren't going for beautiful or ugly in this game. They're going for something to affect the player The audio underwater was perfect. The only sounds that were off of metal sounds just passable. I don't even necessarily agree with that Um, they've got a whole set of comments here basically just explaining what they loved about it And he responded enjoy the game a lot of folks do By the way, these comments he's been putting them on two years after this video came up What do you mean? So the video was posted like eight years ago and these comments he's been leaving here are six years ago Oh, okay. I guess one day he just decided to uh respond to people on soma I gotta say that that one that you read sounded a little bit big mad They're all uh They're all a little I feel like they're all kind of mad at him without trying to express it too much, you know Yeah, they're all being pretty kind I have to say I really enjoyed this game the gameplay wasn't anything new or interesting But the themes it explored really resonated with me and he responded very cool Yeah, like you know what I mean?  Yeah, good for you, dude, you know, yeah, all right Like so many others here I think the game was awesome a must buy for sci-fi fans, but as a horror game It's much more story based than many others and not as scary. So I get the disappointment Whatever There's so many comments that just say it's their favorite game And then you got amnesia rebirth Yeah, which as far as I know has been panned like I don't think anyone really likes that game that much Well, then I guess maybe there'll be maybe they'll make another well They made amnesia the bunker which is apparently much more returned to form like dr. Cent which I'll be playing halloween, okay But that's something Yeah, um, and who knows what's next for them Amnesia rebirth, how's that doing on steam? Mostly positive. That's like 96 positive or something like that. I guess we're done with this video. Yes It's going away. It's going away. We're deleting. Well, I don't that know we're done with uh Delete forever. I like how it says you're delete forever Yes, I wish you could be deleted forever erase this data don't allow anything to bring it back Uh, but yeah, that's that's it for us talking about soma in a specific sort of way And of course those were two videos that made it into my coverage of soma Back in the years before I really pissed you off, didn't I oh they weren't the only two there was plenty I remember being annoyed at loads of people's videos. I um I mean You know on one hand it's like well It's a lot to ask that everybody fully interpret perfectly the game before like when they got days to interview Sorry to in real time. Well, so I was actually going to go that direction. It's like the Nature of reviewers to rush out these reviews is like you can't expect them to get everything right And it's like yeah, but I expect them to get some things right like this getting ridiculous Rather than just making incorrect claim up to incorrect claim with no substantiating References at all and then you watch someone like markiplier player who by the end of it is just sitting there And contemplate what it all beats it went through all the choices in a significant way as well That he was worried that people weren't going to get it and he was totally correct That was that was strangely prophetic of him at the end He's at the credit to the game and he said he's worried that people are not going to engage with this game And not going to understand what he was trying to do And the thing is over time I'd say that it's its reputation has gotten better and people have gotten to understand it I don't know anybody who says like to this day like soma so shit It's like no I don't think there's anyone passionately hating it in the way like tlj still has while also having passionate lovers Like soma the only people that all laugh to the people who love it seemingly And they can get and recommended it and then you recommend it around because soma is really really special um And it's a shame we couldn't encourage more stuff like that or perhaps as part of what makes it so special Is that it doesn't have a wide appeal. It's one of those situations. I don't know You kind of um, I don't know I feel like these guys if they'd given it a fair shake in their reviews that we could have ended up in a place That was far more fair for it um And maybe amnesia rebirth didn't have to If soma was hyper successful, I'd like to believe that yeah frictional wouldn't would have made something better again Who knows? Oh, well at least look right at least at least we got soma at least we have. Oh, yeah Yeah, we we we lucked out on that one for this timeline. So It's often referenced for me. It's just the best story in video games But it's there's a you know, there's a couple of other contenders. It's just that one is particularly impressive It's so good and I do like what that person said in one of the comments that um Whether or not it's got these floors here and there in whatever way it's the game that made them feel the most Which yeah, that's important. It's a big factor for art Um, but yeah, thank you all so much for watching. This was a strange cobbled together episode of different pieces And uh, there's a kind of discussion. I think a lot of efet fans are waiting for which was the we delve into a bit of soma And a trip down memory lane at least for me Wondering what should I just say it's just funny to remember all of the horrors that was the matter of the review of this fucking game To say What are you gonna do? Are you going to do other than? Uh, I don't know what we're doing. I guess Yeah, that's what he's gonna do Play soma. It's really good. I recommend soma. You should check it out. It's a fun game, right guys An engaging game an enthralling game. Yeah a captivating game. Yes Makes you think Well and on that note, we shall say goodbye everybody Yeah, see everybody All right. Bye. Bye. See you later everybody


