Digest at the dark and we're back unfiltered and uncensored talk with young alumni of historically black colleges universities Thanks for joining us for another episode on HBC you digest calm and on serious 142 HBC you Howard University's Digital imprint on serious XM satellite radio back in the house with or is the Morganite? Fred brother Katie line brother Katie I should say yeah, yeah driving and ordering food despite bragging about having a microphone in his home Not at home recording live from the road And tiff once again about to get thrown off the show. So I'm not getting thrown off of nowhere. Um, mm I'm gonna leave that alone. Um So we That will hurt my feelings and then I'll be sad. No, that's why I'm not saying anything. You're not getting thrown off anything yet. Um So let's let's start off with um Last week we had a commencement episode but it was it was kind of serious because we talked to owner and say about their experience in advanced degree programs and it was really It was really powerful in the sense to to hear Two hbc grads talk about the process of getting into and surviving Graduate school. Um, so I'm hoping a lot of people got something out of it So I guess we're going to continue the commencement theme and talk about the way That some of these young people are doing teasers for commencement And I don't know if the teasers trailers are what people are referring to the mass But if you get on Twitter YouTube You see these Extended video presentations of folks celebrating their pending graduation. So Last year, I think one of the top ones was a brother from virginia state um Who did like a like a Like a remake of lupes touch the sky And that was that was cool and that was to be expected because virginia state has a you know an elaborate Video production program. So I wasn't surprised by that and I enjoyed it This year ors, um Is the is the brother from fam you? Who has it reminds me a little bit of the far sides old music video um Where he's kind of walking through campus and people are like throwing stuff He changes his outfit and all kinds of stuff as he's walking through campus um what First what's your reaction to the the the young people doing these kind of videos? um, and do you think that it's I obviously think it's helpful, but do you think it it's Hey, great job. We love to see it. Want to see more of them or is it y'all a bordering on the point of doing too much I mean it depends on where you are obviously There's a conservative bone in me. That's like You know, I wouldn't do that personally by the people who would I forget i'm not gonna say who it was but a friend of mine was talking about they wanted to go redo their because they saw They were like I need to go back to school. It wasn't it wasn't a dream It wasn't a part right especially at fam because you know fam has that a very iconic shot that you see a lot with The eternal flame in the lead hall And people people now have like these orange and green like smoke machines They catch the they catch the flame when it's all at night And the sun is clear and it's like the lights are on so it's so it's a lot different than than what was done Even when I was in school and that was only a couple years ago Now I could I could understand the photography because there are a lot of hbc campuses that are picturesque like that So fam you was one eternal flame boy state actually has um, what is that that they got a flame in the middle of campus um You know how it has founders found his library um And and in the yard I mean so there there are some campuses where it's appropriate where you can do an all-out photo shoot And it looks hey, that's great because you know Not only are you looking good as a as a soon-to-be graduate, but the campus just has a great presentation like that But see but video is the next step of that So when you again in his video he starts in front of lee hall Like the it's mr. Fam you so he's greek so he goes through the set He goes past the greek wall Like it encompasses his entire experience. That's a really like Big part it's probably the heart. It's really the heart of fam used campus is mok Which what runs from you know all the way from the the end where the train tracks are all the way down to Where like the paw medals and stuff are so it's a big point of the campus And video was just the next step of that to show like before you may have done a long photo shoot In front of all these different places and put them all together in like one folder Now We're just doing videos and add music and choreography and i'm sure we're only seeing the beginning of this Uh by the time we get to fall graduations and then into next year spring I'm sure we're going to be seeing you know virtual reality stuff stuff like that It's going to continue to to grow And and first of all, let me let me because i'm old the the inclination for most folks out there thinking I hate this. I actually love it because I think it's it's positive Press for the school And it's young people doing positive things. I don't really see any any of the students doing anything. Um You know provocative like they're not cussing you didn't see you didn't see the family criminal justice student one Maybe I might have missed that one. What did I miss? So there was a criminal justice student and i'll find the picture where he was looking at the at the body looking at the day That was interesting because I say I saw on Social media he was defending it saying you know a lot of people if you saw somebody in a lab coat Who wanted to be a doctor you wouldn't criticize that and if you saw somebody who was who wanted to be a judge And they had on the you know a robin and had a gavel you wouldn't criticize that So why are you criticizing me acting out my career ambition of being I guess a forensic Or a homicide investigator. I guess what i'm saying is that but it's still sensationalized is homicide and anyone Obviously within the the black community we are We are affected by You know by high rates of violence in different areas and it's a noble thing to go do that I have friends who are in law enforcement. I just think Taking making your graduation picture something that's going to be a representation of you celebrating You know four to six years of hard work and sacrifice to be leaning over A dead body of another black person just really doesn't sit for well for me personally Now again, you can do what you want to do I just don't want that type of picture coming in my mail saying thank you for my graduation, you know So you thought that one was was bordering on doing too much And of course it came from the the capital doing too much. I love my school though, but I was I was not when I saw it. I said this is a family coming up to student He took classes in the comments. This is probably what it what it is and again I I'm I'm sure he's going to be very successful in his career and It definitely the moment that brought brought some attention his way. I just I'm a little more touchy with with murder and homicide and stuff like that. So for me I just didn't really like the the imagery of it that one kind of pushed the envelope. Yeah It's graduation is supposed to be celebrating a moment of success and celebration Leading towards your next next point of your career and there's made it for ways you can show yourself Doing forensics or doing, you know, you can get very creative with it. I thought it was less creative and more For shock value, but again, you know, it had it made an impact. We're talking about it now Um, but I think it shows that students always going to push push the envelope I'm sure if you ask the student 10 years from now He probably have different opinions about it because obviously you you change as you mature as you mature, right Tiff, what do you what do you think about these the commencement trailers? Sorry, I was muted because chewing. Um, as I was saying, um, I guess I'm like And different to it Only because I mean, like if I see something and I'm like damn that was great I can appreciate it, but like I don't really care either way Really? Yeah, I think I think there's two there's two ways I look at it one the artistic well I can say that I would like to see more I guess content Or how I got here Like an interviews interview style thing more so than Just it being on the timeline for likes and shit. I mean likes and stuff. Oh boy. Um, would but would it go viral if it was just like a A stand-up kind of interview with some if I I mean, of course there should be some artistic whatever with it But if I was using it for my purposes to show students that I'm working with them at home I would definitely use something like that But if it's just like You taking a picture and there's and you're just on the yard and you look nice or there's like cool effects on it Okay, but what else can I put with this to make it make sense to somebody that's trying to get where you are But katie, don't you think that that that's the kind of thing like these presentations are the thing that Induce young folks to say oh, I'm gonna check out, you know, that school because it looks like it's live there Actually, no to be perfectly honest No, because that would suggest that a whole bunch of high school students are following you and we know that's not the truth This is purely self-interest. I don't personally hate it though, but it goes viral though Like it's it's yes. I agree. It starts out with followers But enough people share it and then other people get access to it and what I compare it to is This is the same generation if I'm not mistaken that was doing prom proposals Where you would get a whole bunch of people from your high school together and say hey Will you go to prom with me? You know what that wasn't a thing That is starting to become a thing and I I wonder if this is a chicken and egg thing like I do I do believe it is because I mean like I think the first time I saw was towards the back end of my college career So that was in 2012. It's 2019 where people was trickling a lot of these written Ferraris and yes It's the same thing Bro, it's so it's so crazy when I see this stuff I'm like, yo these people's parents like people were really like no one had on nothing designer Wasn't no ferragamo belts in my prom like no Like my prom the best part of my prom was that we had DJ big john aka that better be cranking come and do Like a five minute set with Angie and it's because my we called into the radio station. I remember she was doing the proms I remember.  