My name is Kevin Connor. I'm an engineering manager with Red Hat. And I'm responsible for the Istio team on the engineering side or the middleware engineering side. So I've been with Red Hat for a very long time. I came across with the JBoss acquisition and went through transactions and so on. And eventually ended up with Istio. So one of the things that we're seeing, one of the trends we're seeing these days is a transition from deploying big monolithic applications over to microservices environment. So we're starting to break apart applications. And there are various reasons that we do this. It may well be that we want to isolate one part of an application from another. So if there's a problem with one part, then it doesn't impact the others. It may well be that we want to scale different parts of the application in different ways. Or we could have different development teams and we want to give them different deployment life cycles for developing, testing, and deploying their applications into production. None of this, however, is new. We've been talking about distributed computing for a very long time. And all the issues that we've already identified with distributed computing are equally as valid with microservices, especially when you look at the network, especially when you consider all the issues with networking. So distributed architectures tend to get very messy. We've got nine services there. And already you can see that there's a potential for a lot of intercommunication between the services. But when you scale that up to 1,000 services or 10,000 services, that everything just gets lost in the mesh. Sorry, mess. I don't. So that's where the tooling comes into play and that's where things like service mesh comes into play. But there are a number of fallacies that we already know through distributed computing, which are equally applicable to microservices. So our reliance on a reliable network. I mean, obviously networks are not reliable. They drop out. We get routers that will go down. We get cable that goes down. We lose packets. So we need to be able to deal with that, not only in distributed computing, but also in microservices as well. There's a latency involved in communication. It's not free. It takes time to send packets via routers or whatever it is to your other service. Your bandwidth is limited. There's a certain amount of information that you can send between services and you need to bear that in mind so that you don't swamp the service that you're invoking. Security on the network. If you have access to the network, either because you've got access to one of the machines or the hardware, then you can obviously intercept the traffic. You can modify the traffic. You can prevent packets from getting to their destination. So there's a lot you can do there. Topology changes. IP is designed to adapt when network changes. So if a router goes down, your packets get rerouted around other routes. So you end up potentially getting more latency in your services and your invocations as well. Multiple administrators. No one administrator will look after a network in your organization. There'll be a whole group of them and they'll have different responsibilities for different areas of it. Also costs to invoke services. So you need to be careful with what you're doing there. And you have multiple different types of services and languages, platforms, et cetera, that you have to consider when you're working in a distributed computing environment. So how do we deal with the complexity of this? How is it that with the distributed computing or with microservices, what are the things that we need to do to try and deal with that? First, service discovery. We need to be able to remove any kind of dependency on location for a service that we're invoking. If somebody elsewhere who controls another service decides they're moving it to another IP address, you want your service still to be able to invoke it. You don't want to have to hard code your IP address into the service. Retries, if there are failures in communicating with services, you want to be able to retry it because you've got to tolerate the failure on the network. Similar with timeouts. If you make an invocation to a service and it takes too long, then you want to time out and you want to take another course of action to try and compensate for that. Circuit breaking, if you have a service which is prone to failure, you recognize that it's failing a lot, then you want the circuit breaker to fire. You want it to be open. And at that point, you no longer want to send traffic to that service. You want to take some other compensation action and deal with it in a different way. Limiting, similar. You don't want to swamp the service that you're invoking, so you want to control how much information is going there. Load balancing, you want to distribute your request across multiple instances of a service so that you've spread the load. You can scale it up and increase the throughput that you're getting for your services. Bolt-heading, if you have requests that are blocking, you want that to be taken out and handled separately from your main application. You don't want to be handling that within your main application. There's a whole load of these, Edge, Rooting, DMZ, Rooting, doing per-request routing, so based on headers or identity or some other attribute of the request that's going through. AB testing, traffic shaping, doing a dark launch, so you want to put your new versions into production, but you don't want people to access it. You want certain people to access it. Shadowing traffic, being able to take live traffic from a service and duplicate it to another service that you're testing, but without it impacting the live service and injecting faults for being able to test your application so that you can see how it tolerates failures to do with the network or the services failing as well. Zone-aware load balancing, health checks, stats, telemetry, logging, distributed tracing, and of course security, which is the big one that you should be concerned about. So what do distributed systems tend to need? If you're starting from a distributed computing perspective, then you have your application and it will pull in lots of third-party libraries to fulfill some of those requirements that you have. So, I can zoom in. So you'll have, for example, something which can manage the configuration of your service, something you can manage the discovery, the routing behavior, the circulating tracing, whatever it happens to be. So those all get pulled into your application, they're compiled into your application. It doesn't matter whether that's Java, C++, whatever your language is, you need to have some kind of way of dealing with that, dealing with failures and it tends to be through third-party libraries. Netflix OSS have a lot which they're popular in the Java side. If you're using other languages, they have alternatives as well. There is however a problem to this which is when it comes to maintenance, it really is a nightmare because all these capabilities that you're building into your application are now tightly coupled with your application. So if you have applications which are written in different languages or they're using different frameworks and you start to see incompatibility issues between them, especially when you're looking at like thousands or tens of thousands of services. If you have an existing application, then it's very likely that these frameworks will force you to redesign your application in some way to refactor it so that you can embed their framework into your application and take advantage of their features. Now when it comes to upgrades, you now have the challenge of trying to upgrade this across all the services that are in your mesh, service mesh, sorry, distributed application at the same time. So that means that if they are introducing something perhaps because of a CVE, then you need to make sure that the other applications you're talking to, if it's changed the behavior of the application in any way, then then they can tolerate it and they also have the same fix within their libraries as well. So there should be a better way and of course there is a better way and that's why we're here today. We're here to talk about Istio. So just before I go on and talk about that, can I just ask how many people actually have knowledge of service mesh in any way? Okay, and of those, how many know Istio? And how many have used Istio? Okay, I'd hope there was gonna be more than that. I think I counted five hands there. All right, that's a surprise. I thought it was gonna be better. Okay, so you guys may know some of this especially if you're connected with Red Hat in any way but the obvious starting place is you can do distributed services with Kubernetes. Kubernetes will provide a fair bit of the features that we've talked about before. So deployment resiliency, elasticity for invocations, company management, resource management, et cetera. So that's one option that you have for doing distributed services and fulfilling some of the infrastructural requirements of it. OpenShift is obviously another one which is an extension of Kubernetes and provides additional feature sets. So again, we can zoom in. So you've got logs, monitoring, release management, load balancing, et cetera there. And of course the one that we've come to talk about today which is the Istio service mesh which in our implementations, it's on top of OpenShift in the upstream communities, it's on top of Kubernetes. But it provides, I'm trying to do this, load balancing, fault tolerance, traceability, observability, service security, chaos engineering, so injecting faults, traffic shaping, et cetera along with a number of other facilities as well. Okay, so that's what we're here to talk about. The way that Istio works is Istio takes advantage of a proxy and that proxy is Envoy or it's actually an extension of Envoy. We add a number of additional capabilities into the Istio proxy which are not present in Envoy to handle some of the features that we want from Istio. Envoy itself can handle level three, level four, level seven traffic. We've got HTTP, HTTP2, GRPC there. There are other protocols coming in at level seven so Kafka is one of the ones which is underway at the moment. They're developing that in the Envoy community. And it will handle service discovery, load balancing, basically most of the stuff that we've already discussed and said were desirable for a distributed application. It's written in C++, so it's fast. It's got a small footprint and it can be configured dynamically so there's no need to restart the proxy if your mesh configuration changes. You just send the updates to the Envoy proxy.  