Everybody forced here up in two boxes of 2022 tops Cosmic Chrome Baseball hobby for Travis you thanks Travis and good luck You did it here Nice Coar launch into orbit show hey Otani Yeah Chris sale rocket arms Torquelson rookie base with a Kwan rookie base Okay, look over a bunch of Marlins for Travis Let's go dolphins Marcus Sometimes is that that's just people's living SG Extra dollars coming in refractor max Kepler When people have time to get that much into the hobby, that's kind of how you know what it comes down to you know Was arena got orange Galactic Vladdie jr. That's nice number 18 out of 25 Vladdie Garrett Cole rocket arms Jake Myers. Yeah, I'll have people just sell on eBay for a living Launched into orbit Vladdie jr. Stargaze Bregman and Ozzy Albie's blue moon Six of 99 Walker Bueller rocket arms That was J rod. Yeah, Vlad jr. Marlins. Let's go dolphins Stargaze Trey Turner Harper super. I mean hey, that'd be cool Bruhan nucleus Wilson catreras Just like gray Royce Lewis rookie refractor Vidal Bruhan Abrams rookie base Out Thomas stargaze Trevor story Shers are rocket arms. All right, come on better second box here. You darvish rocket arms Blue Moon Raphael Devers 75 of 99 Launched into orbit Ronald Acuna jr. Stargaze Matt Olson. This is not this is not do anything does not work What's that? What's that youth invasion wonder Franco? Oh There we go case hit Youth invasion wonder We'll get that in a bag for you Travis or as Sam would say kill the Trav killer Trav Josh hater rocket arms Stargaze Lindor My condolences thank you Anthony Rizzo Earned that day off For sure Ryan got refractor willy-a-dame's She's got to give him a hard time all the time. Oh, I do I'll come and chat to you. Yes Probably not much tomorrow night Wednesday night. Maybe I don't know. I might go to the hockey game Wednesday night. Oh, yeah, I May what black eclipse Dallas Keichel? Well 10 out of 10 there Not the best player but nice parallel Say a rookie Launched into orbit Luis Robert Bryson Stott Anthony Rendon Devils are a wagon Kyle Shane Bieber rocket arms auto Lopez could be an auto here usually with a case hit There's a decent auto too for the most part wonder Franco nucleus Teosca Hernandez Kyle Muller Stargaze McCutchen their rocket arms Gavin sheets Gold interstellar rookie Royce Lewis. Nice card. Good box here. Good second box first one was tough This one's awesome 23 of 50 On the Royce Rookie refractor Julio Rodriguez as well. Very good box Appreciate it Travis. Congrats, buddy. We'll get these out to you


This session, we are happy to introduce a terrific session called The Bridging Worlds Panel. Our speakers today are, besides me, right? Selby Evans, Dieter Heiner, and Sun Tzu. Selby Evans is a retired professor of psychology at Texas Christian University. He taught courses in psychological measurement, computer applications, and systematic problem solving. He conducted research in pattern perception and studies of cognitive systems supported by the US military organizations, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and other government organizations. He has more than 80 technical papers in professional books and journals. He operated a consulting business for 25 years, serving various companies and government agencies in psychological measurement, problem solving, cognitive engineering, and computer applications. Other interests include computer science, existentialism, Zen, and Second Life. Dieter Heiner was born in 1966 and raised in Munich, Germany. Making first contact with computers and programming in 1981, he set the course for a master's degree in computer science from the Technical University in Munich in 1991. Since 2007, Dieter is a frequent metaverse traveler to provide a safe, simple, and reliable entry-level access to the metaverse. He started creating his own web-based virtual world platform from scratch at www.cyberlaunch.com. That's C-Y-B-A-Lounge.com. To be accessed with the browser without any installation or plugins necessary, to be able to use the platform for educational uses, Dieter founded the metaverse school in 2017, and he plans to start operation in early 2018. David Flesen, Sun Tzu, is a master training specialist and taught journalism and broadcasting for the US military at the Defense Information School and recently developed a college undergrad course on engineering and virtual worlds. He recently graduated from the Art Institute with a major in media arts and animation and is currently looking for opportunities in virtual and augmented reality. Welcome all, let's begin the session. Well, I'd like to welcome my panelists and to get us warmed up, many of you are probably wondering what are bridging worlds, right? What we're thinking about OpenSim is the base technology and how many of us come from different walks of life and different technologies, also from different needs. So Dieter, what stimulated your interest in creating web worlds? Okay, first, I started studying the actual definitions of virtual worlds. I've presented here some examples from Wikipedia so you can see what the definition of a virtual world is, but the main point is I've put