It wasn't a window. It wasn't no ferraris pulling up And most you may have had like some ice parents bends that was like the Let me interject this too though, right because I remember I think part of it is how much is this stuff costing So let's just say for the sake of argument You're not paying for a production team, right? How much does it um a dslr camera cost, right? You know 500 dollars and you get to keep it for the rest of your life. So all you need is one person with a First of all, that's from the school of journalism I was gonna say if you if you're at the right school if you're visiting a state or fam you you can get the equipment Exactly. So it's the equipment is almost copy has a recording studio Like I think every student every school that has an art department has a recording studio So it's not like all you need is access to the studio and as a student You get access just because you're a student because they people want they want you to take the classes So they're not going to say no, you can't come in here. So yes, let's do some club stuff inside of The art room Do you think every school could do this like so it makes sense for Howard it like the bigger hbc used to do it But if a school like and this is no shade when I say this like is it If Voorhees a Voorhees student did it do you think we get the same response? I mean they I hate to say it, but they don't have to compete because it's The exposure of a Howard student a family student a Tennessee state student or whatever is going to get it's going to get more eyes quicker If you're from Voorhees, you're going to have to have Some serious weight coming behind you got to have a network, right? Yeah Yeah, and also because I mean again just just the fact of like my freshman class FM Is bigger than like 60 percent of hbc used So even if it just went viral within my freshman class That's thousands of people that's bigger than schools like miles or wily or a list of other schools Who's the entire campus? Doesn't have just what my freshman class has so it's it's different and difficult I wonder if schools should Take the initiative to try to produce these things. So the students are obviously doing on their own and they're very creative And they're doing a good job Because it's going viral, you know media outlets are picking them up Do you think that the school should invest and start trying to do some of these videos? Only for the top students I don't think only for the top students only because you don't know What it took for a student to get to the end point And if you only show the quote top students, you'll miss a student with a story That you really might need to hear Like how much investigate know if you're going to do to find the best story for every graduation Let me tell you how hard that is to do if you put out if you put out a call And how it does put out a call Well, a lot of schools do but the the question is one are students willing to share it To will they will they share if I was on the radio with the president? Well, you you probably bodied your way dude to the radio I did not But the other thing is will they do it will they do it on time? And just because a student may want to share something it's like or said like They may get there and be like well if if I put this out there now What what is that going to sound like, you know two years five years 10 years down the line? So I you know what may be a good idea now Um may not be going going forward So it is it is hard for those students to tell that story and I think that students and rightly so They may not trust the university to be as creative as they might be um With doing some of this stuff because these students, you know, they they put videos out and do things They don't have to worry about copyright infringement A university has to has to think about that or how much sound are we using and how much of these marks do we want to show and Um, what's the liability of shooting a scene like this on campus? The students aren't really constrained by that if you drop the camera like okay, you drop the camera If we drop it that's a procurement issue You know what I mean so And because it's so much gray area with that why would the students the schools waste time and I think that would um kind of diminish the uh The whole feeling of doing your own video Well that and that's another thing that I want to get into so I want to continue on this track about commencement Because the next thing I want to talk about is if this is what we're going through with videos Wait until these Cross in the stage moments come up And we saw what we saw how it went down last year. So every year I want to see how you guys feel I was going to be this year. I just have to dark. We'll be right back That is at the dark and we're back. Uh, just had a conversation about these uh, pre-commencement trailers online um, and now we want to parlay that into a conversation about Crossing the stage so every year We have to have this dialogue about What students and graduates do when they cross the stage and It delves into areas of like respectability politics and liability and um, all kinds of things that are all legitimate to talk about but I guess the first question I would ask you guys is if the videos Are approaching doing too much What do you guys expect on the stage this year considering last year we had People chest bumping and chancellor Doing a full drum major routine um praise dancing A number of things so what do you do you guys expect it to be On par with last year a little bit more than last year. What do you guys think are going is going to happen? All the way up If they couldn't do more I mean, I'll say this so a lot of schools and we were talking just in the chat earlier today um Because one of the guys in the chat from southern was like y'all have more than one commencement. I'm like, yeah I think that schools like the bigger the bigger schools have more Procedures in place the graduations. I mean the individual commencement ceremonies are shorter So like some schools have two sometimes three even the school like how are they have their like friday thing We actually take your name and stuff and it's saturday y'all just kind of sitting there So I think that there's ways that schools have like the bigger schools kind of have Removed that from the this ceremony possibility I don't think it matters as much as small schools because they don't have a time issue If you only have you know at most 500 graduates You're not going to have a big issue with with time versus a school Like where I graduated from where you got close to a thousand And you're outside in may on a football field with no shade. Right. It's a very different Different thing, but I think students are going to do what they do what they do I mean, obviously the the people who are a part of Greek organizations are going to do their their thing But one thing I noticed is usually men more than women, which is kind of interesting Like you normally see the more outlandish things from from male students You really don't see it from a lot of women students and maybe because they're wearing heels They don't what they want to like fall and really you know go all the way out, but Because I have seen that before People falling heels trying to do something too much on the stage So, but I think I think students are going to find ways to you know do Stuff I wouldn't be probably someone has confetti And I like some confetti off in the middle of the thing or like the little smoke confetti handhelds It's just a matter of time until these things go from graduation pictures onto the stage, right And so Of course, I expected to be over the top But what I would like to see this year is that um schools don't Or really penalize students or graduates who decide to do things.  I think they were actually all alphas, but you know, whatever They find those That's a shot. Okay. I'll respond momentarily They withheld their degrees or something like that and it even though they went viral for what they did in their accomplishments the story itself on the back end central withholding and or um Finding them For for their actions that produced bad press So like this year, I kind of want everybody to be a little bit smarter Is this is this is this central state or central North Carolina central state now, let me Central state now, let me say I'm a meag, baby. When you say central, I mean, right? It's no Carolina central Hey, you know, I don't know nann nothing about sports like that. So I don't know why Because we're gonna be talking about sports in the last segment. Um, even better. Let me say for central state I didn't produce this now. I had a I had a con a conversation with, um For my female hbc president of the year, uh, sinthea jackson hamlin Extraordinary president the sister is sharp Gremlin alumna Now she had an experience where she had a q one year Who was stomping and performing and his foot, you know, the these these stages sometimes that parts of it are all of it Is rented But there are parts of it where there are specific platforms where you have a podium or something else or where a graduate may stand The q was performing. He stomped and his foot went through This part of the staging Okay, so that's so unfortunate now that of course you would expect that from a q alpha bias But what i'm saying is that painted her In her reaction and interpretation to should I let these students go Go all the way off on the stage Because she's thinking it ain't but for the grace of god that when he went through the stage that he didn't cut his leg open Or that they didn't that they didn't fall through it and break his leg Yeah, that's real. So um, and now imagine that happens or the whole stage caught fall down everyone Everyone falls or that happens and you're thinking about something that goes viral You tell him on negative press wait till somebody gets hurt doing something like this And the ambulance has to come in and stop commencement because somebody needs medical attention It only takes one so I understand that the executive view of this like y'all think it's funny until somebody Flips and misses you all operating on the impression that you're going to flip and execute it perfectly And you don't you don't you don't think about those flowers that are standing on the side of the stage if you slip and miss Sisters in heels praise dancing one of them heels goes out Or you trip over a microphone cord Or the other kind of things like and and I get it from an executive standpoint But I also get it from a cultural standpoint because you don't get but so many opportunities to celebrate like that, right Yeah, and I'm from I'll say this um Because it's really tough to legislate this right right how many people if let's say 500 graduate You have 500 graduates. How many of them are coming to the graduation practice? Where these guidelines are clearly stated Only the only the only the kids that care about the corn come to the practice. You must not you must not I'm with them more. You didn't go to practice. You all show up. You don't go to more. You don't go to practice You don't you don't get your degree. That's true. I didn't that was a thing. I didn't know that was a thing for some schools You got to get that card so you could get your degree at that. Yep. Yeah, I got that card Otherwise you gotta wait for it to come in the mail. Yeah That's tough. Well, I mean first of all cop and we ain't giving degrees a day of anyway. We don't have um Our um administration. This isn't big enough to print that many of that first. Oh, no, you're bad mouthing copping I love copping to death, but it just ain't happening with the five people that send that off Is copping one of those schools where they perform at the commencement? Yes, but we are um Some reason it's mostly christian Is right, so it's more a lot more praise dancing than you see the greeks Um, you know doing stuff and we don't have a deep band so you won't have any of our majors going crazy It's really just the it's really just that church feel like every time some every time you have a cop in graduation It's just like oh my god. I'm free. I'm free It's funny because you don't see every school do that. So however, I can't have you out There was a proposal one stage with the university presidents and the provost that I saw a couple years ago That's doing too much Now that's holding up the program. Yeah Um, I don't I don't like that. See that that's something that probably should have been booed because now you're holding up Everything like I I enjoy black love. I support it But a proposal a good proposal should take a good at least six or seven minutes So the commencement carry going hold on because video didn't go viral The commencement carried on they walked right past them. They kept handing out. Um, while he was proposing they kept they kept calling names Yeah, but I mean That's black excellence Indeed indeed it is they kept the program going while he proposed it to his girl Yeah, that's true. But um to my logic point these kids do pay a graduation fee And so part of that gives them a sense of entitlement that I'm going to do what I want since I paid to be on this stage Along with paying the tuition and I pay for the degree, right? Um, so it's only so much stopping them that you can do And then you're right It's going to take for somebody to get hurt before it to be like all right real awakening. We can't continue this So let me let me give two notes on this one every school doesn't do it You don't see people performing at fisk. You don't see people performing at hampton Um, they just have I guess a culture where it's like, yeah, you can try it. You might get tackled off this stage I'm not hard to throw that walker at you But they're you know, when you mostly see it at um the public's And that's and that's hey, that's that's part of the culture But they do have to mitigate the the the risk associated with it. Um and the the coverage of it because again It can easily become a story like oh great graduation was three hours long Which by the way the trustees are not here