There's actually work underway at the moment between ourselves on the Red Hat side and Google to implement something called Incremental to XDS which is a capability for Envoy to just take incremental changes from the control plane. So you no longer have to send all information. So this is getting leaner, faster, much smaller footprint with all the changes that we do going into the proxy itself. So the proxy is deployed into your environment. As part of your pod, it's deployed as a sidecar. So the unit of deployment within Kubernetes and therefore OpenShift as well is the pod and that consists of any number of containers and they all share the same life cycle. So if you scale up the number of pods then every time you get a new pod you get a new copy of all the containers that are in it. If you were to tear down some of the pods then all the containers disappear as well. So they're created at the same time, they disappear at the same time. They also share the same network. So to all intents and purposes the containers make it appear as if they're running on the same box. So they've got access to the same IP interfaces, they can send traffic and in the Istio case more importantly they can intercept traffic. So everything which is coming into the pod goes into the proxy, then goes to the application. Everything which is going out comes from the application via the proxy into the outside world. So the proxy sidecar can then intercept the traffic and it can handle all the infrastructure capabilities that we're talking about with Istio. So this is really what Istio gives us. Resiliency for handling service failures. We can recover from that, we can handle it transparently. Observability, so we can take a look at metrics. We can look at, use Keali which we'll show you later on to see the visualization of the service mesh. You can look at Yeager to get tracing information and try and understand how particular requests are passing through your system. Traffic control, so you can redirect traffic from one instance of a service to another depending on a certain criteria. It could be something which is specific to a request, it could be general, it could be percentage based. We'll show some of that later on. Security, you can secure the network layer so that it's encrypted and it means if anybody does intercept it, they can't change it because of the encryption. They can't read it because it's encrypted. And when you get the communication between the services, you can verify both ends of the communication so you know who you're talking to as well. Policy enforcement, that could be role-based access control as simple as saying only service A is allowed to invoke service B, no other service can do that. Or it could be something much more complicated, maybe you've got API management or something in there as well. And the chaos testing is means to inject failures into the path of your, the data path of your application so that you can test to see whether your application is resilient. So those are the main features that Istio gives you. This is a kind of high-level overview of Istio itself. So we have, it's split into two different areas. We've got the data plane, which is communication service A comes down to proxy there. It goes across to the other proxy up to B then B invoked service C. So that's your data plane. That's all, that's what your application is doing. Okay, that's all the invocations that your application is making service to service. We've also got a control plane at the bottom there. And we've got on here, pilot, we've got the telemetry and policy and we've got Citadel. So those are the main components. There are some other components as well, but for the kind of day-to-day use, these are the main ones. Citadel is responsible for giving each of your applications or more specifically each of the service accounts that's running your applications a unique identity. It creates a key for that identity and then that identity is used for NTLS so that you can verify the identity on both ends of the communication. Pilot is responsible for tracking changes within the service mesh configuration. So it talks to a component called Gali, which it handles all the Kubernetes stuff. When pilot is told about updates to configuration, it pushes all the changes out to the Istio proxies so that ensures that the Istio proxies are kept consistent and they have the same view of the service mesh. It doesn't matter whether you're in one namespace or another namespace, the pilot is sending the information to them all. And the telemetry and policy is there to handle metrics and policy enforcement. So part of that is out of the data path. Part of it is in the data path. It depends what you do. So this is the ecosystem as it currently stands for Istio service mesh. You've got kind of Istio in the middle there and we take advantage of other projects as well, like Yeager to do the tracing. You've got Gali to do the visualization on the service mesh and understand how your services are communicating and then Prometheus and Grafana to deal with metrics and alerts from like from your services. Okay, so that was a high level, quick overview of what Istio is. I'm going to go through some of the other capabilities and do some demos and the like, but before we do that, does anybody have any questions on any of that? What is in another namespace? Sorry, you said in the slide before, what happens if the pod is in the other namespace? There are three pods, but the assumes they are all in dispensers. So it doesn't assume that they're in the same namespace. What it assumes is that you have a flat network on the namespaces. So if the namespaces are linked, they can communicate to each other. And the reason that's important is when you are invoking a service, the Istio proxy is actually talking to the pods themselves. So it goes to the pod IP addresses. It doesn't use the virtualized IP address. So it needs to have network visibility of what would otherwise be a private IP address to that namespace. At the moment with the tech preview we have or upstream it can't be used. So the intention for GA is that we will have a service which will then make sure that those namespaces are linked together. So it will automatically join the namespaces. So it will create your flat namespace for those particular, sorry, flat network for those particular namespaces. And the approach that we're taking for GA is also soft multi-tenancy as well rather than hard multi-tenancy. So we will have potentially multiple control planes deployed into an instance of OpenShift Kubernetes. And each of those will control a separate subset of namespaces. So they'll have visibility of those namespaces but not the other ones and the same with the other control planes as well. So they'll be replicated copies of Yeager, Kiali, Elastic Search, et cetera within each of the control planes as well. Any other questions on any of that? Do you need to run Istio as a cluster of Istio? At the moment yes, but very soon no. So one of the guys on my team has been working really hard to get rid of that. One of the challenges we have at the moment is configuring IP tables. And there was an effort done upstream in the community to replace the init container that we currently use in the sidecar with a CNI plug-in. So that gets rid of one of the big headaches, okay? You no longer need to manipulate IP tables within the application namespaces done outside of that. There are other things as well. So at the moment on OpenShift, we require privileged access to do the IP tables manipulation and a couple of other things and we require any UID SEC as well. And those are also being one by one taken care of. So when we get to GA, well actually probably this sprint or the next sprint rather than GA, you will just be able to deploy an application as a normal user and then it will just work. So we're close. We're not quite there, but we're close, but it's getting close. Any other questions on that? All right, let's get on with the fun then. Okay, let's start with observability. So I should have if everything is working nicely. Okay, so that is Bookinfo. And we've got Istio there as well. So okay, so what I'm going to do, first of all, we're going to take a look at monitoring. So we're going to look at Grafana and Prometheus. So I'll get the application up and we'll put some requests through it and then we can take a look and we can see just what's going on on the Grafana side. So you can see Grafana in action. You can see the metrics being captured. So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to put some load on Bookinfo first and then open Grafana. Okay, that's better. So if you go to the workload dashboard, so you can choose Bookinfo, choose product page which is the first service that we'll see and I'll change this to every five seconds and then we can start to see traffic coming in, metrics coming into the system. So there are quite a few metrics that you have already within Grafana itself but obviously you can create your own based on the information that's being captured and not only that but you can set alerts based on the metrics as well. So if you have a certain threshold that you want to be notified, say the failure rate suddenly spikes on one of your services, you want to know about it, you can set an alert for something like that. So that's Grafana, that's the metrics observability that we have. Now what I will do is, actually, sorry, I'll just leave that running in the background. So the next thing that we can use to observe what's going on with the service mesh is Kiali and that gives you a graphical visualization of the services and their interactions. So I'll do, bring Kiali up, okay. So we can look at Graf, choose the Bookinfo namespace and you can see that each labels will do rates per second. Okay, so you can see traffic that's going on there. See if I can zoom in to some of these. So the green lines are the ones which are active and the numbers on them are the transactions per second at that particular time. So you can see there's quite a lot of work that's going on within the service mesh at the moment within the Bookinfo. So if I go back and Kial that generator, then let's change this to five seconds as well. Then you'll start to see those drop off. It'll eventually quiesce because obviously there's no load going into it. Excuse me. So this gives you a quite a good represent, visual representation of what's going on within your service mesh. It gives you a much better understanding instead of having like in this instance there's only what we got one, two, three, four, five, six services running, but it could be like 1,000 services. It could be 10,000 services. So this gives you a much easier way of seeing where the traffic is and seeing which parts of your service mesh you're actually on the load or which services are communicating with which other services. Okay, so while that quiesces. So the next thing we'll look at is tracing and for this we use Yeager. So when requests come into this system, we actually give it a transaction ID when it comes in if it doesn't have one. And from that point onwards that transaction ID is propagated through each of the service invocations. So we can link that invocation in one service with whatever it does in the other services as well.  