the words in color, our persistency and people. So it means we have virtual worlds which brings people together and everything we do will stay persistent. And the thing was people test to go and say, oh, for me it's too complicated. I don't want to join a virtual world. I don't know what I have to do there. So the vision is to build a web world or a bridge between the real world and virtual worlds and have a very lean on small learning curve. Because what are the main obstacles for users? And really it is, many people have already problems with the installation and the configuration of a viewer. The navigation and use is too complicated. And as we had learned yesterday, only a couple of percent of users are really builders. The rest are just consumers of content. So the goal is to reduce this complexity. I've just made a few small example just to see where the web worlds will fit in. So we have a certain level of complexity for our known virtual worlds like Second Life, OpenSim, Kitely and all the other grids. It's even more complicated for new users if it's a virtual reality virtual world like Sensor. So the goal is to bridge the level of complexity to go from the real world and to introduce web-based virtual worlds to allow people for a soft transition into our realm. So what's so special about web-based virtual worlds? The main thing is it's running entirely in your browser. There's no installation, no plugins needed. You simply click on a URL and you can enter the web world directly. There's support already for many devices. So it's not only restricted to your desktop or laptop PC. You can use it on an Android or even an iOS tablet. And this means it's also supporting a wide variety of browsers. The web worlds are also much more easy to navigate and to interact with. That's part of because interaction is still limited. There are not as many resources available like in a free-fledged virtual world, but for newbies this is very interesting because they are not irritated by too much features. So Dieter, as you're talking about this, I'm kind of wondering what's the connection with OpenSim as far as content and avatar? How does this work? Yeah, so for now we are trying or improving the means to import content from OpenSim into the web worlds. So you can have a similar look and feel of your environment. And so it means you can have your OpenSim content made available for people just browsing the web. So I don't know if you saw Austin Tate's session earlier today with the OER converter. Does your work relate to that in any fashion? No, but I'm curious to try things out because I'm also able to import DAA files into my platform. I've already successfully imported a lot of things from OpenSim, so it could be either directly or as a branch of this development to use it to bring content into a web world. Now, I recall earlier this year you were talking about running some research to test this out. Don't let me stop you on the slides, please continue. But I'm looking forward to seeing how that went. Yeah, so next slide is about the use cases and of course, socializing and entertainment is always on top, but right now we can also use a web-based virtual worlds already for counseling, for education, business purposes like virtual meetings or conferences and also for advertising and marketing. What you've said is especially about the educational prospects. Yeah, now for the second semester, I'm already running a prototype and pilot phase for first semester collaboration environment. So a group of students build a virtual environment which will be used for the upcoming first semesters to do the group work completely online in a virtual world. So as I get weekly tasks they have to fulfill, they can do their work together using voice. They can share documents inside the virtual world and they can also drop and save and present their results weekly in this virtual environment to their tutors and the professor. That sounds wonderful. Now you know, you're getting into Selby's area too when you start talking about education. Have you guys been working together on any of this? Not necessarily the tests you've been running, but as far as the web worlds, Selby. And while Selby's getting his microphone working, why don't you go ahead and tell us, Dieter? Oh, there you go, Selby, hi. So Dieter, I know that Selby has a web world that he's using for office hours every day. Is that correct? That's correct. So we've established a server in the United States, especially for this purpose. So this is a non-profit virtualworld.org. Selby has daily office hours and everybody is invited to drop by, talk about literally everything. And the best thing is, we always collect the feedback from users there and which brings up for us new ideas which we can then implement in the next version of the platform. So getting a sense of how this works when we click a link and go into a web world, Selby, as I'm thinking about what you're doing, you talked about personalization and drag and drop. What does that mean for you? Well, the drag and drop feature, which Dieter has added to SelbyLounge, means that you can, for example, take