for Every time we have these stories What you don't see is the is the trustees hauling the president and the provost into a meeting like How are y'all going to shorten this ceremony because we as always said we're not sitting out here For three and a half hours in the sun like this every time And you got people in the audience falling out And getting high and leaving because they don't want to sit through it all that time Jared were you were you at Morgan when that that initial kind of uh where people got him and left? Well, no, but so yeah, people are here to give them leave every year. We have we have graduate walk off the field, but That's a Morgan tradition. But um, but no, you know, initially obviously Morgan always had their graduation with graduate school and undergrad together And I think after 2014 there was a big Stir from undergraduate students and from the board like we have to separate this like the school has gotten too big Like you can't be giving out 50 doctorates Yeah, and doing the doing the hooding and all that stuff reading the whole title of the dissertation Right. Yeah the dissertation beat six paragraphs long and it was just crazy and I remember They tried to separate it one year And it was a big fuss and the graduate students like called the baltimore sun and all this stuff And then eventually I guess Morgan just said we'll take the bad press or whatever And now it actually full it actually now have two separate ceremony and what a grad they have a grad school on friday and undergrad on saturday, but Morgan's approaching what's going to happen like I say like sam you they have Two separate Commencements on the same day They have like different schools at different times one in the morning one in the afternoon And I feel like schools like Morgan like ant like fam are going to be moving to a model where like these pwis For graduations on thursday friday saturday and sunday like u.h. Has like four graduations Because there's no way to make it possible to do a full commencement with 2000 3000 4000 graduates and that's the that's the level in which we're going to so I think saying students have a certain Saying that the katie's point students have a certain level of like oh, I earned this You did but they have to make it feasible as well for people because Quite frankly these schools are getting so big that there's no way to efficiently confer 500 600 plus degrees at one point at two o'clock in the middle of the summer Do you think if schools went to a formula where they always Broke the graduation out so let's say you start the ceremony You have your main commencement speaker and then you break out to individual colleges and schools That you would have as many people performing because it's In my mind and I might be wrong I can't recall Being at too many commencements where it was broken out and people still back flipped on the stage Like they do that when you have the main audience of the football field Like if you're a huge stadium if you got the whole huge stadium watching that's one thing But if you got the whole Hill field house watching that's something else But but how but howard is howard is brilliant because they have that friday ceremony I was about to say like howard had I mean saying the same thing with spellmen Like spellmen has spellmen graduations like four days Because you get down and they have howard is the entire week Yeah, so like so how does that work where they do it the whole week for people who don't know Say that again. How does that work so for people?  Oh, yeah, or the day before whenever your ceremony is when your name is called Yeah, your name's not called at howard on saturday when you have Unless you're like, uh, I think doctorate or something like that where your name is called at the commencement Undergraduate through masters or whatever. I know masters is I think commits me to but yeah, no bachelors See they got to do something because and here's the other reason like more and more of these hbc's are getting, um In my mind higher profile speakers, right So you we've always gotten like legislators and stuff like that now you're starting to get like celebrities at some of these campuses And so I think that you run the risk if you are Running too long sometimes the speaker likes to stay and watch it But if y'all start going too long, what you're gonna have is the speaker leaving They're gonna say i'm not i'm not sitting through all of this i'm not staying for pictures I'm not staying for autographs and you miss a moment and it's actually may be missing an opportunity to network because you haven't Run the program as efficiently as you could have So I don't know if it if it matters to the students.  I mean, it's okay. They eventually get across the stage, right? Yours wasn't too long, right Katie? No, I wasn't no longer than my high school graduation. See and it's Yeah, and I everybody know everybody so we just having fun.  No, no, well Don't go there because I knew what you used to say. Um, here we go When we come back, uh, we're going to talk about some new coaches at morgan, uh, namely and howard, um, and the new culture of Bringing in high profile assistants and former nba players to run hbcu basketball programs the dodgers have to dark. We'll be right back Dodgers have to dark and we're back, um People throwing shade about new coaches tiffany not weighing in. Um, not a sports fan So we have had a big run on in some notable names being hired at hbcu basketball programs in recent years So the two most recent kenny blakley, uh A blank knee. Let me let me i'm sorry a dc product who played uh for duke university was an assistant um A lot of lot of big time programs harvard, uh Delaware a number of programs. He's he's coming to howard And then you have, uh, kevin brottis who's a maryland university of maryland assistant Um, going to lead up the bears basketball program Um, this is on the heels of wan dixon, uh, former university of maryland standout guard bottom one city product One of national title with maryland He's now running the program at coppin. This is On the heels of kenny anderson Going to fisk Jarvis haze getting an assistant coaching job at morehouse So you you know, you have a lot of former mba players a lot of high caliber Um college assistants finding their way to hbcu's Mostly in basketball, but you're starting to see it in football as well Don't forget lindsay hunter mississippi lindsay hunter, you know mississippi valley um Todd day at philander smith college. So there's a lot a lot of them. Um, Darryl armstrong used to be a clark Atlanta So, uh, joy and i think george lynch, uh, who was an mba a long time mba role player took his place She she was down there as an assistant as well at clark Atlanta. So you have all of these This pipeline which i'm going to talk about from the mba to the to the to the hbcu ranks But first of all, let me ask you guys so it Obviously, I would imagine this would be positive for the hbcu's for the name recognition of the name exposure alone um Since all of us have a new coach coming in Um, what do you guys think about one these these new coaches? And two the prospects that it presents for hbcu's to to get further on the map in their city in their region as a basketball product Hey katie, i'm gonna start with you because you actually you're in proximity to copping and wand dixon is like a like a hero in baltimore um So what I mean first having gone through it was a tough year Um expected, you know for wand in his first year What is your reaction to him running the program and the prospects of copping returning to glory? um I'm a little indifferent right because I don't think name recognition means you can recruit I am praying for his success as I want copping to be successful But honestly, I think they were just trying to attract students to the school And i'm not sure that wand dixon was that answer um And now I can you can say that for all of the um hbcu's that have hired You know former nba athletes of college high profile college assistants Can you recruit because see a lot of my problem with baltimore in general with the mirlan sports Network in general is that a lot of the top talent leaves mirlan um So my question is how do you keep the kevin de rance? From leaving mirlan How do you keep cudd mellow anthony in the state of mirlan even if they don't go to hbcu's? How are you keeping them here? And then once you get those those that tear that caliber of athlete to the mirlan schools Then how do you get their their teammates that were really good as well to come to your schools?  It's so interesting because you are so right every time I watch college basketball outside of the hbcu games it's I mean villanova temple syracuse north carolina I mean, it's it's nothing to hear somebody from from washington dc from prince george's county You know oxenhill maryland baltimore maryland.  I'm with that. I hope maryland fails but I mean the university of maryland that is but it is to say If you can't keep those guys at the university of maryland Then the honorable mention the second team all counties the third team all counties Can we honestly keep those guys too? I think maryland ruined the culture though. So people believe in the basketball and stay to maryland in general maryland That as well But don't forget maryland's top two players right now from from from maryland jaylin smith is from bolsomore He went to mouse st. Joe's anthony cowan went. He went to st. John. He's from pg. So They do they do all the way. They do have some local boys every once in a while playing for the turps um And they had and they have their recruiting class is pretty deep. They've done a decent job You can go back to to nick fowls went when when uh, tertiary first got there or whatever, but saying I mean maryland is not a very big state So I think I think to have the idea that kids who are from like no one did it No one ever did it better than john thompson jr. Old man john thompson getting reggie louis getting david win gate I mean even going down to tide water and getting la la's old morning getting alan iverson alan iverson uh victor page like I mean when you so when you look at we look at the the history of what Georgetown has done You know, they were probably the best at getting the best people from dc from bolsomore and from the subsequent You know kind of kind of region. I think it's difficult now with these national countries I mean, don't forget marquel force and i'm not kicking a draft. He's from of marlboro Mike You know and he went to university of washington So, you know, what it shows is that there really isn't there really isn't an apparatus to do this But even going back to where hbcu's are I think that where hbcu's can do best is really Doing better at getting those players who instead of going to sienna or vermont or new hamster or lafayette I mean, there are tons of local talent Who end up going to these same kind of scs style schools?  