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Welcome to my session. And it's great to have you join with me about the metrics, about defined metrics for the CI-CD optimization. My name is Xu Chunhuan. I'm with the 99 Cloud and the technical director of 99 Cloud. In this session, I will share with you about how to define metrics for your CI-CD optimization. Right now, nowadays, everyone is moving to agile to stay competitive. And agile development has become those very trendy buzzwords, as you know, right? And as we can see, agile manifesto are like four key values to streamline the software development process. The first one is the individuals and the interaction over process and tools. Second is working software over comprehensive documents. The third is the customer collaboration over the contract negotiation. And fourth is the responding to change over following a plan. Based on these four values and developers come up with another 12 principles of the agile software development. And there is a principle, working software is the primary measure of the progress. And because the agile development is very different from the traditional waterfall development, it emphasizes more about the interaction or communication. So it's not easy to actually implement agile models and even hard to define metrics to optimize them. But anyway, we need to define the metrics to optimize them. Because if you cannot measure it and you cannot improve it, which is said by the Peter Drucker. I don't know if you guys have the experience, if you want to lose weight. I want to keep fit and want to lose my weight. And it's hard for me to lose the weight. Because if I can't keep an eye on my weight, and I cannot find inspiration by myself and keep working on exercise to lose my weight. So I have an idea. Then I buy an app. And the app can track the weight of myself every day and do exercise. And I get the metrics of the exercise. And we will see how the exercise can improve my body. And finally, I can get a good shape. So I think it's similar to improve the CI-CD by defining metrics. Traditionally, people when adopt agile development, they do not measure it. There are several reasons. First one is when we use the measurement, you will use the measurement by mistake. Because you don't really understand your metrics. The second is some metrics actually is worn. And it's not useful. So you cannot actually follow the metrics to optimize your process. And third is to implement some measure metrics is cost a lot. So you cannot spend a lot of resources to implement or collect those measures to help to improve your process. So let's see why we need those metrics. In general, there are three aspects for us. The reason we need to use the metrics. The first one is decisions. We can use the metrics held to make decisions for us. For example, we can make the business decision to get better product for the customer and get the result feedback from the customer by using metrics. And then we can use the metrics to improve. We can improve the quality of the product and we can improve the velocity of the team. And third is we can use the metrics to do a prediction. If we have a lot of metrics about your CI-CD process, you can predict a lot. For example, you can predict the velocity of your team in the next iteration cycle. Or you can predict the customer behavior based on a lot of the metrics. At the same time, we can categorize the agent metrics in several phases in a development cycle. First of all, the metrics can help us in the iteration planning. It can help us to make clear the priority of the features or the size of the features based on your history data. And it can help us to do the iteration tracking I just mentioned. And third, it can help us to motivate and improve the team and the team member. We can visualize the, for example, we can visualize the build status in the dashboard and help the team understand the current status of your building system and understand the building time of the system. And you can find ways to improve it. In the following slides, I will introduce an example of my company how we, from the basic metrics, build time to optimize several other metrics. And finally, we can improve the build time and improve the velocity of the development cycle. And last but not least, we can also identify the process problems and identify the quality of the, during the pre-release and the post-release. We can get the data from the pre-release and understand the development quality of the product and get the data from the post-release to understand the feedback of the customer and help us to close the feedback loop. We are talking a lot about the metrics. So what exactly the metric is? I search a lot in the website, and I think I find a proper definition of a metric. I think this definition tells a lot. A metric is any collectable, qualifiable measure that can enable one to track the performance of a spec of a system over time. So I highlight several keywords during this sentence. Let's see what's a collectable and qualifiable measure. During your process, if you're going to measure some performance issues, it may not be easy to measure. For example, if you're going to measure the mode of your team member, that is very hard to measure. Except you can use some survey or some other statistics method to collect the data from the team member. So you have to find a way or spend a lot of resources to collect the metrics you want to get. And the second is track the performance. We can collect a lot of data from the whole development cycle, but not all the data we want. We just want the data we care. For example, we just want to measure some aspect of the performance. So we have to collect that kind of data, not all the data. And one matrix may be just a spec of the whole process, which means you have to have different metrics to reflect your spec of the whole process. And there is no one data or metrics can tell you everything. And at last is the overtime. You have to have enough data and collect the data over time so you can see the chain of those data and you will find the problems and you will finally get the solution. So a lot of people ask me if there is one matrix to talk about the whole process. So I think the answer is no, right? Actually, during the agile development process, there are many research. They are finding they are doing a lot of jobs to help us to understand different aspects of the agile development, at least several aspects. And there is some metrics in here. I think that these metrics can give you some intuition about your problem. Sometimes, for example, I just mentioned, the team happiness is belong to the people and team, human elements. As we know, human always be a very important factors in the agile development. And the second is the process health metrics, like the cycle time and the lead time of the story or the task. The third is about the release metrics, like the release time cost per release. Fourth is about the product development metrics, like the benign chart. And today, we will focus talk about the build time, which is technical metrics here. I will share you a story from my company, how we optimize the build time of the system. Before that, I will introduce you to approach how you can develop metrics for your own. Actually, when we want to resolve something, some problem, there is two approach. The one is the top-down approach. The second is the bottom-up approach. I personally recommend when we want to develop a metrics for your own, we can use the top-down approach, because we can place in the goal setting as your first step and force you to find the metrics related to the problem, which is very critical to develop a metrics for specific problems. And if you don't have a specific goal, then you can try to use the bottom-up approach. You list all the metrics you can get and just look at the data and try to find some trend or some pattern of them. And you may get some intuition about the data. Then you can have some idea to how to optimize your whole process. So next, I will introduce the CI-CD infrastructure of 99 Cloud. 