an image file and drop it on the web world that you're in and it will appear, it will be brought into the web world and people can see it instantly. Well, as instantly as other things happen in virtual world. And the thing, you can also do that with a web on cram, browser on cram, whichever one you want to call it, which means that if, this is one I would use for all kinds of instruction, you can, if I have lots of things on my blog and many pages would be useful in instruction, I can bring that in instantly. Again, after a while and, but without having planned in advance. So this is great for providing instructions. We actually, I don't know whether Dieter will know, I don't know whether we are yet able to bring in videos. I did bring in videos and I think it works in some browsers but we can't use unless it works in most browsers. And the video, of course, works as well. We bring in a YouTube video and that works just like it just as it would in a, on YouTube. So we can bring in all sorts of instruction. We can also bring in, and this is what I wanted to mention, we can bring in collado files. So we can bring in objects. And I mean collado files with the, with the model in there too. So it's a 3D object. And those, that also, I don't know what, I would not encourage anybody to try to bring in a collado file immediately, just any random collado file because I don't think it'll work. But Dieter will be finding out and telling us more about how to set up the collado file. So what, go ahead. Oh, well, that sounds wonderful. So we have the convenience of content, easy to upgrade, to load into these worlds, which of course is one of the requests that educators have had, right? For curriculum because it's so hard, first off to teach using virtual worlds but secondly, to get all that content in there. So are there any other affordances that you can think of there, Selby, from your perspective? Cause I know you've been testing this out every day. Yeah, yes, well, of course we do, of course I would emphasize, we do have voice operating and we are able to build. I have built a little, and I don't even know how to build. Nobody will find anything on the market that I've built. But I do, I can build a little bit. I've built and I have done instruct provided tutorials on how all of the build, commonly used building things that are available right now.  And that means, and then you can go in immediately and start trying to build. And I say trying, cause you won't be that simple, but it wasn't that simple in second life either. That's true. So speaking of this drag and drop, I'm gonna pass the mic here for a moment to Sun Zhu who I think has a question for Dieter. Oh no, actually what I was talking about in that one was just addressed by Selby. I was just mentioning about how- Joey, go ahead and repeat the question. Okay. Well, I was just asking about dragging 3D models directly in world, but Selby just mentioned that you can do that with the coladas, the DAE files. That's awesome to hear that you're doing that. For those of you that may remember, there was a world from Sun Microsystems a while back called Open Wonderland. And one of the great things with that is that you could drag and drop your 3D directly in world. It was both a good and bad thing. It was good because it gave you access, but it was bad because not all models are created equally. So sometimes people would bring things into the environment that weren't very well made and that could actually cause some problems because the geometry wasn't done right. That's right. Well, thank you there Sun. So Dieter, back to you, right? So you were telling us about Cyber Lounge. Please continue. Yeah, so most of the topics we already discussed now also with Selby, yeah, the drag and drop features this was one of the proposals my students brought in because during a semester of coursework they have to import several dozens of documents with tasks and results and simply dragging these from the desktop into the 3D world then they're automatically a corresponding object is created. It's really helpful for them and it saves a lot of time. So for example, you simply have to click on a shelf drag in your Word document and it will appear in world immediately. That's great. Did you have any other slides you wanted to showcase or are you not just we're wrapping up and to make this all into a real platform not just for offering a 3D world. I found that the Metaverse school earlier this year the goal is now to bring together students and tutors and educators in virtual worlds not necessarily in Cyber Lounge could also be using Signal Girls web worlds or an OpenSim platform. The point is to have the interaction and the collaboration features. So I really love Khan Academy but this is more or less for self-studies and the thing is for many topics we need a real one-to-one work between somebody teaching and the learners. You just mentioned something about Khan Academy and of course I have to think about that because this is the week of the hour of code. It's like the world's longest hour, right? Yeah. And so why don't you tell us a little more about what you