So again, so if we take a look at Yeager. Okay, so yeah, do ingress gateway. Okay, so we can look at the spans. Let's see, I tell you what, let's do this one because this one's taking quite a bit of time. So you get a graphical representation of the call graph. So this, if we, so here this is the ingress gateway. So when the request is coming into the system it's the first stop is the ingress gateway. That's it's entry into the service mesh. And then from that point on everything else is within the service mesh. So we've got a gateway set up there which invokes product page and then product page itself we'll call book info here. So this is the client side in product page and this is the service side in the details. Sorry, not book and document details. And then again we've got a client side in product page which is calling reviews and then this is the service side of reviews. Okay, so you can see how the costs are going through the different system. You can see how long it takes. If there's one in particular that you want to look at you can drill into it and the information that gets captured by the proxy the metadata that's captured by the proxy and sent to Yeager you have that information there so you can take a look at it and you can see if there's something peculiar there something that you can, if there are particular issues that you've identified with something that's taken too long then you can use that and try and replicate it and try and track it through other logs and the like. Okay, so you have those, that information on your request as well. So that's Yeager and how it is used. Okay, so those, that's just kind of your observability part. Grafana, Keali and Yeager and they all target different areas. So the next thing I want to show you is traffic control. So if you're doing one of the examples that you can do is canary deployment. You can choose to, if you want to deploy a new version of a service into production but you don't want normal traffic to hit it then what you can actually do is you can set up a rule so only specific traffic can hit it and that will allow you, for example, in this example if you're, you happen to be somebody who works in the office from Boston then you get to see the new version. You get the version three. If you're everyone else then you get to see version two. Okay, so all your usual traffic most of your usual traffic will hit V2. It's only specific people that will get to, to hit V3. So we can do something like that very easy and bear in mind when I'm making these changes I'm not touching the running services. They're all running. These are all declarative changes. So what we're going to do here and the bit that's important is that part here. So the first part says if we have a request that comes in and it has the end user header as Kevin no guess, no, you don't need to guess why I chose that name then it will go to V3 and if you have anybody else it goes to V2. Okay, so we can look at what thing I haven't shown you so far. Oh, it's not the one I want. Okay, so if we look at book info then you can see on the right hand side that at the moment with no rules there we are circling through three different back ends for reviews. Okay, so version one is that one with no stars version two is that one with black and if we get a red one that one's version three. Okay, so if we were to just create those rules with an Istio then we're now stuck in version two because we said that all traffic apart from Kevin should go to version two. So if I log in as Kevin I get red which is version three. If I sign it we're back to black if I sign in as say Bob then we're still on black. So it's only when I sign in as Kevin that we get shipped to V3. So again that's declarative. There's no changes to the application in order to do that. It's all handled by the proxy and at the infrastructure level. So that's the canary. You can do that with canary. Waded Rowdy you can do the same thing if you want just to test a new version of an application or you want to test either performance or behavior whatever it has to be you can specify a certain percentage of traffic to go to the application. So we'll do that with Istio here. So again it's just a matter of specifying the rules. We've got two destinations there. V1 and V2 and they have weightings. V1 is 95 percent. V2 is 5 percent. So let's create that and I'll put some load on the system so we can see something going through. And if you go back to Keali. Okay let me change this so it's percentage. Okay so we then get to see what to do that. See what I'm going to do this way. Right so you've got V1 is receiving roughly 95 percent. I mean it's not accurate. It's a close approximation. And V2 is receiving 6 percent of the traffic. Okay and then that changes 94 and is it getting even closer? But it fluctuates. It's not guaranteed to be always 95 percent on the dot or 5 percent. So that allows you to send your traffic to different versions of a service based on a particular weighting. So you can look to see how V2 performs versus V1. If it doesn't matter whether it's a functional change or a performance change or whatever is that you want to test. That gives you the ability to do that. Okay so let's pull those down. Okay so that's weighted routing with Istio. Dart launches with Istio. So this is when you want to put a new application into production. You want to test it with production traffic but you don't actually want to release it into production yet. So you want it to get traffic from the original production system. Handle it as if it was a request coming in from your clients but then you don't respond to it. So what happens here is Envoy will duplicate the traffic from so service A Envoy. There it will duplicate the traffic from A to B V1 and send it also to B V2 but it'll just ignore any responses that it gets. So it just sends it and forgets. That's what that does. So again the configuration is pretty simple. You have your normal destination there which is V2 of reviews and all you're saying is mirror the traffic in this case to V3. So if we were to put that into... Well actually I'll tell you what. Let me deploy it without the mirroring first and I'll show you what that looks like and then we'll go to Kiali again. Okay we should be seeing some load there. Come on Kiali. There we go. Okay. So now we are seeing traffic coming in. Now at the moment you can see we've got a green path which is coming in here. It's going to be to and straight to ratings. There's no traffic at all V3. Okay. So if we change the mirroring I'll just keep that going in the background and add the mirroring then okay hopefully this will start to become clear. So what will happen is that the proxy for V1 will start sending traffic to V3 as well. Now you won't see it as a client invocation but you will start to see V3 creating traffic as a result of that. So there we go. We've got V3 now creating traffic. So this line here is still gray. It's not showing up within the transaction but we now have another transaction being created here which is the mirror traffic and everything that V3 is doing on behalf of the... Oh okay. I've never actually seen that happen before and I only updated to Kiali the latest version the other day as well. So oh no. All right. Okay demo gods. I'm not shining. All right. Let me see if I can let's see what happens if we start again. Oh no. My demos have gone. Okay. There we go. We're back. Killed all that five seconds. Okay. So we're back. I'm sorry. I don't know what that was. I'll check the logs later on see if there's anything in the logs to feed it back to the Kiali team. Okay. So that's mirroring. That lets you know that shows you how to do that. Okay. Security, TLS at the moment none of the traffic there is being encrypted. So if we go back to here so what we have is product page here. We're currently accessing that through ingress gateway. So the request is coming in through a two proxy which is the ingress into OpenShift. That's invoking ingress gateway which is then the ingress into the service mesh itself. So from that point on if you had if you enable them TLS then all that traffic would be encrypted. Okay. But with OpenShift we can actually bypass ingress proxy and go straight to the service. That's not something that we suggest you do as part of the service mesh but I'll show you it for one particular reason because when I enable MTLS you'll then see that any requests that are coming in through that route stop working. Okay. Because they're not being you're not a client which is running within the context of a service mesh so you have no identity as far as Istio is concerned and no certainly no no no key for proving your identity with MTLS. Okay. But if we were to so we've got the app that's running at the moment now let me so if I was to so this this is a this is bypassing ingress proxy. So this is going into HAProxy at the front end for OpenShift bypassing so you're not ingress ingress gateway so bypass is the gateway and goes straight to the service which represents the service mesh. Okay. So you're coming in as an external client to the service mesh if you don't have MTLS then anybody can do that. Anybody can access your service but if we turn on MTLS okay so we set it up here that product page we set some rules here that everything which is going on with the in the booked for namespace is has mutual TLS set up and whereas the other one and the default policy is MTLS okay so anything within the service mesh will be able to talk to your service so this will still work because this is the one that's going in through ingress gateway which is the correct ingress for the service mesh and this one stops working because now the far end of the service is saying I need MTLS you need to prove to me who you are I don't know you who you are because you're not starting a TLS connection with me because you're not giving me the right credentials it drops the connection okay so that's what MTLS does it not only encrypts the traffic on the network but also enforces identity as well and enforces that you're getting requests that are coming in from somebody within the service mesh and you can take advantage of all back as well so that you can