99 Cloud, we have developed the OpenStack distribution based on the OpenStack Cloud. And we leverage the drew as a CI system inside our CI infrastructure. And we accept drew. We also use the red mine to help to check the project and issues. We use GitLab for the Git code and Garrett for review and Jenkins Server for the integration server. And we have the local mirror servers. And at last, we have our own the metrics server. The metrics server will talk to the red mine for the issues and the project. And talk to the Git, we can get the Git metrics and talk to the drew, we can get the pipeline metrics and talk Jenkins, we can get the build information. Right now, we use the drew v2, not upgrade to the drew v3 yet. As we all know, the drew, we can define different pipelines like the check pipeline, gate pipeline when we are going to merge to the repo and the post pipeline when it will happen when you get merged and pre-release and release pipeline. So right now, I will show you the data from the build system. We collect the build time from the system. And here is the build time train. It's a very nice curve, right? Actually, we launched a new project in the August. And the build time, it will increase dramatically. And it troubles us a lot. And we, so the following slides, I will introduce you how we find ways to define metrics to understand the key issues of this increase and how we can define metrics to keep monitoring this trend. And we finally, we will resolve this issue and we will get a nice job in the late September, even though they have a small increase in the next month, in the month of November, OK? So look at this increase. First of all, there is questions coming up to us. Are all the jobs run equally in different build servers? In our infrastructure, we have actually two build servers. And the job will come to different build server and we will have different build running on these build servers. So to answer these questions, we are defining a new metrics called job balance ratio. We will try to find out if the balance is the job schedule not so balanced, which cause some job runs very slow and cause the time increase. So we collect this data from the build server and we calculate the ratio as this diagram, as you can see. Actually, the job is equally be distributed in these two servers, right? So as we can see, the job balance ratio, it tells me the problem is not caused by the unbalancing of the job. So actually, what's the next hypothesis? We will try to see if because the performance of the build server and especially because the network issue, because when we build, we have to build a lot of the dark image and the image have to get the ripple from the outside and we will cache it in the local cache server and we will build it again. So during our investigation, we find out there are a lot of retry in the log. As you can see, we are using the caller to build the other Docker server and the caller log, you can see it will fail a lot and there are many retries. And based on our history data, normally the deployed job, it will have eight times retry every day and for the image build job, it will normally have 75 times but from the data from the August, we will see there are more than those data. So the actions we have to take is to optimize the network connection and also try to resolve the IO issues. So the optimization number one is very simple. We first of all, we will try to upgrade the build server with more CPU and RAM. And second, we will use the SSD storage to have better IO performance. We moved those two build server from the SATA pool to the SSD pool to have better IO performance. And the third, we will change to use another VPN to have better network connection because in China, the image build have to use the resources from the outside and sometimes it will be banned. So we have to change the VPN to have better network connection. After this optimization, you will see the train is dropped. We optimize about the 25% of the build time. But we are still thinking how we can optimize it to the normal data just like the previous data. So we dig into the detail of the building process. And before the building script, it just not so modelized and every step is mixed together. And we have the engineer discussion and clean up the steps of the building process. And we finally, we will understand is the building docker image, it has the similar curve to the build time. And the build docker image, this step is a critical path of our whole building process. So we will find ways to optimize this script. So how can we optimize the building process of the docker image? Normally, when we are building, we upload a patch. The patch gets merged. And when we run the daily build, it will build all the images overall. Actually, as I remember, there are about over 200 images. So which means in the daily build, we have to rebuild over 200 images every time. It takes time a lot. So we decide to define a new metrics to help us to understand if we could reduce some images and avoid building them again. If those images are not changed. So we define the image reviews rate for this process. What's image reviews rate? The image reuse rate means during this daily build, we are not going to rebuild this image. We will keep reuse these images. Because when we are developing some features, maybe some images is not getting packed. So eventually, we do not need to rebuild this image. So we can keep use the last version or last tag of the images. So from those metrics, you can see in the September, the reuse rate is zero. Because the whole script, it will just build all the images overall. And from the September, 17, we are going to refactor this script. And the use rate will increase