mean when you say with Khan Academy? No, so the thing is Khan Academy is more suited for self-study. So you have access to a lot of knowledge but then you are left with watching a video even if you watch it again and again and the thing is I want to provide the interaction really to have like classes and online courses in a 3D environment where you can really have a tutor and you have several students which are able to ask questions and can get the support they need according to the personal learning speed. Oh, that's great. Thank you. So I know what's going on in everyone's minds. Before we start thinking about avatars and identity as well why don't we tackle the question, is a user-built web world, like a technology you're talking about here, is this going to be replacing virtual worlds or what are we advocating here? No care. Yes, that's my cue.  Oh, Selby, you can jump right on in there and then we'll pass it back. Yeah, let me jump in on that because I've commented on that before. Basically, replacing our kind of virtual worlds, no way. But it is a bridge. That's exactly what we should be talking about. We're talking about. It's a bridge from the web, from the flat browser, which we've been in and looked at and we all know how to use. It is a bridge from that to real virtual worlds. And if you want to follow that bridge, we can actually have people, the live people talking to you about how to do that. Okay, that's my point. Okay, so that reminds me and I know Joyce is probably thinking back when the MacArthur Foundation did their little thing in Second Life in October 2006 for the digital media and learning, thinking about all these integrated technologies and blended reality kinds of meetings. And of course, Krista Lopez's work with the Hypergrid as far as fostering through OpenSAM better meetings around the world. So we're trying to take that same initiative and think, how can we integrate more people who may have technological limitations maybe on mobile devices, maybe, because will your stuff, by the way Dieter, run on mobile devices? Yes, indeed, that's one of the major goals I had from the beginning because if you have a modern browser which is capable of running WebGL, the environment will also run on an iPad or an Android tablet. When I see that, especially in affordance, because we're noticing the world's not only moving to the cloud, right? For cloud computing kinds of hosting, but also to apps, right? App-oriented operating systems distributed. In fact, I keep wondering when the day is coming, when we won't have our desktops and our systems the way we have them today. And I know many of you are going, I'm already there, but not me. I'm kicking and screaming and hanging on to mine. Yeah, but I'm also supporting the Google Chromebook, for example, which is very popular in school environments. So I'm still testing every new release first on a Chromebook to make sure it's compatible with this operating system too, because it's really widespread in educational environments. Well, that's great. I know there's fans of the iOS out there going, okay, that's fine for the Chromebook. What about, and of course, the Microsoft Surface folks, the iPad folks, are you testing on any of those platforms? Yes, I also have a Surface Pro for testing. I have a professional iPad. I have the Android devices, a couple of these. I even added stereo rendering on mobile phones so we can use the environment also in a Google Cardboard device with real head tracking and everything. So we can also join a lesson in a real 3D environment, which is more or less a marketing feature, but still nice to have. Oh, that's great. That's great. So is this your last slide? Should we head over to the... This is the last, yes. The next thing is only just the links you mentioned. Good, good, good. And Selby, do you have any last thoughts or that you wanted to say about this technology before we started thinking about avatars and identity bridging? Good there? Okay, great. So let's see. So SunZoo, I know yesterday, you graciously gave us an orientation into some of your work thinking about avatar identities and bridging. And many of us think, you know, one of our challenges is as we move between worlds, and of course, Mal Burns touched on this yesterday too, you always want to be yourself wherever you go, whatever yourself is. And it could be lots of different selves. Often people ask me to say, how many avatars do you have? And I says, well, I have lots of Lear Lobos, right? But I seem to be very similar everywhere I go, right? So what are your thoughts on this? And I'll let you take control of the viewer for your part of the avatar identities. Okay, thank you, Lear. Yeah, I think a lot of it is, it depends on the people in the use case. Sometimes people want to look the same. Sometimes they want to look different. It all depends on the person and the application. Like for example, I know from speaking with General Herron on her work with the soldiers that were coming back from the war or they were trying to adjust to their new life afterwards because of things that had happened to them. They were, many of them had