actually specifically say only certain identities within the service mesh can access your service as well so if you've got A, B and C within the service mesh then you can say C can only be invoked from B you shouldn't allow A to get there so that means if service A becomes compromised it doesn't have access to the rest of your applications okay so I'm just gonna actually I'll just bring it down I'll just bring that down in the background because that's that was actually the last of my my demos that was for as far as I got so fault tolerant aspects circuit breakers we already talked about circuit breakers before the purpose of those are really to handle services that are repeatedly failing okay you don't want to keep sending your requests to those services because you suspect there's a problem with them so you would say thanks so you would say sorry so you would say for example okay well if I get 20 errors within a certain period then that means that I no longer trust this service so I want the circuit circuit breaker to trigger at that point the envoy proxy from the client side will just not send a request to the server it will just return an error and your application can then handle that and recover from that as a cease fit okay so in this instance if service C was to become heavily loaded then you can trigger your circuit breakers for B to C and A to C as well so they would no longer invoke that service no longer attempt to invoke that service timeouts and retries again that's something that you can specify declaratively you can specify timeouts on your invocations you can specify a number of retries before you give up and return an error to the client and envoy again will handle that on your behalf it's not something your application needs to know about rate limiting similar maximum number of connections maximum concurrent requests that are going to a service again you can specify that and I'll choke the number of requests that are going into a service so you don't overload it chaos engineering injecting faults you can inject a 10 second delay for operations so you can say in this example here we have 10% of requests that are going from B to C you should add in a 10 second delay okay so that will test how service B will tolerate long operations long requests does it handle a request that takes 10 seconds as it does it fall over okay you know now rather than when you're in production when it happens for real similar you can do HTTP status code responses as well so rather than everything being rosy and you get your 200 back with your response throwing a 400 or something else and see how your application handles it and again this is declarative you choose one to do it you choose the percentage of requests that you can do it with it gives you a an opportunity to force your application to fail and just see how it tolerates failures okay so that's those are the kind of areas that I was going to cover that there is a lot more we didn't do policy or anything like that because that's much more involved usually especially we integrate with free scale which is an API management system as of the sprint we've got that integration in there and you've got the usual allow back stuff in there as well so I haven't covered any of that but I'll just take a second to tell you about a service mesh so open shift service mesh that's our distribution of Istio we take the upstream Istio and we create sent us versions of it rel version for it and it's intended to go into open shift eventually we're about to GA now with all the delays from things like open shift and the upstream Istio will be delaying will be GA roughly the end of April with our intended GA and that include Yeager Keali Prometheus Grafana as well Maestra is the upstream name everything's open source that's where we we have it we integrate with the application raw application runtimes so whether that is spring boot or vertex or Node.js or trying to think what the new sorry darn tail thank you very much I was trying to remember what the new name for that was then we integrate with those as well so they've got demos that show those languages being used within Istio and we integrate with free scale for API management as well so you can include integration of three scale through mixer so you can specify policies that can be enforced in in the three scale system and have it enforced in an Istio as well so the other thing is I don't know if anybody's looking for a job but we're actually so we have two wrecks open this quarter and I've got another wreck next quarter and I'm trying to build up the team as quickly as possible so seriously if anybody is interested in working on this then let me know and we'll get you to apply okay resources these are good books Christian Foster, Burst Sutter have done these Clemol has done the one on reactive microservices with Java the one on the right Istio in action is currently in the early access program you can get hold of it as Christian writes it he's fair way through but he's still got a way to go but it's definitely worth pursuing Christian no longer works for Red Hat unfortunately he went to work for somebody else recently took on another opportunity but he's been an absolutely fabulous help for my team very experienced with Istio he knows a lot of stuff he's definitely somebody to pay attention to there are some labs that we have as well that you can run through so learn.openshift.com forward slash service mesh service mesh or you can go to bit.istio-tutorial and you can run through those labs as well so there are PDFs of these slides available which I think will should be on the conference website or something so if I'm not giving you enough time I just saw some people taking photographs but you should be able to get it from the slides as well and that's it so questions I think we've got five minutes left for questions okay so the question was I mentioned there are seven protocols being added to Envoy Proxy and mentioning specifically Kafka earlier on there are more that have been suggested but as with anything open source it's a community project so people have to somebody needs to step up and do it the Kafka work is already underway that's been going for a while it is something that we are also interested in from our side so that's something if it's still a work which is outstanding then we already have people working in Envoy to do open SSL support for Envoy as well as incremental XDS and then we'll move them over and they can look at doing Kafka and stuff like that as well so Kafka is definitely underway it's a work in progress there's PR they're already for it and but it's tagged as WIP so it's not something they would merge but it's it's in development so it's quite far along the path to getting there I'm not aware of any others but I mean it's it's open source so if there's anything you need put in a create an issue in GitHub for Envoy Proxy and then somebody will look at it okay any other questions yes and so the question was what should we expect in the next month where can we see a roadmap so my question back to you is are you talking about community or are you talking about products or what roadmap are you thinking about okay so OpenShift side we are geeing as a product towards the end of April so OpenShift 4 has slipped it's now I think mid April and we are I think a week or a week and a half behind them so it gives us time to test it just do last minute testing to make sure we're ready before we release as far as communities so that is going to be based on Istio 11 which is still being worked on in the community our tech preview images are already using the Release 11 branch as of about a week ago I think it was last Friday so just a week back yesterday eight days ago where we took the snapshot to to productize so that will be those type preview ones will be released on Wednesday this Wednesday and that includes the three scale stuff so you can get that you can play around with with that now either well based or sent us based we do community ones and we do product ones through the the OpenShift registry Release 11 for upstream Istio in theory is going to be I think it's February 21st is the date for it but there are still quite a few P0s that are open that we need to get rid of first so it's there is a possibility that will either either they're all going to get fixed in the next week and everything's going to be fantastic we're going to be on track or it's going to slip again but it's it's not too far away from it now so RGA will be based on Istio 11 and we are currently looking at towards the end of April okay any other questions I don't know why your hand went up slowly there so K native is based on top of Istio so they take our stuff and they add their the serverless stuff on top of that yes yes yes so they take the images that we create for Istio and they base there they just add in the serverless stuff on top of that so we are we are underpinning K native okay any yep so do I still need say the need of Waf I'm not I don't under a web application firewall so yes I wouldn't say don't do it because I think more security is good security you you have different security is one of those things where you get different vulnerabilities in different areas and it's better to be protecting it in depth and relying on one particular thing so there are certain things that Istio does really well for security so mutual TLS that kind of stuff the role-based access control so you can restrict who can focus on it but it's not protecting the applications themselves so anything which can reduce the impact of vulnerabilities in your application you should still do yes definitely I think that's done so thank you very much for your time