to 80%. But going to the next month, the reuse rate, it will not so stable. That's because the use rate, it depends on the feature development. Once the feature has many projects, we have to rebuild many images. So after we reflect this script, we can have a better optimization of this, have better optimization. The optimization effect is around the 70%. But from this 70%, it's not the best. Because you can see in the next month, the build time is increased again. That's because we should have another way to optimize our script or for another aspect. We have to find another metrics to have another metrics to help us to understand the key issues of these building systems. So we are keep working in this month holding to find a better metrics to help us to understand. So the summary is we think a metrics should be used for purpose. Just like I show in my story, we use the reuse rate to measure how many dog image we are using in a daily build. But not all the metrics can resolve one problem. So we have to define different metrics from different aspects to describe these problems and finally, we can get the resolution of this problem. And the second is we have to understand the different relationship between different metrics. Metrics may have some relationship. They may have some metrics may depend on another. Like the building time, the metrics, they depend. Actually, it depends on the image reuse rate and the job schedule ratio, those two metrics. We need to find several metrics or a group of metrics to describe a problem. Also, we should find a group of metrics to describe your solution and help you to evaluate your solutions. The fourth is we need to drill down and define new metrics. How to drill down is you have to understand your problem very clearly. Just like the example I show in the slides, you have to understand the build time, how the daily build runs and what's the steps. And you can drill down the data, drill down the build time into different metrics and evaluate each metrics. And the fourth is make assumptions and implement them. Make assumptions and try the adjustment and try to see the results of your adjustment. And then you will close your feedback look. And last, I will encourage you guys to look at your CI-CD process. And starting today, maybe you do not have a goal to how to optimize your process. You can look at the data in your hand. Maybe you can get some intuition. And if you have a goal that is better, you will try to understand the problem and drill down the data. And you will find a solution to them. OK, that's all. Thank you. Any questions? OK, thank you. So after you break down the build time from Docker emit build, which is the most step that's been most time in the build? After I break down the steps, the most time consuming task is the image building process. Can be more specific? Actually, we have to download a lot of the image from the outside. So the download process? The download process from the image layer. So you change the VPN service to both that process? Yeah, that is one. Another is we try to reuse the image we could reuse. Local catch? Yeah, and not the local catch. It's because in some day, maybe the image not changed. We can use the older image. So do you have any local reports? Yeah, we have local reports, but if we merge the new features, the local reports have to be updated, right? So some image will not update, some image will update. But by default process, it will update all, and build the image all over all again. That costs a lot. Thank you. OK, thank you.


If you're in your 20s, you're not too young to run a business. And if you run a business, you're not too young to manage the business successfully. But most young entrepreneurs do not take their business seriously. As Julian Hall of ultrapreneursaign.com wrote, People will take your business as seriously as you do. Mary Barra rose to the top of General Motors after 33 years at the company. Barra started at the very bottom of General Motors at age 18 when she enrolled in an engineering college sponsored by the company. There she spent half the year inspecting parts at the Pontiac plant. She walked her way up the ladder with smart decision making and willingness to give the company everything she had. Colleagues recall her being the first person in the office every morning and responding to emails after 11pm. In 2013, her dedication was rewarded when she was named General Motors' first ever female CEO. She took on the role in early 2014. She took her business seriously. Do you have a business or a joke? Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla CEO, advised entrepreneurs in an interview, you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week if other people are putting in 40 hours' work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks. Then, even if you're doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve informant what it takes them a year to achieve. Your business is as serious as you take it but if you do not know how to take your business seriously, use the steps below to help you get started. Number one, resume early. Have a fixed resumption time, which should be convenient for you and make all efforts to show up at exactly or minutes before that time constantly. When customers know you will always be there, they will always think of your business first. Number two, dress well. The way you dress is the way you will be addressed. That's a cliche but it's still relevant.  This doesn't have to be expensive, elaborate dressing.  This equally applies even if you walk from home. Number three, create smart goals. If you have planned your business, then you should have goals you intend to achieve. Short-term goals, medium-term goals, long-term goals, goals you are planning to accomplish each day, each month, each quarter, each year, and so on. This not only builds seriousness into your business, but it also keeps you focused and energizes you to pursue business success rightly. Number four, have a designated workspace. Even if you're just a one-man business and you walk from home, you should have a designated workspace where everyone around you knows they would always find you when they come in at business hours during the work week. Number five, set office hours. What time will your office open? What time will you close? Will you open on holidays? Will there be occasional breaks? All these should be factored into your business plan and also declared to your friends, family members, and customers. Your business will be treated the way it is presented. Number six, have a separate bank account. Your saving