lost limbs and things like that. And some of them wanted to look the same as they were in real life, right down to the wheelchair and the specifics of it. And others wanted to be something totally different. So it just, it all depends on the person. It depends on their use of the environment. And it's different for different people, but a lot of people tend to want to bridge the two worlds together and they want to look somewhat similar to themselves in real life. And I think even I've seen with a lot of my friends over time, they tend to bring more nuances of their real life to their virtual life over time because it's a part of them. And it's kind of hard to separate the two because it's more of an extension for a lot of us of our real life. It's not like just a game that we're playing. It's actually part of who we are as a person, both the virtual and the real. So one of the things that I was taking a look at was avatar identities. I did a presentation on this yesterday. I'll share a little bit with you on it. If I can go to my next slide, see if it takes over. Okay, good. What I wanted to show you a little bit is about how you can actually create something from real life. Cause as I noticed in the title of this, when they're talking the bridging worlds, I guess the initial focus on that is bridging between real life and virtual. So let me show you one. I hope I can get this to work out. I was trying to bring, I do have a couple of images I brought in world if I have to to give you something a little bit new on this. But let me see if I can do this as a add URL event. Hopefully this will work. It's from Google Plus. We'll see. If that does it. And I don't think that's going to work. So what I could do is it okay to raise the pram here and just put it on a pram? You can start to try. All right. We're fine with it. Let's see if you can. And while you're doing that, I posted a link a few minutes ago while you're setting up your content from Nancy Sherman's work because you mentioned General Herron and Nancy Sherman spoke to our Global Learning Forum event on moral injury and on avatar identity. And she came into a virtual world. She had just flown in from like, from the Middle East, literally got off a plane, came in and then hopped into a virtual world. And it was an open sim in virtual harmony. And we were very impressed with her agility because she'd never been in one before. And of course that this comes to mind when we think about speaking in a session where you've never been in a virtual world. And by the way, now you have this broad exposure. There was a four-star general in the room with us while she's presenting about moral injury and healing and how the use of identity is so critical. Anyway, so what's here? I'm taking a look. I see your content appearing here and it, yes. Okay. Good. Who needs screens? We can make our own, right? Absolutely. So, okay, so let me just put up an image here. I'm gonna show you, there was a movie that we did a presentation on inside of the world, one of the worlds that I work in, which is called Sign Space. And we had the producer from a film called Loving Vincent.  Over a period, I think of about seven years.   So that's where these tools for me have really come into play is I take real-life people and I replicate them with avatar tools to make them look like their real-life selves. Because a lot of times they want to be able to do that. And I'll show you here. Let's see, let me make sure I'm doing it just on the face. Recent items. Okay, so this is what the actor, or excuse me, the producer, director looks like. Let me make that full bright so you can see it a little bit better. And so as you can see, he's got the beard, the mustache, the blonde hair, the shirts, with the logo on it. Pretty easy, it's nice black shirt and pants. His shoes are a little bit on the unusual side. So what I did is I did something fairly similar to it. It's not exact, but in fact, I'm gonna edit this and I'll just bring one forward so I can have the after view. And then this is what it actually looked like when I was done. I would admit that's, there we go. So as you can see, that's the avatar once it was inside a sign space. And I can also put them side by side if you'd like to see. And I've done this for several avatars already. Now these ones were done with a program called Adobe Fuse. So it gave me the opportunity to recreate somebody and I'd make it exactly like I could have recreated the socks on his legs, but I didn't have socks in the original one in Fuse. So I'd have to have painted it on the avatar myself. And I decided, it wasn't that big of a thing. It's kind of like one of my friends told me that created the Paris Sims in Second Life. When you create something, you can create a memory just by picking up some key things in the landscape. And it doesn't have to have every single element. It just has to have some of those key elements and it really pulls it together and the person feels like it's themselves. So sometimes it's just pulling some things together to really make it feel like you're there. So I'm gonna just push these two, thank you. Gotta push