Welcome to Toffty TV, this is my three things from Everton to West Ham United, Nill, at Goodersham Park, first thing I need to talk about is the manager today, I feel as though he's had a tough time over the last couple of weeks, deservedly show it if you're looking at results, you know, four defeats on the run, five defeats in six games, the pressure is on the manager today, obviously going into the game with a couple of injuries, Fabian Delpho with a hamstring injury, Seamus Coleman suspended. Morgan Sniadlin, I feel as though he's either ill or got an injury because he's not even in the 18, so I feel as though going into the game he's had a couple of things that he, you know, ironically have worked for him today and I hope that he has the conviction now to keep this team and move forward with it. But the pressure was on the manager today and he had to make some bold decisions and it would have been easy for him with Sniadlin not being there to leave Guilfee Sigarton in the team because obviously Guilfee is a big player for us, scored goals last season, especially in our good run at the end of the season. But the manager quite rightly leaving Sigarton out, he's not started this season very well at all, he hadn't scored a Premier League goal until today, hadn't looked like scoring, truth be told, and the manager left him out, made a big decision there, a good and bold decision to put Tom Davis in the midfield or, you know, maybe it was because of the Sniadlin thing but he's put Tom Davis in that midfield and I thought he was excellent as well. Delighted for Tom because I think some people give Tom a rough ride, some people expect probably a bit too much of him at times or maybe or just have higher standards I feel of him rather than other players who he fought over. But he showed today how valuable that is for us, you know, he passes the ball forward, he was busy, he buys free kicks, he always wants to get on the ball, doesn't hide, okay he's not the quickest but he was positionally I thought he was very good today and I think what's really helped Tom Davis is playing those games for the under 21s, the England under 21s and in that role because positionally him and Gomez were always talking through the game. I felt a wobie in there, really helped, it made a massive difference to us breaking forward, he was very, very busy, Alex a wobie, all over the place again, final pass could be a bit better but breaking the lines and causing West Ham problems so the manager made the changes and was rewarded, he's rewarded for playing the Charleston through the Midlands and what I thought the Charleston did really well was put himself tight up against the Open and got the Open involved in a little bit of a battle. The referee could have done more, I feel as though sometimes the Charleston has given some rough treatment by centre-back and he doesn't get it and yet West Ham lands in, he fragging and saying because went over a couple of times it would have been easy and had bought a few free kicks but that's listened, there is what it is but I think the manager's bravery was rewarded today. Now is the next step of this now, it's vital I feel as though for Marco Silva, he goes to a Brighton next week and he brings Snidel on back in and Delth of his fit maybe or Sigurdans back in just because he's got a brilliant goal but he's just back in on that goal then. In my opinion he won the lanes, it's about these lads now and I'm giving the manager lots of credit today because he deserves, it's been tough for him and he's had a good win, now can he take that forward, who knows we'll have to see. Second player I want to speak about today is André Gomez, who I thought was fantastic, absolutely brilliant. He's exactly what we've missed in the last month, so the last four games that we've lost without having Gomez in that midfield show today, what a difference it makes when he's on it. Good strength, good ability, he took the ball under pressure, kept it in tight spaces, West Ham had it two or three on him at the end, swinging off his shoulder and he came out with the ball and Declan Rice couldn't really get near him, neither could noble so he gave them a torrid time and it reminded me very much of the performance down at the London stadium in March when we went there in 120 and it could have been seven or eight, it was the same today, it could have been seven or eight today and Gomez was the fulcrum of that performance that day. It's exactly what he was today, absolutely brilliant, ability to play short, ability to switch the play right and left, gets us Gomez, our metronome today and was supported brilliantly by Tom Davis and Alex O'Wobee and they're giving it legs as well and Bernard who came in off the left. So just a great performance by Gomez and it's a very, very important player for Everett, man for the manager and so it's fight like he stays for it but I think Andre Gomez, Everett with Andre Gomez in are a much different proposition and today I just thought he was brilliant and he was worth mentioning and then a flip of the coin for me who was man of the matter between him and my final point and the final thing I want to talk about is Yeri Mina who I think has been, he's been Everett's best player in my opinion. All season, absolutely brilliant again today, twice two marvellous interceptions at key times in the game, big and strong, okay, Haller won a few headers against him, he went back and won some against him, it's a good battle between those two, so much so that Haller didn't try to go over to Keane side a little bit and play on him. I just thought he was immense for us, he's got a good header off a corner which for some reason the referee has disallowed and when everyone's looked at it again there was nothing wrong with it and what I don't understand about VAR, I really don't get this about VAR is that the referee makes an incorrect decision. I said that on my other video where I sit in the bullons there's the TV there and I'm talking to David Protten after it and asked him about the thing and he was like there's nothing wrong with the goal, we've looked at it ten times, there's nothing wrong with it, goal misstands his ground, there's not a foul, so if they're looking at that, why don't VAR overrule it and say to the referee it was a goal, there's nothing wrong with it, the referee shouldn't be blowing whistles until a play. I don't know, maybe someone will say in the comments whether it can happen for this reason, but that to me is big, but I mean it was just brilliant, that interception towards the end of the game at 1-0 where Stan looked like he was in and the ball was rolling across and he gets a footing, just fantastic and he was brilliant and he went down at the end and come off with a couple of minutes to go and I'm hoping it's just an impact challenge. I think it was when he headed the clear and we broke and Guilfee scored actually, that was where he come from, he headed forward and I didn't see what happened because I was following the ball but then he was sat down on the half-way line but you walked off the pitch which is good and I'm hoping it's just an impact injury and that it'll settle down over a couple of days and he'll be ready to continue next week. Like I said for me, he's been our best player this season, he's getting better and better and he's looking like he's becoming the centre back that we thought we'd signed last season and obviously this season was curtailed by injury times but he's been absolutely brilliant, I thought it was worth mentioning. And like you say, for me a flip between him and Gomez, for man of the match, probably, probably I would give it to Gomez because of his position on the pitch and how key that was to get older than we feel but me and it was right next to him for it, absolutely brilliant display. So, there you go there mate, three things, disagree, agree, whatever, you might have your own three things or anything you think you want to add on, additionally put it in the comments section below. Thanks for watching, make sure you check out the instant matchups and mine and Peds and Peds player ratings, they'll be interesting. Subscribe if you haven't, give the video a thumbs up, it helps and also if you want to become a Peyton Kerr over there and do that as well, have a fantastic weekend, thanks for watching, see you later.


As president and CEO of Horseman, a company founded by educators for educators, I'm proud to honor the five recipients of the Horseman Awards for Teaching Excellence. With three sisters, three nieces, and now potentially my daughter being teachers, I know some of the challenges they face in the classroom, and I hear about the rewards that make it all worth it. Teaching is more than a job. It's a higher calling and a critical role in our society. Teachers mold our future. And for these five finalists and many other teachers, the job isn't confined to the classroom. Teachers pick their students up when they're down, give gentle guidance in the right direction, help them find their strength and overcome their weaknesses. They build teaching teams and inspire some of their own students to hear the call to the profession. And it is a noble profession that is frequently underappreciated. At Horseman, our mission is protecting the short-term risks and securing the long-term financial future of educators. And we make recognizing teachers a part of what we do. For more than a decade, Horseman has sponsored the NEA Foundation Awards for Teaching Excellence, because we know how important and deserving it is to shine a light on outstanding teachers who make a difference in their students' lives and who continue to elevate the role. So please join me in congratulating and honoring five individuals who have been singled out by their peers for going above and beyond and becoming this year's Horseman Award recipients. Riddle over. A newspaper. What do you call fish with no eyes? I don't know. What makes a good riddle? Mrs. Riddle is an awesome teacher here at Foxborough Elementary School in North Salt Lake, Utah. I think Mrs. Riddle is a kind of a teacher who cares about individual students. She expects that you learn and that you do hard work. Fun but not necessarily easy, huh? That's hard stuff. Yeah, you're learning because she respects you enough to do that. Okay, a good riddle makes you think. I think her ability to make each student feel like an individual and feel loved and cherished and unique. She's so good at it. She can hone in on what the kid needs and find a way to make that blossom. And a good riddle challenges your brain. Well, Ms. Riddle is constantly taking classes. For example, a couple years ago she took a reaction time class and now we use all those experiments that she learned in our classrooms today. The floating raisins activity is actually one of the things we did in that class. So I'm constantly learning because she's still learning, too. It should be funny and it should connect with everyone. She's a leader in the community. She's a teacher of teachers and she's active in her association. You'll find her a lot of places. You'll find her on Capitol Hill, of course at her school and in her classroom. You'll find her at meetings where teachers are learning. She does a lot of classroom management, procedural type, professional development workshops. The two of us did one together in last month for new teachers and the reception for that was fantastic. And the feedback from that was, we want more of this. I got it, I got it! Uh, okay, what? What's the best riddle? I don't know. So I would hope that every child that leaves my class, if they came back, they would tell me, I remember that I was part of your team and I learned a lot and I had fun doing it and the whole class got along well and had a good time.