Yeah, William and mary like So we look at it like they're on the same exact level as us. They're both You know, they're not going to get they're not going to get a at large bid They have to win the conference tournament type schools and they're still not coming to our institutions Even though we can probably offer just as good or a better package It's starting it requires me to find that it's starting to turn a little bit But to katie's point and to yours it comes down to the recruiting And I I guess the question would be and tyven you got to get in on the conversation here How much of the recruiting is based on the relationship you can develop with the person who's recruiting you Versus in the nature of of athletics. It's how much do you appear on television? How good are your facilities? How live is your game day experience? So knowing that there's two areas that an athlete may focus on What are you as a recruiter? How do you how do you sell them on what you know could be deficits in their eyes? Am I answering first? Yes um So this isn't something that I actually have experience in because But you recruit students who are choosing from different campuses and there are different reasons for why They are choosing so when you when you know what those reasons are. How do you still make this sell? um, I don't focus on where it is The campus may lack if that makes sense I'm going to tell you everything that's great about the campus first and explain to you why you belong here Now is everything perfect? No, you shouldn't think that it's perfect But will you get to where you say that you want to be? highly likely so I don't try to sell um On an athletic dream because honestly I that's not my strong area. I don't do that. Um But you know, that's that's what I focus on and I'm talking to the parents too Because it's not just a student especially if you know, the parent is involved and all faster and all that And I think that's where the conversation gets a little murky for the student athlete because all of these kids have a pipe Not a pipe dream but have a dream of me of going pro And so the question is how do I get my how do you get me enough exposure where I'm getting looked at? by pro teams Even though like the college system doesn't seem to be built towards the second and third tier guy going to the leagues Like you might get a g league spot But you might be g league forever or you might get those overseas spots But you don't necessarily need to go to college to get those overseas spots as long as you can play on a professional level so I don't know to that point I just I think about how that is what uh some of these Student athletes they want they do want to go pro however they can go pro, right? But then I started to think about how much better are we than PWIs if we just we know a student wants to go pro and that they'll do whatever to go pro But they may not necessarily be the best student That that they can be they just want to go pro and want to have A chance and the only thing that we might do or that some people do um in terms of recruiting our student athletes is Sell them that dream even though they are a terrible student You're selling them a dream. They can't perform. They have not performed But you're selling them a dream. You see that's why the campus That's why I think what what president Fredericka Howard said about hiring Blake me was so poignant because He makes it very very clear that Howard is not going to recruit students who don't meet their academic needs, right? They're very very clear about that and they are unapologetic about We will we will be more comfortable losing games in some ways It's more than a game. Yeah, and that's that's a big thing. I think I think that really is my attitude So when I said I really can't relate to the question the first time because it's more than a game But that's hard to do though because let me tell you why that's hard because or is your folks are on the on the bison express That's the fundraising mechanism for Howard athletics. They respect Howard's academic profile. They get it At the same time they want to win Because when you win, that's how you get corporate sponsorships. That's how you get people in the stands That's how you get people talking about you. That's how you get media coverage So there are a lot of things that revolve around athletics. So I but there's one thing when I talk about Jared And that's that's what what's the number one issue? HBCU sports. It's not it's not the student athletes It's not the quality of product. It is sustainability. We have coaching carousels I mean I can't see I can think of maybe one or two programs in the last couple of years That have had the same coach same ad and have won Now there have been like, I mean nickleberry was at was at Howard for forever. He didn't win anything So, I mean we have programs that are extremely mediocre that have you know, that have Really really really good, you know sustaining of Of executives and of coaches, but I think the biggest issue that affects all these schools from copping to Morgan to any I mean even Sam We look at these schools We cannot keep people there. And I think the issue is that coaches come and they do well hbcu They leave immediately or coaches come they do terribly and they can't get a job anywhere else So they stay and get stuck looking at like norfolk state football. So when you When you when you talk about kind of where things are Um in the grand scheme, it's like, you know, we don't have We don't have coaches stay for a long time I mean even I know broadway has retired and he's he's comfortable in retirement But there was even some talked about when broadway retired at at ant that There was some contract disputes and it wasn't it didn't tell me it was a clean break And I think that's probably our biggest issue with recruiting even go back to katie's point is that It's very difficult to recruit if you have no faith that your coach has recruited you He's got to be there when you're you know, by the time you leave And you just see and you see howards top the top the leading scorer meaq player of the year It's transferring but it's interesting because lavel modan has been in central for it for a number of years And he's always up for a job Um, and yet he still brings in enough talent that he's competitive in the meaq where he's winning it So I would to your point. Yes. I think I would like to see and I think a lot of us would like to see Lifers we would like to see a return of like big house gains Um, you know at talmadge hill like, you know like guys that come to an hbc We're gonna be there for 20 years and you can but it doesn't be that long I mean leahole came to morgan one one one of seven meaq championship and was gone the next year I mean it literally it literally is like we don't when's the last time we had a big name hire even even look at london How long did london last london lasted two years? I mean It's I just don't think that there's a way to be sustainable if it doesn't help the coaching But I think that there's such a Such a money driver trying to get a big name that it may be better for coaches I mean for schools to find somebody to build with them Who wants to be at the program for a while and stay like a la velmo versus the carousel that we see In many ways and unfortunately, you know, we don't have the money to pay these people to get them to stay But even schools like florida state I mean like jimbo fisher was making tons of money at florida state and leads for texas a&m for even more money So it's always going to be an arms race. It's never going to be good enough But if we could have a bit more stability, I think that we'd see more results I think part of it is you if the benchmark now Is can you make the nc double a tournament and can you possibly upset somebody? That's a that's a high benchmark every year You don't see what that did for him though, bro. I mean and I think that if we return to a thing where Our benchmark of success is not did we make the nc double a's? But did we beat our arch rival? Like did you yes, you want to be competitive? Obviously you want to win the conference and all that But there was a time where if you win the ci double a if you're morgan your goal was to beat buoy Like that major season your goal is to beat coppin And if we go if we go if we go 14 and 14, yeah, okay, we didn't do so well, but we beat coppin though You know, if you're north kalana central we we got we got to be we got to be a&t We got to be winston I think for the smaller schools or the the smaller schools. I think the benchmarks would be the one your um Your conference tournament, right? I think that that should be your goal every season Because there's no way you're beating Zion Williamson. You're not and that's and that's what i'm saying like if you just focus on If you and it's not to say like we should settle for mediocrity. That's not what i'm saying But it is to say that if unless we're going to be like a gun zaga Or one of those schools where they consciously say it is time to commit to athletics and you start pouring money into it And your alumni start pouring money into it Which we know we can't afford which we're not going to do then we have to get we have to get realistic and say okay then the best thing that we could do is Really focus intensely On our arch rivals our in-state and intercity rivals and try to make that The most poppin product that we can Because right now if you don't if you look at howard versus morgan in anything. It's a popular game It ain't it ain't the talk it ain't the talk of the beltway Because because because because they don't put any they don't put any power. I mean the other they had the howard morgan game during spring break point year like I mean, it's It's ridiculous how and again I'm I try to be not to be too critical of me at leadership, but Even the howard morgan football game The coppin morgan basketball game Even with some even with ant played central I mean in basketball like they this year was over like ant spring break. I think like They have not done a good job of really capitalizing. I mean when when texas plays Oklahoma It's a game no matter how bad both no matter how bad they are and then and that's how coppin versus morgan is And that's probably how norfolk versus virginia state is And it should be how howard versus morgan is but they're not I do they're not like that I do want to ask this though or at least throw this little caveat out there Because you mentioned me at leadership, right? Isn't isn't david wilson sitting on a high high position in the hcda He just got he just got put him to a board this year Um, and he and he also and he also was the the chair of the president's committee other meaq So he's the he's the head president On the meaq as well. And so now it's incumbent upon the morgan state university president to At least inject some life into the meaq sports He trying to But see it sounds so simple, but 95% of the problem is that you have You have a very very wide Breath of schools and regions even in the meaq Even in the swac now. I think the swac is a better job And especially in football. I mean they have though. They have two classics in dallas. They have Obviously magic city in birmingham. I mean they do a really good job, but again, most of those are run by the individual schools so But one thing I do think the meaq could do better again is to create more opportunities with some of those inter Um, inter area schools, but even more so It's again to find a way To create some sustainability within the within the process because the fact of the matter is the meaq will always be The baby to the ci w a so basketball wise No one is ever going to go to norfolk for the ci w for the meaq tournament Ever it's never going to be what what charlotte is and what boltsmore will become but What the meaq can do is they can do a bit more in terms of football which we all know makes more money And um, I think you know, hopefully this hopefully I mean it'd be cool if they could do You know more classic opportunity even if they did it one year or so have a nt play central in charlotte I don't know. I don't know. I want that but that'd be nice for a year You know to have instead of morgan playing up at hughes have it at m&t There's something they could do to make some money and generate some interest in some buzz In the city it would have helped when you know the mayor was still a morgan state graduate We want to we want to give a arrest in peace So her candidacy. Oh my god and her chief of staff actually was a howard graduate but um But you know, it's it's unfortunate, you know, kind of how that played out, but I think that there's more that can be done But people have to be creative and let's let's face it like there is not a lot of interest right now With seeing hbcu sports on the grander scheme, which is why we're on esb in three basically and so I think that if they can find ways to Generate some more buzz. I mean a nt is a great example of a school that has a lot of buzz right now, but You know, we need to do more and and push for more and uh, but But I think we got a we got a good example in if you look at morhouse, for example morhouse is in the dirt for a while and now they're riding they're riding They're riding high because the last two years they got like 20 wins They've had like 20 22 game winning streaks when they part when they play clark atlanta. It's the talk of atlanta Like no matter what clark atlanta is doing like if it's morhouse ca you like that's that's on 11 alive Like that's in the ajc They're talking about it, right? So You know, I There's a model for it, you