accounts belong to you. Your business accounts, which can equally be another savings account, but you don't touch except for business, should be designated. Number seven, monitor your expenses. How do you spend your business money? How much should be invested back into the business? Who is buying what and how much are they paying? You should be answering this in your business plan so you know where your money is going and how to call it back if it isn't going in the right direction. Number eight, use contracts. Contracts are good to make you and your clients know you are committed to this and nothing is going to change it. Contracts save you and your clients from headaches and help you explain what actions to take if any member defaults. Number nine, use invoices. This should keep you and your clients notified of monetary transactions between you two. Documented records cannot be wrong, but undocumented deals can lead to unnecessary business hiccups. Number 10, know your business statements. What's the one sentence that describes your business such that if you needed to explain your business to a prospect in a single conversation, it sticks with him immediately. Find that statement, learn and use it often. Number 11, stop working for free. You should draw the line between building opportunities and letting yourself be taken advantage of. If you're investing your time and talent or skill, you deserve the pay no matter how little. Number 12, invest in yourself. Make yourself better in your business. List things you need to personally improve upon to help you build your business to success. Spending money on building yourself for business success may seem like a waste of money, but it isn't. Actually, the more you grow, the more you earn. Improving your confidence, for example, is not a minus to your business. It is a great plus. Number 13, invest in your business. Spend money on what will make your business grow, equipment, devices, gadgets, seminars and training. Number 14, mention your business everywhere. Talk about what you do, say it to everyone and anyone who cares to listen, there's no reason to be shy about it if you love it and it is your business. Number 15, measure your success. Don't just plan, measure what you're doing. Are you achieving your goals? You should have a day in the month when you do this. Ask yourself serious questions about why you are not making some progress or how you can scale up your success. Number 16, have business cards. This isn't always important, but you never know when you would meet some wealthy individuals who want to lavish his money or a generous philanthropist who is looking to invest in some bright business idea. Number 17, ask for help. Don't be afraid to ask questions from people who know about your business and those who don't but are vast in areas that can profit your business. Hire people to help solve your business problems. You don't always have to do everything yourself or as it often happens, you get burnt out or nothing gets done. Number 18, change what's not working. If something is not working in your business, throw it away. Being too afraid to lose is being too scared to make a profit and push your business forward. Number 19, have a title. What's your title? CEO, MD, general manager, principal? Give yourself a title and don't be afraid to tell your customers or clients to call you that. Call yourself that too often and it sticks. You'll naturally start to behave like it. Number 20, know when to say no. You don't have to work for everybody. You don't have to say yes to every idea. You are not obligated to manufacture every product so feel free to kick a client away. Number 21, always look the part. Successful people take their business, whatever it is, seriously. They dress the part to look the part. They work and talk to look like their business. They resume office earlier than most and would close later than most. Their integrity is impeccable. They built their skill to outperform those of others. They simply treat their business like it's business.  If this video inspired you, like this video. We love you.


Okay, welcome back everyone. This is live in Las Vegas, IBM Impact. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the city from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host, Paul Gillan with SiliconANGLE. Our next guest is Brad McCready, vice president at IBM Fellow of the Systems and Technology Group, welcome to theCUBE. Oh, thank you, John. You've been on before, Dave Vellante, the big flash announcement in New York City. You've been on theCUBE before, but now we're here at the event. Big news here at IBM Impact. Opening up the power platform, opening up in the cloud. Give us your take on your first experiences from Impact this year. Well, I got here about an hour ago. So, my first experience is a great interview. That was the cab ride. Great interview with SiliconANGLE at theCUBE. But, you know, there's a lot of good energy here.  This is the first time we've done it. Taking our technology that we usually put in the data center and the data centers and putting it in the white boxes, getting ready to go into the hyperscale or warehouse scale data centers.  What is the big thing around the power systems? Obviously, in San Francisco, you have the announcement with the foundation. Open is a key message. How does that change what you guys are doing internally? Could you share a little bit of color on, you know, how you move from the black box to the white box and what's involved? What's changed? What's new? What's the enabling piece? Yeah, you know, it is different. You know, that's one of the things that we've been working on and things do have to change. We have this technology, this great technology, very few people in the warehouse scale data centers say, oh, we don't like the technology, but when it's sealed in a computer that has a door on it that you can walk into, it's not packaged up and ready to go into a warehouse scale data center. So, as we start going into that, you know, we're taking that same technology but we're opening it up. We're enabling people to build SOCs out of our chip technology. We're enabling other people to manufacture and design systems and sell them with enablement from my team. I lead the development team to help them build those systems. We're got an open source firmware and software stack. So, you know, you can't go into a warehouse scale data center with proprietary code. You got to go with open source code. So we created an open source stack to enable them to go into the data center as well. So those are some things that we've done to take the same, you know, base technology but move it into the right way that's consumable by warehouse scale data centers. But Brad, why now?  