So, at the Moodle Moot, who knows what the most valuable thing about the Moodle Moot is? I think that presentations are a really great way to share knowledge, but at the end of the day what's really important is networking and communicating with each other. So if you ever want to come up and speak to me about any of the things I've talked about, please feel free, I'll be at the VR booth. Also, if you're into Twitter, take some photos, hashtag MootAU17, and we can all follow each other because we're all interested in LTI, or saving the world, one of the two, or maybe both. So I've chosen an ambitious title, I'm sure, how LTI can solve the world's toughest problems. But I think that the potential in this tool is really great, and maybe you've heard of it before, maybe you haven't, I'm not sure if you've used it before, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to show you the amazing potential that it has. And as we build up the community surrounding LTI and LTI and Moodle, I think that there will be some great benefits. So in the world right now, there's a lot of problems. There's things like fires, natural disasters, poverty, overpopulation. These are huge problems that we need to be thinking about and solving. Now, we're all teachers, or we're all admins at institutions. Maybe we can't directly be helping with these. But I'd like to say that we already are. So because we're contributing to education, we are the people preparing the people who are going to be solving these problems. And as the saying goes, you can either give a man a fish or teach him how to fish, and I think that it's more important that we are here doing the things that we're doing to the best of our ability so that we can prepare the next generation. So how does LTI fit into this? Well, a lot of you came to my virtual reality presentation and it was kind of, it had an anticlimactic ending in that I revealed that it was not available on the Plugins DB and it was quite difficult to install and start using. Now, I'll take responsibility for that. That was my fault, but it was showing a very real potential of how education might be reshaped in the future and the new tools that are coming up. You may have also seen a lot of presentations around gamification. Personally, that's one of my favorite subjects. I studied games and I've moved into education now and I just love the potential that gamification can show. And you may have seen things like advanced analytics. Maybe you came to the Q&A about analytics last yesterday afternoon. But at the end of the day, we're looking at all these presentations and it's great. But there's this question that I get asked almost at every moot. It's definitely the question I get asked the most. If I can't install Plugins, how can I do these things? Because there may be requirements. Either you're working on a cloud-based system that doesn't allow individual Plugins to be added to instances or maybe you don't quite have the support staff needed to be able to work on it or your administrator has some very valid concerns about the effect it's going to have on the instance of your Moodle site. So how do we do it? We're here at the moot. We're learning about all these amazing new ways that we can teach. And a lot of them come back to tools that we need to be using. Is there a better way that we can shape this? So the answer, in my view, or one of the potential answers is LTI, which, if you don't know, stands for Learning Tool Interoperability. So it's basically a standard. And as soon as I start talking about standards, it's very boring. So I'll try and make it more interesting. It's a way that we can say this tool is not only compatible with Moodle, but it's also compatible with any other LMS. It can just be dropped in. It doesn't need to be installed. All the interactions that it needs to make putting grades back into the grade book, enrolling students, managing them all, it's all done automatically. So with LTI, I honestly believe that the best tools in the world are at your fingertips. You, maybe you might see, you might go, oh, I want to get this virtual reality thing. I want this gamification.  And you might want to start using it straight away without having to go through all that process.  So what is the effect that this has? Maybe if you're an admin in the room. I'm sorry, I might be scaring you.  Well, the great thing is the LTI has a really strict set of standards that makes it easier to guarantee exactly what it's going to be doing. So you can control permissions directly around what user information will be passed to the tool and what it will be doing with that information, et cetera, et cetera. So let me tell you a story. I love photography. I am no good at it whatsoever, but it's a good hobby of mine. So when preparing for this presentation, I was like, why don't I take a bunch of really nice photos and put them through? Well, as it turns out, I'm quite busy as we all are and I didn't get time to do it at all. So I found this great website called unsplash.com and it had basically amazing photos just ready I could search for anything that I would need. And so instead of making everything myself, I basically used a tool that's already out there to make this presentation of what I'm trying to teach and the ideas I'm trying to get across to you more effective and more memorable that I didn't have to do it myself. So LTI is that basic idea of saying there might be a part of your process that you can get from somewhere else that will help you to teach and communicate a lot more effectively in tools that can do amazing things. So what is LTI in Moodle? Well, we call it the external tool module because that's what it is. It's a tool that you're getting externally. So you may have seen it. It's the green puzzle piece. I don't know if you always just scroll past and go, I wonder what that is. But it's there and it's been in Moodle for a long time and we're just seeing the potential of it come into fruition. So I think the main benefit that I've discussed is it reduces the work for the course writers and content creators, whether you're a teacher or you're creating content for your teachers. And it gives control back to the administrators. Like I was saying, you can control individual capabilities that the tool will be given. You can say, I don't even want any information about my students to go to it, but I still want them to be able to use it. So then they're given an artificial name. Or you can say, I do want their name, but not the email or I want the email, but not their name. And the other side of LTI is what in technical terms, we call it an LTI provider. But on the website, on a Moodle instance, all that's really called is share as an LTI tool.  So this enables you to not just use tools that are already out there, but also to share your content with the rest of the world. So there's great potential in that whether you're altruistic and just want information to flow everywhere or that you might want to charge it so that you can have more resources to create more content in the future, the options are already out there for you. It also helps you to connect systems together I've heard that LTI, one of the more common uses for LTI is actually to be able to connect user accounts between two different systems because a lot of times when we're working at institutions we have an old version of some old LMS that's already out there and we're trying to move everything to Moodle but the reality is maybe the time isn't there or the technical expertise isn't there to get everything across. Well, LTI can help there. It can basically connect any system back into Moodle. But both of these tools together, whether it's your sharing things by LTI or whether it's your getting content into your Moodle by LTI it opens up just a world of possibilities that ordinarily wouldn't be there because here at Moodle we're all about empowering educators and so we really want to empower you to not just be able to use content but also share it as well. So here's some screenshots. I was lucky enough to be asked to work on the new interface for LTI to make it a little bit more user-friendly because as I've said, there's a lot of potential out there but maybe people might think it's scary. I know all three letter acronyms are always scary just as a general rule. But we tried to put a lot of effort into the usability of LTI to make it easier to use. So if you haven't used it, all you have to do is find a link to an LTI module and then paste it in there, click Add and it will run you through the whole wizard. And then after you add a tool, you have the option to make it appear in the list just like any other module. And I think this is really important because it enables teachers to just see these tools just as another tool instead of having to go all the way into the external tool module and try and find it there. It makes it a lot more clear upfront and they know that they can use it and it's a lot more easy to use as well. So if you're an administrator in here and you've never used LTI before, in order to let teachers share the content via LTI, it's disabled by default. So no one starts sharing privileged information by accident. But all you have to do is enable the LTI authentication plugin and enrollment plugin. And then once you've shared the tool, it's as simple as going to this interface and you can copy that link, paste it into whatever LMS, whether it's another Moodle or another LMS that you have, and it should just work. So I hope I've inspired you with LTI and you've seen maybe a few of the things that it can do. And I think that when it comes to LTI, the community is going to be the most important thing. As we develop more and more content and make it available via LTI, that's where the potential of LTI will really increase. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. It's great to have tools to make using Moodle that much easier. Do we have questions for John? Upgrade tools. How do you mean by upgrade tools? LTI tools to upgrade. Well, if an LTI tool is upgraded, it will upgrade automatically and you won't have to do anything about it. No manual process, man. There's no manual process, no. Thank you. As a Moodle administrator, I'm wondering if you have any ideas for how to help us with managing LTI because it is a great tool. It makes it very easy for our instructors to add new tools into their courses. But from an administrative perspective, I find it difficult to be able to know what people are actually using. So do you think that you'll be creating any reporting to help us with that? In addition, it's great. You can add LTIs individually into courses. Any thought about creating tools to actually batch LTI into courses so that you can do them en masse? Well, so in regards to the first question, I think reporting would be great. So we've been working on the interface recently and we want to make it as usable as possible. So those use cases are really handy for us. I suppose being able to know what tools are used where, we have a little bit of that. You can now see which tools are used the most, but not down to the individual course level. I think that would be something good to add later. And the second question, what was the second? Oh, batching. Yes, not yet, but it's coming very soon where you'll be able to go through the process and it will add a whole bunch. So basically, you will, instead of adding a tool individually, you'll be able to go through a wizard that's defined by the tool and they'll say, I'll set up everything for you and it will just add as a batch. That's coming very soon. Maybe not 3.4, but 3.5. And if you say already had pre-configured linda.com as an example as LTI and you wanted them in all courses inside a category, do you think that you'd be able, is that something on the roadmap? So sharing back the other way. Not on the roadmap yet, but if you create and track a issue and get some votes, hopefully we'll get it in soon. So one of the struggles I've had with LTI is that as far as I can tell, the only way to add an LTI 2.0 tool is to be an administrator and add it at the, like in the site level to register it as a tool. But because if you just go and add the LTI and then paste in a link, then it automatically does an LTI 1.0 launch. It doesn't do a tool proxy registration request. I'm getting quite nerdy here. Yeah, yeah. So is there a way to do that? Is it maybe already there in 3.3 and I don't know about it? Yeah, so LTI 2.0 is the easier way of conferring a tool. Basically what it is is you just paste in a URL and it will configure the tool for you. So we've supported that for quite a while, but it was, I think it was just recently, or maybe we've always had it, but there is a capability which is LTI managed and you can just give that to anyone and they'll be able to add via proxy as well. There is talk of how we can make it so teachers can have better separation between the admin and that, like they'd have their own selection of LTI tools, but that's not available just yet. So as a solution for now, give them the LTI managed capability. So being someone who knows basically nothing about LTIs, are there any things that we should be aware of or avoid? And also do you have any recommendations about where to find out more and source good LTIs? I'd say the main thing to be aware of is if your institution is using a local instance of Moodle in that it's not available publicly, a lot of LTI will have trouble because it's all about allowing the tool to communicate back to your site. So just make sure if it's on an intranet, make sure it's accessible publicly as well. That would be the main thing. And the second question was? How to source good LTIs and find out more? I'd say there are some really good websites out there for finding LTI. If I know for Moodle itself, we're going to be pushing that a bit on the new Moodle net and things like that so that we can have our own repository of these LTIs. But yeah, if you search the internet, you'll be able to come up with good results about LTI and you'll be able to experiment and get involved and see what's out there. Great. Any other questions? Sorry, I'm not sure if this was obvious or not. Is this just between Moodle sites? I mean, if someone's got a proprietary LMS, can they still share content? Yeah, so it's not just Moodle. It's all of the big LMSs that are out there. In terms of a proprietary one, it depends on the implementation of that one. But I know all the major ones do support LTI and it should all work with them and tools to those and then back to Moodle. It should all work. My experience has been contacting them. Half of them don't seem to know much about it at all. So they just tell me you've got reports you can access as an admin into our systems and also download them and use them, which isn't really very useful for tracking content that's being done on another site because I hate sending people off to other sites where they have to create their own user ID and password and things. Yeah, I think... So that's exactly why LTI was created in the first place so that you wouldn't have to have them log in again, et cetera, and worry about all that. It's even beyond SSO at this point where it just tries to make the process seamless. Obviously, that's in an ideal world. I think with the same with Moodle, we call it external tool. Other LMSs may call it something else. And I think that the reason I wanted to give this presentation is because I want to raise awareness about LTI as well. So I would even be not surprised if the people you contacted in support just didn't quite know what the feature that was already in there because, yeah, I know that the major LMSs all support LTI. So keep asking questions. Yeah. Any other questions for John? No? Okay. Thank you, John. Thank you very much.


Yeah, boarding off this Thursday edition of the Sports Mag Zone with Cricket following his superb player of the series turn in Australia, Shamar Joseph is still making headlines ahead of the West Indies three-match ODI campaign set to begin tonight. Caribbean Time at the Melbourne Cricket Ground MCG, Cricket West Indies, announced earlier today that the 24-year-old's regional franchise contract has been upgraded to an international retainer in recognition of his superb efforts down under. In the meantime, Windows white-ball coach Darren Sammy spoke glowingly about the test series hero and his chances of breaking into the squad for the shorter formats of the game. Speaking to ESPN Cricketfo, this is what Sammy had to say, he will definitely be an all-format player. I can't wait to get my hands on him in this squad. But look, everything has a process to it. That's the way myself and the chairman of selectors operate. What he's done is he's created a really good headache for me with the World Cup coming up, building forward in the ODI team. Sammy continued, we ride the wave that's happening there, but we won't go crazy if the guys injured, let him go home and rest. That's probably the first time he's been away from home for so long. He's got a young family so we understand whatever we do is well planned and well thought out. I think going home to his family, enjoying this moment is important because pictures like that don't come around all the time. It's important that you enjoy these moments, savor it so that it keeps you motivated to have more moments like that. The West Indies white ball coach Darren Sammy speaking there about the test hero Shamar Joseph, the former West Indies captain of course selected Joseph as a replacement in this squad for Peshashore Zalme in the Pakistan Super League which begins in a little over a fortnight despite Joseph not being selected in either white ball squad in Australia although the understanding is he would have been asked to remain in Australia if not for the toe injury that he got. So very important of course Darren Sammy, the coach of the Zalme team in the PSL. Let's get Fazir Mohammed involved in this conversation. Because unprecedented because I don't know if in the history of awarding contracts in West Indies cricket we have seen in the middle of a contract period that a player gets upgraded from anything much less moving from no international contract to an international contract. Of course all he had before was a franchise deal. Your thoughts? You're right I don't recall this ever happening but you can understand why you can understand why especially not just because of his phenomenal achievements but for the fact of all of these franchises looking around so there would obviously be a level of urgency even desperation to get him signed on to a retainer contract that allows some form of discussion with cricket West Indies and I think that's so very important which is why I was so delighted to hear your interview with Ian Bishop because I think Ian as someone who's played the game at the highest level knows what it is to be an out and out fast baller what can happen in relation to injuries and I thought he made a very very relevant point that I wasn't thinking of at all that yes it's all going to play as many franchise tournaments boost up your revenue and whatever else without getting injured but it could work against your pace that you could lose those energy levels that has you from being a tear away fast baller frightening the lives out of the best batters in the world to someone who's good very good but still lacking in that world pace and I think that's very very important so I would hope that this is a template not just for Shamar Joseph but moving forward that there is that understanding that one players have to earn a living they have short lifespans as far as the peak of their careers but also it's about managing it effectively to ensure that not just Shamar Joseph Alzari Joseph Jayden Seales anyone else who comes up I heard Ian talking about a young fast baller also from Babis who's from a very poor community who has tried his best for them to get an opportunity with Guyana with the franchise it hasn't happened as yet so this is really where you need to listen to players to individuals who've been there who've done that who could offer that sort of advice yeah very much the case and I get the feeling that cricket West Indies and the West Indies Players Association are starting to understand the importance of this just coming out of the MOU that they signed it recently and if you look at the recent trend as well this administration has been more willing I would say to let players go and play in franchise leagues we are going to speak about the one-day international series coming up against Australia but the captain Shay Hope Darren Sammy as well the head coach have been preaching the importance of building squad depth because it is in having squad depth that you will be able to allow players to consistently go and play in these franchise leagues while being relatively confident that the players you do have can perform well at the highest level absolutely to be fair I don't think any cricket West Indies administration has ever attempted to prevent a player from signing on to one of these franchises so it's not like as we've seen in Pakistan where players are refused no objection clauses nor to their contract we don't see that happening thankfully in the Caribbean because we simply can't compete but I think what you see now and this is I think more to your point a level of a willingness to discuss remember what happened that that infamous occasion in 2014 when when we had signed on to an arrangement to a lot of players earnings to go towards the regional first-class cricket and the prominent players didn't know anything about it and it resulted in the abandonment of the Indian talk of 2014 and all the bad blood around that time so yes it's about having a mature discussion not a discussion that says I am in charge and this is what I'm offering you it's a discussion that says okay this is the lay of the land gentlemen ladies what do we do about it yeah and just to get back to the Shamar Joseph