know, there it can be done. You just a few years ago. Didn't um morhouse send somebody to the san diego charges Uh probably I mean, I mean that doesn't do with that. I mean does not forget morgan Morgan and howard had a huge game This is probably two years ago three years ago where they played on espion on third on Thursday night under the lights Nobody involves more They didn't know him was there, but it didn't have actually didn't have pretty good views on tv but I just think that again you have to create an environment people will go on want to do these games I mean morgan played delaware state of the lights one year It was like maybe 2012 or 2013. No one came, of course But I mean, I think that you have to create an environment people want to go And if and if it's going to be better to have morgan play howard in dc, which obviously we know it is Then then do that then me act make up your mind and make a decision I mean, do you know how bad it looks on tv to see? You know some of these stadiums empty You have to find other ways to get people to go I mean, we all know like sami does great with getting people on the stands But a school like norfolk state has a has the biggest stadium in the me act 30 thousand seats Or you acknowledge that morgan, you know, some stadiums just are literally not physically set up right for example at morgan Our cameras our our skybox is over the home side So when you look at the camera view it always looks at the you're shooting at you're shooting at the empty away side When the home side is full So the other thing that um That the schools can do is kind of like follow the army navy model because you notice that stadium is always always play exactly It's because they force the students to go Now grand, it's a little murky when you talk about you ain't gonna make morgan copping Howard students go nowhere the moment you say you can incentivize them going you could We don't even film campers on friday. We're not going to no games like literally after class It's cleared out on thursday nights Like like i mean we have to be totally real like again every what fam you can do What a and t can do is a very different thing than what morgan can do because of this the the demographics of the school And i think is i think it's not it's not it's not smart to to look at them and to create Initiatives for them are the same way and leadership from the meag office looks like We have to create different incentives We've created from program for different campuses because the the conference is so unique It's not the same well part of it is also have a winning culture too on campus For example, you mentioned fam you and a and t they get good crowds because when you're winning The guys and the girls consider that a place to be like everybody's going to be there So let me walk in there and make sure i show face Morgan if you if you if you walk into a morgan game is like okay. Well I mean i just walked out the refagger.  You didn't want to participate in this conversation So you're gonna have 45 seconds to to rant about you against sports I just want to say that throughout all of this I just So many variations of maryland accents Let's wrap this up. Thank you guys. That's good night. Oh my oh my goodness I am from my area who is in exile here in texas. I need more love. She's so mad. My god She's so not she asked for me not for the sports talk Anyway, so this is this is a really great conversation because again sports is the is the thing that that will get you the most eyeballs In the most butts and seats on the campus during any given any point in an academic year So it's not something you can You know just say oh it don't matter or you know what it is Is what it's going to be like you got to keep having this dialogue Especially about who runs these programs because they do shape The revenue in the face of what a lot of people think about our institution. So Brothers I really appreciate it morgan Or is the morgan I thank you so much been a long time.  Um Katie I love you dearly. Um my brother my brother despite, uh, tuning in live from your car. Um Nobody knew that though I had it on mute the entire ride back from the subway, which was delicious subway. Please sponsor this podcast um timony, um About to be thrown off the show. Uh, at least you made it through.  We gotta get over that sir recruitment and enrollment We gotta get over that sport stuff sir No, please don't qualify. Don't bring me no bad news. None of that None of it We appreciate it another uh wonderful episode of digest after dark again Thank you for all for listening hbc digest.com and on series 142 xm radio the howler university radio network We'll be back. Uh, what hopefully next week What it's today thursday or today tuesday never mind you you about to be thrown off. So we'll we'll see Next time that just after dark. Thanks for listening. Peace


Shuffle back, shuffle forward, shuffle back, shuffle forward. It's number five, six, five, six. Okay, six to seven. Six to seven, just a feet, just like that. Okay, so we're here, step to the corner, shuffle the back foot, pivot. Step to the corner, back foot, pivot.


Hello everyone welcome to cloud native live where we dive in code behind cloud native I'm Paul Simons and I'm CNCF ambassador every week we bring in a new setup presenters to showcase how to work with cloud native technology they will bring things they will break things and they will answer your questions join us every Wednesday at 10 CDT and this week we have a pleasure to receive like Kikwarp from CEO from the store West and he will talk about automating the orchestrate database and our stateful workloads with Kubernetes also join us for cubicon and cloud native virtual Europe in May doing four in seven to where to the last from the cloud native community this is an official live stream of the CNCF and as a second is a subject of CNCF code of conduct please do not add anything to the chat and our questions that would be in relation of the code of conduct basically please be respectful of all of your fellow participants and presenters we for all that's hand over to Alex to show us about this amazing idea that is how automating the orchestrate database and the stateful workloads and companies thank you Alex for joining us in our live today thank you thank you very much Paolo and thanks for that amazing introductions hopefully I'll live up to to making this an amazing discussion I'm going to share my screen and put up a few slides to help with the process so a little bit a little bit about myself my name is Alex Kikwarp I'm one of the founders and CEO of storage OS where we've been building a software defined platform for cloud native storage I do have two hats I'm also the co-chair of the CNCF storage sake so feel free to to to ask any type of questions around cloud native storage during this talk and I'll happily try to answer to the best of my capability my background before before starting up storage OS was was actually working on infrastructure and infrastructure engineering of sort of large platforms with large financial services I mentioned the CNCF storage sake I want to make a little plug here we're always looking for to expand the community and have people join the the the sake and the and the the the SIG meetings we cover a lot of things including project presentations that that are for projects that are working with the CNCF as well as projects that are just considering joining the CNCF and we also do a lot of work on different documents and information that we think would be really useful for for the end user communities and for organizations and developers and teams that are that are deploying cloud native technologies so I wanted to cover off right we often have this discussion around you know what is a stateful application why is cloud native storage so important so I'll start off with something maybe a little contentious my my premise here is there's no such thing as a stateless architecture all applications everywhere want to store states somewhere whether that's you know simply in a file or in a database or a key value store or or perhaps an object store or a message key or or any any one of those things so so when we think about why storage the answer is really you know all applications are going to use storage somewhere and of course if you're making the investment in platforms using containers and orchestrated using Kubernetes why wouldn't you want your stateful applications to be orchestrated and managed in exactly the same way so if we're talking about if we're talking about stateful applications what special considerations do we need to think about from form a cloud native storage point of view because of course not all storage is is is equal so it's worth it's worth understanding what we're looking for when we're talking about cloud native storage you know there is this common thing about pets versus cattle in in the cloud native world and you know cattle being this this sort of homogeneous recreatible easy to manage and easy to orchestrate environments versus pets which are you know very bespoke implementations and the same applies to the storage to as much as possible we want cloud native storage to be composable and declarative you know in much the same way that you can specify which containers your applications uses and the amount of CPU and RAM and perhaps the the network topology or the the service mesh etc that that that your applications need developers should also be able to provide the ability to compose their storage environment and of course you know for that to be possible the storage environment needs to be API driven and needs to integrate with you know the control plane or or with CSI and Kubernetes for example to to to be able to provide that that declarative interface the other the other thing to consider is in cloud native environments organizations systems often have very scalable systems which which actually change a lot under the covers right so this could be because you're scaling clusters on the man that could be because you're doing upgrades on the man that could be because of you know failovers or availability reasons but but very often you know we underestimate the complexity of ensuring that data follows an application and why is this right because for the longest time storage has been typically presented or made available to a server but now that your applications are containerized and they're portable and they can scale on demand having the data that those applications use being tied to individual servers is potentially less useful so so we've coined this term application centric storage because the the storage needs to be tied to an application needs to be able to move with an application as it moves within within an environment the other thing is platform agnostic right so so what do we mean by this here i'm talking about using software options or or or perhaps services which allow you to use the same client native storage or the same declarative interface wherever you are whether you're you know developing on a laptop environment or or you know in on premise on big bare metal or client environments or or whatever the mix is you really want the cloud native environments to be the same in all of those environments so that your development environment and your production environment can relate to each other and can work together and finally agile and i do admit that this is incredibly cliche but what do i mean by agile well like i said in in cloud native environments the rate of change is high they are designed to scale on demand they are designed to to have to to swap out nodes as part of upgrade processes for example and therefore the client native storage systems need to need to operate in those in those environments and this is really important because at the end of the day you don't want your storage to be managed by humans you want the same automation that you're applying to your Kubernetes cluster and the Kubernetes world to apply to the storage environment too and and and have that automation such that the storage is is consistently available and and and and also is performance under their rate of change and can integrate with your orchestrated environment and provides you know the same protection via namespaces and RBAC and