Suddenly it's big move toward openness, toward open source and sharing the spec and bringing on partners. Why was now the time to do that? You know, there's about three things that kind of come together at the same time that we really feel this is the right time to make this move. You know, the first is which, you know, many people have talked about in the industry a lot which is Moore's Law. You know, we clearly don't see Moore's Law continuing on the same rate and pace it has been. So in order to keep that cost performance coming down, you have to innovate now beyond just the processor and technology. You've got to innovate with accelerators, accelerated networking. And so the first reason is, is to decline to Moore's Law, you need to do innovation across the whole stack. That's what OpenPower is about, bringing all the partners to do that. Second thing is, you know, the PC has driven so much of the server industry for so long. It drives our standards, it drives the volume base for DRAM and things like that. As PC starts to go down in volume, we're going to have to innovate new memory solutions and things like that with our OpenPower partners in order to pick up what we're losing with the PC standardization. So that's the second thing that's causing you know, OpenPower to be the time for that. And the third thing, of course, is, you know, we're kind of going into what people call the third generation of warehouse scale data centers. First generation was black box, second generation, everybody started kind of building their own white boxes. And then the third generation, we believe, is going to be innovation across the whole stack, SOCs, silicon innovation combined with IO and storage innovation and things like that. So as those three things come together, we think now is a really good time for OpenPower and the innovation that's going to bring to our partners to the data center. Is this also a recognition that Intel doesn't have it anymore, that the X86 is running out of steam? I don't think you would say it's running out of steam. I don't think I would phrase it that way. What I would say is, if you're going to drive the advancements right now, you've got to bring in lots of people, lots of partners. Like if you look at OpenPower, we have Malinox, NVIDIA, Altera, Xilinx, Google, all the FPGA vendors, I mean, all the memory vendors, Micron, Samsung, all these people have got to come together and innovate in order to move the ball forward. That's how hard it's going to be. If you're just at home playing with your transistors, playing with your silicon and your microprocessor design, you're going to have a really hard time bringing the innovation to move the ball forward. Which is a way of saying Intel was not doing that very effectively. You saw this as a time for IBM to take the initiative. Yes, I think that now is a good time for us to get in there and take the initiative to try and bring those people together to do that innovation. Brad, talk about the folks out there. I mean, obviously, you can get into the enabling side, open source stat, that's all the modern era. We call the modern era computing, it's upon us. A lot of folks look at IBM and they're, oh, wow, IBM got rid of the ThinkPad and the laptops and the desktops. Now the servers, the low-end servers, we're kind of pushed out to Lenovo as well, that announcement. So this is more of the high end of the computing scale, web scale, warehouse scale. What does this mean? I mean, obviously, getting into the low-end commodity side of the business is a margin issue. Steve Mills talked about that at Pulse. But how do you describe when someone says, hey, I thought you were getting out of the server business? So what this is about, this is driving innovation. So we have the open consortium is driving the innovation with lots of partners, lots of new things around memories, accelerations, IO. And then we see that innovation is feeding into our server business and driving that forward. Which is very important that we continue to move the server business forward with innovation there as well. So we have innovation taking place, let people build their own, roll their own out in the hyperscale space. A lot of people do that. Then of course we'll have our core IBM server business going strong, taking that same innovation and moving it into our customer sets.  They build their own stuff.  A normal enterprise still has needs, large scale needs or web scale or hyperscale. What are some of those innovations? Because Doug was talking about the Linux investment with Flash memory at the converged layer. He's talking about new software paradigms where just things are changing. The ability to persistent memory, for instance, changes the software model. So what are some of those things? Can you get in the weeds a little bit and share? What's going on in the kernel and the Linux? Are things changing? What's the big, ah-ha? So over in our open power booth here at the demo, we have six demos. I'll give you a little bit, a few of them, some examples of the innovation we're doing. We have a very unique way we can attach FPGA accelerators to our processor. We can attach it coherently. So now you can have an FPGA share the memory that our processor's sharing. We implemented a couple of algorithms on that. We implemented Monte Carlo and got a 250X speedup over running off of a normal processor by doing a Cappy attached FPGA of a Monte Carlo algorithm. We did the same thing with a key value store with Memcached with our partner Xilinx, we did that one. Sped up 35X, a whole key value store. Doing that, but again, we had sharing a memory between the processor and the accelerator and that really enabled some easy to program and a lot of acceleration. We attached some flash to our processor. Got about a 5X cost reduction on a key value store, took all of the key value store out of main memory and put it into a very low cost flash solution. So those are the kind of things that are going to keep moving forward in the warehouse and in the regular data center and those are some of the advanced things that we're doing with our partners and open power. This isn't just like buying a box drone in the server rack, this is engineered differently. What is the things that you could point to to saying the one or two things that are just the levers of the innovation? Is it the memory? Is it the flash? Is it the software? The truth is, is if you go and look around, we actually have to do it. Silicon scaling was such a powerful force in our industry. I mean, when you got that transistor going twice as fast and about half of the expense of every 18 months, that just drives everything. So what do we have to do now? We got to pull on every lever. You're going to see innovation at the network level. You see innovation at the storage level. You're going to see accelerators with FPGAs, GPUs. You got to be pulling on all those levers if you're going to replace what Silicon used to bring to our industry. So that's the next scale point. Absolutely. Yeah. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Is this going to create some new complexity in the market for buyers, given that you're talking about systems that are really special purpose. They're built for a particular use case scenario. So will buyers have new decision points to consider in all of the accoutrements that they buy with a processor compared to what they've been used to, which is just Intel inside? Yeah, the general purpose processor, the general purpose processor isn't going to carry the mail I could use. And so if you're going to want to keep going down on a Moore's Law Life curve on cost reduction, you are going to have to look at, let's call them use cases, some general buckets of use cases. Hey, I'm going to run key value stores. Okay, let's find some ways to speed up key value stores. Okay, over here, I'm going to run web front end servers. Okay, let's find some things to speed up Java over here. And it may be different. They'll probably will be different. So there will be some buckets and use cases, I think going forward, as you try and buy servers or get servers that are keeping you on the Moore's Law. As you work with your partners and they have access to the Power Systems reference document, can they customize the processor itself for a different application? Yeah, so we actually have some partners that are doing that already, customizing the CPU for use cases around security. We got some partners that are customizing around the networks and the peripherals around the power case. We have both ends of the spectrum taking place now. And what quality control, if any, will IBM retain over that process or the foundation for that matter? Or is that not really something you worry about? No, no, it is something you worry about.  You know, if you look at it from an IBM perspective, you'll see that kind of a range.  Because the most important thing is the software's got to work. And then to do that, you got to keep that architectural compliance. You talked about the emergence of the hyperscale data center. I mean, for the people who don't know what that means, how do you define that? That's true. It's one of those fuzzy terms. But usually when you think of the hyperscale data centers, you're thinking of, you know, the very, very large public clouds. You know, then you think of Google's and Facebook's and Amazon's are obviously the top three to come to a lot of people's minds. But it's a very, very large public cloud. Software, his IBM's, large hyperscale data center. Some question we talked to Doug about earlier was Google's participation in the foundation. How important is Google's endorsement going to be going forward? I mean, beyond joining the foundation, but actually building a product, implementing a product, maybe even commercializing a product. How much, how important will that be to the success of what you're trying to do? But Google's participation in the data and open power is really, really important in that, you know, you need to have all perspectives in the foundation. You need to have the perspective of users. You need to have the perspective of the developers. You need to have all of those perspectives in the foundation. And, you know, Google does a great job of bringing that guidance and that guiding hand as to what the users of this type of technology are looking for. In terms of being an analytics engine, what are you doing with power to make it better tuned to the analytics needs, the analytics market that you're attacking? Yeah, just kind of what I was discussing a little bit earlier, you know, we're taking and putting advanced I.O. and things around the processor, as well as in the processor. I mean, if you look at the processor itself, it has more threads than other processors. We have larger caches than other processors. And on top of that, you know, what we're showing here at the impact, you know, is we're also showing how then we've gone and taken in a very advanced way, attached flash to have very, very close low latency flash right next to the processor. You can put, you know, 12, 24 terabytes of, you know, direct attached data right there next to a CPU to enable it to handle those big data sets and big data analytics. What kind of performance improvements are you seeing from that? Oh, we're showing, you know, 10X improvement, you know, with some of our implementations around a high-speed network attached and then, you know, even more importantly, like with the example I showed with the flash, it's really going to enable us to show a 5X cost reduction, because we're really going to be able to do with flash what people were doing with DRAM.  You know, and when you look at these big data problems right now, all of the cost of it's in storage. So we're seeing a big bubble in the market right now, the flash bubble. We are joking, Dave Vellante and Paul were joking about the storage bubbles of yesteryear. Pure storage, just got a $3 billion valuation for all flash array. What is all the hubbub around this market right now? You mentioned FPGDA, the acceleration piece is key. Is it one piece? How do people get their arms around this bubble or innovation cycle, if you will? Because there's innovation, certainly. But the valuations of these technologies seem to be a little bit out of the range of sanity. What's your thoughts on that? I mean, how, I mean, is it real innovation or just the marketplaces don't know how to value it yet? And I think, you know, as I talked about, you know, when we asked about like why now? You know, and I talked about these three discontinuity striking. You know, when you hit these discontinuities, what do we do? We all tend to fan out and try lots and lots of things. And it's going to get shaken out and weeded out and we're going to come back and we're going to converge on a few things. You know, and I think we're in that spread out phase right now, kind of like I think you were describing, right? You know, we've got a lot of people. You can go to the literature, there's tons of investigation on FPGA. We've got two or three FPGA projects going.  