discussion because the white bald head coach and I've been quite keen to hear from someone like a Darren Sammy on how he sees the future of this young man in limited-overs cricket so based on his performances in Australia absolutely no doubt he has a future in test cricket but limited-overs cricket now and Darren Sammy is saying yes we have a problem a good problem but a problem nonetheless because we now have to look at this young man for the T20 World Cup do you feel Darren Sammy is saying the right things on this matter I believe he is and you know I have to say Ricardo or I am not I'm almost really I'm almost relieved for Shamar that if he's not on the boat already that he's on the boat back to Barakara pretty soon because that is his home base these are the people who really matter to him and you're going to get a lot of people even as from the media piling in wanting to get a piece of the action wanting to claim a bit of him and so on claim some credit and the other thankfully Brandon Colek was the first off the boat to get to Barakara from Babishan himself to have that interview with him on his podcast and so on so yes it's really a time when there's gonna be so much noise so much interest most of it well meaning but a lot of it exploitative as well so we need to be mindful of that and maybe it's the best thing that he's gonna be back at home with his family with his uncles talking about the experience while all of this goes on yeah fast we're not trying in any way to take any credit for Shamar Joseph's performances but we are trying to get an interview with him and guess who is leading that charge is it you no it's not it's the one and only Mariah Ramarack oh thanks for telling everybody alright fast so it's my time to question you so of course you know I'm looking at everything and while you're I was following the discussion with you and Ricardo about Shamar really just getting back home I think you know yes it's very very necessary because you know even having discussions with my own sister when you do well everybody as you said wants a piece of the action right it's like you're being pulled and talked in different directions and sometimes you're just not sure what comes next and I think sometimes that can also have a negative effect on you and we spoke about it on this show I think it was yesterday where the next time you know he suits up for the team he can also it can be negative in the sense that he feels as if the job is again in his hands to of course deliver with the ball and with the bat because we saw potential from him also with the bat you mentioned you know it's so so important that he gets back to the family as he gets ready for the PSL in a bit do you think that we'll be seeing the same sort of Shamar that we saw in that test series or do you think he's gonna based on what we saw with his confidence and his his approach that you know we'll get a more measured performance well Shamar Shamar I think what you see is someone who rejoices in being in this environment who revels in the limelight we saw that early on with the bow when he got that five-bucket hole in Adelaide and more than likely you're gonna see similar sorts of showmanship when the PSL kicks in and he's playing playing for Peshawar's army but I think more than anything else we want to see someone who enjoys what he's doing the moment it becomes burdensome the moment it becomes the book you can't turn left right or center without someone shoving a camera in your face shoving a microphone in your face wanting a signature wanting an autograph it can be too much and I think that's where the managing of the situation comes in and having those around him to advise him properly because it is quite possible that some can all around it and get carried away with it and then get greedy with it I hope not and I expect that they won't because they seem very well grounded because you can almost want everything right away and and that is where that measured sort of advice people like Ian Bishop who's been there a Brian Lara who's had his own experiences Brian Lara famously mentioned a year after his world record year of 2014 sorry 1994 I'm getting carried away 1994 he said the cricket was ruining his life and he walked away from the West and his team on tour of England in 2015 yes because of the the pressures that were being put on him 95 years his use now 95 fires not 94 that he had those records and the year after 1995 you're correct when he said the cricket was ruining his life so it's important that we put these things in perspective and understand that as much as everybody wants a piece of Shamar Joseph or anyone else that these are human beings with their own that they've already had their own lives established already let them enjoy being with their own friends and family and and then revel in the atmosphere once more when the time comes yeah because that's exactly what motivates them and spurs them on so tonight on Sports Max we have the first ODI of three ODIs Farz talk to me about that how are you feeling as we get ready for this ODI because everybody's acting as if it's the same team that played in the test is going to be suiting up for the ODI no no no two different formats two different teams just so sorry Joseph joining the ODI set up what are we to expect from our ODI team well let's hope that the team can carry the form that they finished up last year into this series because again as I was pointed out in the introduction Western is an Australia hardly ever meet in one day internationals they played a tri-series in 2016 together with South Africa in the Caribbean where the West cities reached the final against Australia and lost since then they've only met four times a World Cup of course there was no World Cup for the West cities this time around when Australia lifted the title there was a three-march series in the Caribbean in 2021 which Australia won 2-1 that's the last time that they would have played so there's an even though they they met just a few days ago in test match cricket there's an element of the unknown here because again that number 27 which you also mentioned in the introduction West cities on the non-Australian team in an ODI in Australia for 27 years and you're seeing a number of different players not just in the West cities team but in the Australian team you don't have this spare head of their bowling attack that won the World Cup this time around so they like the West cities are doing a feeling out process as they prepare their team for defense of the title in 2027 and in the West cities case to at least try and qualify for the World Cup in 2027. Yeah Fazz Shea Hope's batting in ODI cricket has been exemplary and as far as the batting rankings are concerned he comes into this series as the most accomplished batsman on either team. How much pressure is there on Shea Hope to deliver here and will he need the support of some of the other young guns like Athene's and company to support whatever effort he's able to deliver. I don't know the sense that Shea Hope feels that pressure too much of anything you would often find that we tend to see times sometimes lands someone is burdened by captaincy and it gets the better of them they struggle to perform. Drew Root was a classic example for England when he lost the captaincy. Look how Ben Stokes is reveling in Shea Hope is not that expressive type of personality but he seems to enjoy his role as captain he seems to enjoy batting at number four or maybe opening the batting again because there's no Brandon King this time around so there'll be some shuffling around of the order and yes it's automatic that you need the support from others. No one player can ever win a cricket match either batting or bowling because there's got to be support from the other end. Yes someone might score the most runs someone might take nearly all the wickets but there still has to be support from the other end. So yes it's important for Athene's it's important if other players like Teddy Bishop would brand new to this level of the game if someone with a test squad Justin Graves somewhere with the squad but didn't play like David Imlak if they're given opportunities this is their chance to really stick a clean for a consistent spot in a West Indies one day side. Yeah and fast as we look to the under 19 World Cup fixture the West Indies boys have against the Aussies on Friday which will be critical to their semifinal hopes and the euphoria of Shamar Joseph. Do you get a sense that this ODI assignment for this West Indies team with Shea Hope and his team there is a recognition on their part that the team is in a position to propel itself beyond what we have seen for decades because we know that success is something that triggers a lot of things including improving the product of West Indies cricket which has a lot to do with the marketing of the team because I think part of the CWI struggles with getting the kind of financial backing and sponsorship for West Indies cricket I don't think we can deny that the lack of success for the team has impacted that. Do you think the team feels motivated at the moment by what happened in Brisbane and their opportunity to keep that going. I think Shea Hope said so in one of his early interviews and it's inevitable I mean and you know Lance Mariah and Ricardo it really reinforces the stature of test match cricket because West Indies have had successes in other formats but look at the reaction to winning a test match in Australia and because of that there's almost an aura now previously it would have been well you know maybe they want to save our environment maybe the T20 squad will rescue some pride for us after being annihilated in a test series. Now it's a different situation and now they are expected to carry it forward it's not automatic because it's Australia you're playing against any opponent that you're going to be playing against will be looking to get the better of you because they have their own agendas so yes it feels like a euphoric time but it's a time when those involved those in the middle those who go out this afternoon Melbourne time to get into action should not lose their focus on their individual and collective priorities to perform to their best in the colours of the West Indies. Fazz thanks for talking to us as usual and we are all as cricket fans getting ready to watch this first ODI it comes up live on Sportsmax at 11 30 Eastern Caribbean time 10 30 in Jamaica and that's certainly early enough for 95% of us to be watching. Thanks Fazz. Maybe for aging people like myself it's becoming a challenge but given the euphoria I'll stay away. Yeah I know you will Fazz that for sure and we'll talk about it tomorrow. Don't leave us at the moment coming up after the break we have Sean Bridge Mahon one of the most successful Caribbean riders in the history of a horse racing in the USA along with the Barbadian Patrick husbands well over 3000 wins in North America he'll be live in the studio on the other side of the break back in a moment.