encryption for example that that that is key to deploying to deploy and securing data and applications in in in cloud environments so when we looked at all of this in the CNCFC we we we realized that there was this this huge broad landscape that that's where storage you know is defined and it covers lots of different things everything from you know distributed storage systems to simple local systems to databases and key value stores and object stores and and other things like that so storage storage in the client native world is a particularly broad topic in order to to help to help people understand this we created the storage white paper which is now at version two and what we cover in this paper and it's available at that at that link is you know the different elements of how a storage system can be deployed we cover some of the things around the attributes of the storage system because it's it's more important than ever that that developers can understand what their application needs and therefore what attributes of the storage system they're looking for how the different layers in a storage system in a storage solution affect the different attributes because what we what we often see is that storage systems in cloud native environments have any number of layers and each of those can affect different different aspects of of say availability or scale we talk about the data access interfaces in terms of the volumes and an application apis that are used by applications and we also define the management interfaces which are those those apis that those those apis that are used by the the orchestrator control plane um there was a question about uh pinging the link um i will i'm just trying to do that now i'm not being very successful i will i will ping i'll ping the link as i can in the for for what it's worth um if you if you search for cncf6 storage um all of the all of the white papers etc are in the sig repo too so that's an easy way to look it up um when we when we talk about how the cloud native storage is instantiated and deployed you know there are obviously a number of different options there are still a lot of traditional solutions which are which are deployed as as hardware written a data center but obviously you know that that limits the portability and the the availability of those environments in cloud environments um what i'm going to focus on mostly in in in this talk is is um the the software elements and the cloud services which which um allow uh the cloud native storage to be more platform agnostic um and and in some cases uh like in the case of storage or as for example those those software defined systems can also be deployed as a container and then can be managed and and uh automated by by an orchestrator themselves um so we we also talked about the different storage attributes right um and we when we sat down we talked about this we we we landed on sort of five key um storage attributes which which which are often determined used to determine which type of storage system you might want to use um within the environment um some of the key things are are obviously you know things like availability and scalability um but very often you know performance is a key consideration too um and we mustn't forget uh things like consistency and durability but what what we found was that these different attributes could be measured across um a number of different vectors so for example the ability to to fail over and and and and have applications access um storage in different locations being able to move data between nodes and protecting the data against against um save save failures uh it was was another factor um similarly you know scalability could be um could be in terms of say the number of clients that can access the storage system um the the number of operations that that that might be important say for for a database where where it's all about the transactions per second um but also scalability could be measured in throughput where you know it's um which could be really important if you're running workloads like analytics or something like elastic search for example right um and it's very rare that um one storage system is going to be able to do everything right so so systems that are very often um optimized for availability might have constraints around consistency or performance similarly um when we uh when we try to um optimize for um operations um those are quite different architectures to systems that that optimize for for for throughput for example so so so I think you know trying to understand what your application needs is is is an important point because then you can actually look for particular attributes um in the underlying storage systems and we talked also about you know some of those layers right because what we find what we find is that um there are so many different layers um and and and and abstractions that that often happen within within a storage system everything from you know the the physical non-volatile layer where where data is actually persisted at the end of the day to to the data services that run on top of that like like you know replications and and snapshots um to the different technologies that are used to protect the data like um perhaps raids or racial coding or replicas um and of course you know the the storage topology plays plays a huge part in this so so for example um you know distributed uh topologies might affect latency sharding is often is often a tool that's used um to to to allow workloads to to scale better and to support large number of clients um and hyper converged allows uh it is very popular today because it allows compute and storage workloads to to share the same uh environment and of course you know the orchestrating the host and the operating system um can have any number of of of different um different uh abstractions there so for example if you're accessing um a database or you're accessing the service you know you might have uh increased controllers or load balancers in in the part and and if you're accessing volumes there might be um uh volume managers and things like that in the part and you know one of the key things here that we often find is is really important to understand is the difference between some of those key localities is key topologies i mean these topologies um because those topologies um can dramatically affect a lot of the of the different attributes you know starting off from from local which which tends to offer you know really great um low latency performance and and and fast throughput but but obviously um poor availability and uh and durability but um uh remotes allows you to to sort of disaggregate the the architectures um and and more commonly nowadays distributed um systems allow you to make it easier to scale and to provide uh provide the capability to uh to to provide um storage capabilities across a larger number of components or or nodes um and and capacity um but obviously you know there are um there are complexities in in providing uh distributed systems and you know that was certainly one of the challenges when when which we came across when we're developing storage os and and our control plane with with design creative consensus um um so the when when we talk about data access interfaces um with with workloads um the workloads can typically access um storage through a volume which is probably the more um mature interface when it comes to uh orchestrators or it can um access uh storage through apis um when we're talking about for example say an object store a key valley store or or or a database um one thing that although a lot of the development thus far has been on um put in and container orchestration around volumes we are seeing um now developments with the new um with the new cap uh with the called uh cosy which um is talking about now creating abstraction layers for um object stores as well but ultimately the data access interface also impacts um a number of attributes within the system but what's important is that we don't necessarily um consider um the different attributes purely on a data access interface so so for example um you know object stores um typically have uh slightly higher latency than than say a block uh a block volume in a file system um because uh object stores um have a more distributed nature and the api itself obviously adds adds overheads um but it's not always safe to assume that say a block or a file system uh volume will always have lower latency than an object store in fact you know there are any number of distributed um storage volumes that could actually be built on top of object store um back ends in which case you know the the the some of the attributes that that volume would would inherit are based on those those back end object stores in terms of availability um so we tried in in in the white paper we tried to put together um a few um uh comparisons between you know how the different access interfaces compared to each other this is this is generally you know um generally accepted attributes but like I said it doesn't always apply because very often the layering means that that different systems can be built on on on different underlying components um but typically you know we see um block interfaces are are often the best for for that low latency performance and you know that could be important say for database or message cues file systems especially um uh offering shared capabilities um allow uh multiple pods to to potentially share the same data sets at the same time um and of course you know object stores in this three interfaces are are fairly well um understood and are are great at providing large capability and and typically large throughput but um less well suited for for low latency for individual objects so that was the data access interface um and I'd like to just finish off with some of the orchestration and and management interfaces so typically a storage system is built is split into two components the control plane and the data plane um workloads will be using the data interface to talk to the data plane component of the storage system but the orchestrator will be running um uh will be uh interfacing with the control plane of that storage system and this would be in order to um dynamically provision resources perhaps and also uh to do things like for example attach resources or or or move resources um to different nodes or depending on where the workload moves um at the time um the the standard control plane interface uh for for volumes within within Kubernetes is CSI the container storage interface this is um you know an analogous to the CRI for runtime and CNI for for networks um and effectively you know that provides an ability to um to create and actually attach um uh uh perform snapshots etc um from the underlying storage system some storage systems also have um you know a variety of frameworks and tools and that can also interface with the orchestrator this could be um systems it could be an operator for example that allows um uh the distribution of or the deployment and the upgrade ability of of a storage system within within Kubernetes um it could also be uh it could also be you know additional services like admission controllers which which might help with say data locality uh within Kubernetes so so we talked a lot about the the different um the different options um before actually before before we go into the next stage I just wanted to say if if there are any questions um please feel free to to ask in in in the chat um I'm happy to stop and and answer questions on the fly um as I'm going along to so don't don't uh don't feel like you have to wait until the end um so moving on um I wanted to sort of maybe talk a little bit more concretely about how storage is configured in Kubernetes specifically and try and give um a little bit of an example of how we can use that to automate and and build out um workloads uh safer workloads in in in Kubernetes so the the the most important building block um in a Kubernetes cluster when it comes to storage is in in fact the storage class so so a storage class um is uh allows you to define a set of parameters that will interface with a uh with a driver with uh that that uh is used within the control plane of that of that storage system so so effectively the storage