You got, you know, we didn't even talk much about the advanced memories yet. You know, people are trying to take cost out using MRAMs and phase change memories and all that. I think I see all of these things going forward and they're going to go forward for a while as we test them and try them and beat on them and then we'll pick one or two. But we're definitely in the weeding out phase. So what is the impact of the underlying architecture or above architecture, above the chips? Because you got databases, now you have in memory, no SQL, SQL. So you got a lot of variety, diversity of different pieces of the puzzle. You got data layers, you got database layers, you got analytics layers. Is there, I mean, how do you make sense of that?  I mean, it used to be you're both on a database and you've done your mission, Mongo, that's only one aspect of it, but.  I think the software structure isn't changing that much. I think you're seeing different players as the open source pieces of software are coming in and, you know, in some cases simplifying, in some cases making things more complex. You know, how much effort you're going to put in yourself makes a big difference on what you can use, right? You know, while people are coveting the lower cost, you know, it comes at the price of more, more role your own at that lower cost. How about the CIO? So what's going to change in your mind? You know, this is more of a vision question, but I'm the CIO, I've got a large data centers. I'm running a big bank and I'm like, okay, I got all those data centers out here. Obviously, footprint's important. What's the big change, sea change, that you see in the data center? With cloud, obviously you're going to tap into the cloud. I mean, with the build your own, which is now the trend, the maker movements upon us, the homebrew, computer club, the data center, whatever you want to call it, we've called it a variety of things, but now you have significant footprint issues. You have now enabling technologies is that, what will the data centers look like for that CIO? What should be thinking about? How does he lay that out? We haven't talked about it much, but what I think is really going to be, if I were a CIO right now, where I'd be reading and studying and executing on, is really to get to the hybrid model. We didn't talk about it a whole lot, but I think one of the most important things, you know, that the CIOs need to be thinking about how you can take everything and move it all to the cloud, or off-prem, or keep everything within my four walls, but how am I going to make these two things work together? You know, that's going to be the win. The guy that figures that out first is probably going to be the guy that wins. Because- Without disrupting their operations. Yeah, absolutely. With all those usual constraints, you don't lose any data in the process, don't lose any compute in the process, but I think the hybrid model is the one that's going to survive. That's Brad's opinion, and I think that's the one, if I were a CIO, I'd be really looking real hard at. It's how I can do my critical stuff on-prem and then go off-prem. You're out here, one of the things you're doing, this is sort of the formal rollout of the Open Power Foundation here at this event. You're talking about your roadmap for the future. Can you, in a simplified form, present where you're taking power over the next two years? Well, the rollout that we're doing here isn't necessarily as much the power rollout, but it is the Open Power rollout. And what we're really describing with the Open Power rollout and sharing with everybody is the innovation that we're trying to form across the very broad spectrum of partners in Open Power. So we are showing, just like we've touched on here, a place that we're taking it with FPGA acceleration, advanced memory, advanced IO, and networking acceleration, GPU acceleration. We're also showing some of our very first white box systems. We're showing a reference planer, one socket reference planer. It's our first white box systems over there in the booth. So we're trying to show all the different avenues that we're innovating on, which we think are all key technologies that are going to enable the industry to move into the third generation of warehouse scale computing. To what degree is the future of power itself influenced by members of the foundation? We definitely got a, and I actually described this to my IBM team. I keep painting the picture over and over again, the two-way street, where we get influenced by the foundation members, and they influence what we build and the technology to try and learn from them. But then the same thing, we take that technology from the foundation as I described earlier, move it into our products to make the products more differentiated and more productive. So it is a definite two-way street where the foundation's influencing us and we're influencing it. Brad, final question for you in the segment. What should the folks out there who are watching really pay attention to around what's so important about this impact? Why is this event here in Vegas really, really important to them? So you got to realize you're talking to the hardware guy in the middle of a software conference. I mean, is this scale a new capability? Is there a distinction anymore? They're clearly blurring together. I mean, when we talked about the use cases, they are blurring together. And I think, maybe I'll go ahead and take that angle on my answer to your question, which is, hopefully as you go and you look at some of this stuff, is that we're showing how we've taken the hardware and really, really applied it to the software use cases to get something that's one plus one equals three versus just, here's your hardware, go find your software, match them up at the end, and take what you get. Because that's the kind of stuff we're going to need to do to keep moving the technology forward. And the software part is pretty flexible. You can pretty much use open source stacks and or whatever the developers want to innovate on top of. Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at most, I think even all of IBM, not all, but there's large pieces of all that we do that has that meshing of maybe an open source foundation with differentiation on top. I think you're going to see more and more of that. It gets the job done, that's the key, right? I mean, time to value is always in the top mind, but we're in a massive change. Brad, thanks for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you gentlemen. All right, thank you.