class is the standard interface um that defines a name of the storage system and how to access that that storage system um a developer can then claim raise a claim this is called a persistent volume claimer or PVC um out of the storage class and Kubernetes will then uh using the CSI driver that's defined in that storage class typically will um dynamically provision a PV or a persistent volume um out of the storage class and then that persistent volume can actually then be accessed through any pod or or any stateful workloads um and uh it becomes becomes you know a piece of portable storage that can move around with the pod right so the idea is that by um giving uh dynamically provisioning the claim and giving the claim a name which is then referenced within the pod you have you know a standard building block for how to link storage into into the the applications so i want to give you a little example of of what this looks like in in in real life um you know show me the animal as they say um so this is an example of a storage class it's it's an example for the storage or s um storage class effectively all we're saying here is that um we we create a a storage class uh called storage of s we give it a name um the the the um we define what the provisioner for that storage class is in this case it's the the CSI interface for for storage of s and there may be some parameters that are also defined within that uh within that storage class um and then we can dynamically provision a volume by creating a persistent volume claim and it's you know at a very simple level a persistent volume claim is uh just needs to provide a name in this case we're calling it database volume one it references the storage class so Kubernetes knows which driver to use and which interface to use to create that provision um and we specify the access mode so so if we're doing something like um a database volume for example we would choose um read write once which means um that uh that storage volume is accessible to to one pod at a time but it's also possible to create volumes with read write many which typically uses some sort of shared file system um like NFS for example under the covers to make the to to enable the volume to be accessed by multiple containers at the same time and the other mandatory uh piece of uh data is typically the size of the volume right so in this case we're doing a five gig volume now it's it's it's possible to define different attributes for different systems um in the storage class or in the persistent volume claim so very often it will be possible to define parameters uh like replication or compression or encryption or or or other data services for example which which can be applied either at a storage class level or or or at a individual volume um depending on the on the underlying storage system in the case of storage of s you can create you know different classes with with different classes of data services and then and and you can also create granular uh individual settings for for specific volumes and then we can launch a stateful application so so in this case we're launching um a post address uh a post address uh database um and what you'll see is in in that list we'll see where we're um mounting uh pg data and we're using um we're using the database volume one as the claim for that volume so so what's actually happening behind the covers from a Kubernetes point of view is that the the CSI um uh provisioner will be attaching um that dynamically provisioned volume to the nodes um Kubernetes will mount that volume into the namespace for for the container typically through a bind mount and then um effectively the container starting up and it will see a slash pg data mount point that will be using the dynamically provisioned volume called database volume one um and really is as simple as that so so with a little bit of yaml it's extremely easy to have a complete end-to-end declarative interface to start stateful workloads with storage um and also to template them and build um build your services as you go along again if there are any questions um that come up feel free to ask them in the in the chat window and uh and Paolo will be will be covering some of those off um as we go along too um so I wanted to also then take this one step further and kind of say okay now that we we've explored the planning of storage and what it can do and how it can work for your environment we'll talk a little bit about how this translates to a database and and perhaps you know the concept of moving that database from your um existing uh traditional environment perhaps uh or or non-cloud-based environment and how do you think about that when you're thinking about moving your database into into something like Kubernetes so if we if we look at this you know most systems start off with you know a particularly well-defined server um which might be running you know a large a large database instance many times these database servers are um very server-centric um it's based on a scale-up approach where you know the server might have a number of database instances or a number of databases within a single instance um running on that node um and and and ultimately you know it is problematic every time a new database is required whether it's for development or testing or or or if um databases are required as the application expands um it can be problematic and and often risky to make changes to to you know your database server instance so let's see what this looks like if we if we apply some of these client-negative principles to the concept so you know we start off with um with Kubernetes cluster we have the developer addition of um storage essence off which actually um virtualizes the storage and provides that scale-out distributed storage for the applications and provides those plugins for CSI to to allow Kubernetes to dynamically provision volumes on demand across a storage pool that's aggregated across all of the nodes in the cluster and what we see is that we can you know we can create a database and we can also um then rather than have one big database instance we can um we can uh we can move um individual instances as as as separate um pods within within the cluster which can then which can now be spread out so so rather than have you know um each um rather than have one big database instance where your failure domain and everything else is based on a scale-up architecture you you now have a distributed architecture where it's easier to make changes or to tune um or to scale individual um databases or database instances within your environments and of course it can be extremely um it can be extremely easy to um to to scale this up um every time you know if a developer needs uh a test database or or or indeed you need to fire up a database as part of the CI CD process um the whole thing uh the whole thing can be can be done dynamically on the fly and in fact you know we have we have a number of organizations using storage OS running uh this sort of environment where they're creating and destroying you know tens of thousands of of database instances and volumes uh every single day on a on a CI CD basis um and here's the here's the other thing right we talked about different attributes that uh cloud native storage um can provide so if your underlying storage system like storage OS is providing that high availability for your database you now also have um an automatic failover and and typically the way this works is right because we talked about not just availability but consistency in order to be consistent um the storage system will be taking the the transactions that are being committed to the primary volume of storage and um replicating it to um one or more replicas we typically recommend two replicas to to to provide um additional availability and once the replicas then acknowledge that the replica has been done that uh data is then acknowledged to the the database and we call this um you know strong consistency so it's the difference between strong consistency and eventual consistency is is about um whether you can be sure that a the if if if there is some interruption in the flow or interruption in the system that all the transactions are always committed to the to the replicas and b but when uh the database um actually queries the disk it's definitely going to see the transaction that was last committed um and there is no delay between the two some systems of course optimize for eventual consistency for um for for performance but that's not always great for for many databases but what we see here with this with this underlying system is that if if one of the nodes fails and effectively you know a copy of the data is lost the underlying storage system with liquid storage rest can can actually then automatically um create an additional replica to get you know the desired state of having two replicas back into back to match the actual state um and the database continues to work on the underlying on the new primary volume which is which is promoted from a previous replica um and what we see here is is effectively you know uh an easy way to provide to to tie storage availability to application availability here we we see a database um that can transparently now fail over between different nodes and continue to access the data anywhere um in this in this environment so in conclusion one of the things I'd like to to just sort of um focus on is um cover up a little bit about how we see um most or many organizations take this journey to to plan native um and stateful applications right and most of the time we see organizations um uh start up with uh building out containers and moving their applications to containers um and what that means is that now it lends itself to being orchestrated and of course Kubernetes is that or is that the factor orchestrator but in my view the biggest superpower of Kubernetes is the fact that everything becomes composable and declarative right so a developer can specify um can specify uh environments where they define the containers and the cpu and the networking etc um and Kubernetes will just make it happen and abstract away the infrastructure and also deal with the scaling and automated failovers etc but like we said all applications need to store state somewhere and this is where a glad native storage solution that integrates with Kubernetes um can now automate not just computer networking but also all of the um storage and what this gives you is an incredibly powerful um application-centric storage paradigm right where effectively um we have the ability now to move any stateful application into into Kubernetes whether it's um a database or a message queue or or uh infrastructure components or analytics like elastic search or Prometheus or Kafka for example um but more importantly we can build anything as a service because it's is it's templatable and uh you know with the power of Githops and the power of of of those YAML templates you can effectively build um any type of service whether it's a CICD as a service or a database as a service and we even have organizations now using um projects like kubeverts which actually allow you to manage VMs within um an under within uh an environment um to to actually have VMs managed on cloud native storage um giving you an infrastructure as a service right this is this is um this is incredibly uh exciting now if you want to get into the nitty gritty of how we do it with with storage os you can try the developer edition this is the only bit of plug i'm going to do on storage os you can try the developer edition for free um we have uh a number of different use cases including you know both grass and different databases and how to run them on on kubernetes um and this is a really easy way to sort of experiment and learn in your own kubernetes environments um all the concepts that we talked about today there are a couple of there are a few questions here so one of the questions hi alex hey paul what's really amazing this time is very important uh from the perspective of resilience uh we have uh we have the concerns about how to be to have an application how this application the part of data and not only data and trends but data in rest is resilient it's so much important to focus on how you use will store your data so it's it's amazing tim and we can discuss about it and how what's the better best practice for this uh for day long i i love this this presentation uh we have we have some questions a few questions about uh one for example one specifically them uh about for example uh storage class uh the question is how can specifically how can be is specific to local dc for example vmware hosted nef vi it's possible to be specifically for this kind of uh vmware feature or company there where no oh you can earn me strange oh i can i can hear you now you came back lost everything oh my god sorry i said that is uh amazing because one point important point for applications from the perspective of data not only data in trends but during rest is to how you maintain uh the resilience of the application how you store your or data how you maintain your data through ever uh execution uh so not only during the current execution but then if you fail or if you have a long running process so you can stay uh with your data in some place so it's an amazing time you can apply a day long uh conversation about this we have we have thank you so much was amazing uh i have a pleasure you here with just today uh we have a question about how you if it's possible to uh configure this kind of feature like uh i think our storage class to a specific implementation in uh uh in a specific dc like vmware nfe vi uh company it's possible to drive for a specific implementation like this absolutely so you know it's it's it's it's possible you know there are csi is is is a general driver that allows Kubernetes to to abstract out to any number of different storage systems and and they could be you know traditional storage systems you know like a hardware array in a non-prem data center but it could also be software solutions like like storage os so so effectively you can you can use that in in vmware you know if you're using these these sort of storage solutions which are based on software you can you can use it in vmware you can use it on bare metal you can use it in in cloud instances because because typically they'll they'll apply everywhere you know and it's not just storage os but even you know there are cncf projects like um like rook for example that that provides um similar sorts of things too ready uh so it's uh we have many opportunities to use any anything and anything where in the cloud or not a cloud public cloud or private cloud because you have this capability adapt for with drivers amazing uh we have another question this is about uh what why you'll be recommended for Kubernetes uh three time db replica cluster for example Galera or replicate a single db at storage layer um it's not it right it's it's it's not a straightforward answer it does depend there are different pros and cons right um doing um doing uh replication at the database layer or or even sharding at the database layer is is certainly um you know a very common architectural pattern um and it works to to to a certain extent um the downsides to to doing say you know replication with something like um Galera is that of course you have to use three times the amount of compute for example if you if you have a primary and and a couple of replicas or or a couple of secondaries so if you do replication um at a storage level uh you can potentially save some of those compute resources of course having multiple um compute resources um for for the the primary in the slave can also mean that you know you gain additional scalability because you can use the slaves for for read only workloads or or or to or to run batch reports and or or things like that as well right so so it's it's not always clear cut um the other thing is it doesn't have to be an either or solution right you can use storage level replication as well as database level replication because database level replication can give you the scale that you might need um and that doesn't just apply to you know things like Galera but you know Cassandra, Mungo and and Fittes and and Cochro's DB etc are all defined on that on that same type of architecture um but then on on the the the underlying storage um can also become a challenge when you have um a recovery scenario so so so imagine um you know you have a distributed database and you lose one of the nodes well it's obviously possible to start up another node and let that let the database replicate into the data into the new nodes but what you'll probably find is that the that replication process might degrade the performance of the overall um database for for a period of time um whereas if you also had um replicated storage you might find that the recovery process is much faster and you don't get that uh you don't get that degrade performance uh during the recovery process really uh we have another question about how to manage or across multiple DC across multiple region cloud right so so that is that is um uh that that is that is a fairly interesting question so what we'll what we can see is um you know how I mentioned that a storage system will have control plane and a data plane in a in a distributed storage system that's handling replicas you know like storage or s for example what we can find is that um the control plane and the storage system can automatically place replicas across availability zones in a cloud provider for example and thereby provide additional protection against an individual availability zone or failure domain from from taking out all of the replicas so so replica placement is is is one of the functions the other function though that that that we need to that we need to consider is the the the challenge is um around uh latency right so so if um you are doing replication across large distances um then uh you have to make a consideration around consistency if you want synchronous replication i.e. you know data is always available in all the replicas um then uh higher latency between the different data centers will have a material impact to the performance of of the storage overall um and you may want to choose to use a synchronous replication but that said if you're using for example um you know availability zones or failure domains within a particular region uh in a cloud provider you often get low enough latency that that synchronous replication is possible too i'd like to have a good question in my opinion here from jogging in our uh alternative live chat in the slack uh if you one thing that about scaling stateful workloads like db that i weren't scaling down what happens when you go through from four to three or two zero yes it lost everything well to zero it's lost everything but maybe to one right so so i think i think you have to differentiate between scaling um scaling the storage versus scaling the database uh application parts right so you can have um you can have an application uh that's that's using say distributed storage um and you can scale it up to to to to uh based on demand and then and then scale it down um you can also potentially scale it down to zero and stop running the application altogether but as long as the storage system still has some sort of scale you're fine of course if you are if you want the ability to to um scale the entire cluster and the nodes in general um uh you probably want to have a set of nodes dedicated to um to storage which you which you don't scale down you know so so you might rather than go for a completely hyper converged topology you might go for some sort of hybrid topology where some nodes are dedicated to storage and some nodes are dedicated to compute and you use the compute nodes to to scale up your application and and you maintain the the the storage nodes for for the persisted data great alex we have a great question from yogi but don't have more time here or just have five five minutes to finish so yogi will try to answer your questions then debate about this in our uh in our chat uh with alex and if alex can help us but uh alex is a member co-chair of uh a special interest group a sergeant special interest group alex we have a few time just could you please uh talk a little bit what is what's your uh what's the job of uh a special interest group storage space there's a group how can we participate in and uh how you participate in this group what is be a co-chair i want to be a co-chair what's what's uh what's his work for cncf a special interest group right let me there you go um so so the the sig is um it's an open community um we uh we have uh calls twice a month on the second and the fourth all the calls are open and all the calls are recorded and you can also watch the recordings uh on the youtube um the sig does a number of different roles um we uh we we effectively work with the toc to provide them with um storage expertise uh and storage advisory um so for example you know we help the toc when they're looking at um projects that are joining the cncf we help them evaluate and do the due diligence for those projects whether it's at uh incubation or or graduation for example um but also there are you know lots of projects that that present to the sig because you know it gets the it gets the project out into the community and after they join the sandbox it it's it's a really great vehicle to to get information about the projects there um the the other thing that we do is we provide uh educational services um to to the um to for end users effectively in the cncf community um so things like white the the cncf uh storage white paper that we that i just talked about today um but we also have um a performance uh and benchmarking white paper that we're about to launch um and uh cloud native disaster recovery white paper that that we're working on uh and again you know we we we want people from the community to help with that process um the sig itself is you know constituted by the toc we we don't make any decisions ourselves we we act in an advisory capacity to the toc the toc uh nominates uh and votes for code chairs and uh tech leads uh within within the toc sorry within the sig um and typically it's people who are uh active in the community and trying to help out so you know the easiest thing to do uh if you want to to to have an active role in the sig is to join the community calls um help with uh help with the the documents that we're creating and help with um product reviews and that obviously would get you nominated and allow you to to have a more active role oh really uh alex just to finish my my last question about the storage uh special interest group we have many guys there with specializes in in storage and how lead with with workloads that need to of course storage data etc so if you someone has a question or doubt about this concern it's a good place to reach uh the the channel from sig storage to to chat about and maybe get some help because we know that the the the group has other many many uh work to do but uh when you have a doubt you should have a uh a place to put this up then try to get help it's a good place there absolutely so so i'd recommend um people who are interested to join the mailing list and we also have uh we're also on the cncf um slack um you know if if you have um a project or you have a technical query or or or something that you think would be useful to the community and it needs to be discussed we can add it as an agenda item um but if you mail the mailing list or or uh sort of ask a question in the slack channel um there will typically be somebody who can help with that too amazing thank you alex thanks so much was amazed to have you to get today uh was an honor of course and uh uh i want to see you next opportunity yes i look forward to uh to a kubecon in real life uh sometime soon yeah i suppose in north america we can meet together meet personally uh and meet everyone uh thanks so much alex thanks so much uh thank you everyone for joining us today uh in this uh last episode of cloud native live it was great to have you alex and talk about uh work with this state for workloads in the in the cabinets that is something that not it's not stateful so it's amazing uh we also really love the interaction and the question for the algeance and we bring you the last cloud native cloud cloud name called every wednesday and next week we have another great presentation and thank you for joining us today and see you the next week thank you so much