these two up to the top and just do a very quick walkthrough because I don't know if others have seen my presentation earlier, but I'll just go through real quickly on a whirlwind tour on it. But these were the different technologies that I've used in the past and I'd gone over in my presentation. Adobe Fuse, which is what I use for the ones that you see up there. There's also one called Adobe Mixamo. There's one called Autodesk Character Generator. Some of you might remember that from the earlier days, a company called Devolver that got bought by Autodesk. They did a lot of work with Unity before they were purchased. Make Human, which is an open source software solution. And then 3D Humanoids is when I just ran across about a week or two ago, that works with Blender as a plugin. It looks very impressive. So especially your folks that are used to using Blender, I suggest you hop in and check it out. You can make avatars and I think clothing options might be in that one as well. So that might be a really good way to create some avatars that you can use between worlds. Or if you're trying to make your avatar look more like yourself or somebody else, that might be a good thing as well. There's the Morph Character System, Morph Studio and Ready Room. They're all by a company called Morph 3D. And then finally, kind of on the high end of things is iClone.  This, excuse me, SunZoo. This time, we're interested in this content but now we're thinking about it in terms of how we take OpenSim, characters, identity, ourselves and then use this content. I mean, can we bring any of this back into OpenSim? Can we, see, I'm thinking both ways. I'm not just thinking of taking content from world out to others but I'm really thinking about a blended reality experience. So as you go through these slides, I want you to think about that and then think about some of Dieter and Selby's work and how everyone can benefit from this. Please, go ahead. Well, like for example, now you mentioned, and I haven't been in your world yet, Dieter, I expect to go in there this next week to check things out. So thanks for the invite and the information that you provided on that. But I did look over the videos from Selby and things like that. One thing I'd wonder about is can you bring an FBX in? Because an FBX with animation would be quite useful, possibly for NPCs just to have them doing a idle animation or things like that or maybe you could have them affected by in-world AI. So that would be kind of interesting to see. Like right now in Sansar, I can't bring any animated characters in there. I brought in elephants and rhinoceroses and things like that but I've noticed their geometry doesn't look exactly the same as it did before I brought it in in some cases but I can't bring them in animated yet. They're not at that stage yet of development. So for a solution like you're providing with your world Dieter, it would really be nice if FBX with animations inside of them could be used somehow. That would be awesome. That would give educators a way to at least add some life to the land. I've seen some of the work, for example, from Ferd. He's done some awesome things with animals, grazing, milling about. It makes you feel more like you're in that real world, feel like you're connected. And I think that's what a lot of people wanna do. Now, as far as can we use these in different worlds, I think you can pretty much use most of these in most environments without a problem where it becomes an issue if you sell them. So if you're just using it for your own personal use, that's one thing. If you're using it for commercial use, or if you're using it to sell solutions to other people, then I would say definitely make sure that you check out the terms of service on it before you start using it, because you wanna make sure that you're not doing anything illegal. So like fuse, yes, we can use fuse in environments, but I can't make a fuse avatar and then go sell it on the Unity Asset Store, because that's an open environment that anybody could grab it and then use it for whatever they wanted for it. And then also the way that you're using it might have a limitation as well, because some of these companies specifically specify that they don't want to use for sexual things and things like that. So you wanna be careful that how you're using it is something that's appropriate to the terms of service. So, but fuse is a pretty good one, but sometimes it uses your own risk. It's not currently under development right now. So you might find that it breaks at times and you have to uninstall and reinstall. I will note to you though, if you look at the top there on the right, fuse is actually available in a couple of different flavors. If you go to steam, steampowered.com has a few elements on their site that actually give you earlier versions of the fuse engine. But you can also get the most recent one up on the Adobe site as you see there in that link as well. Now, I personally like some of the elements of the older version better, but then you have to export it out as an OBJ and then use the auto rigger from Mixamo or rig it with your own software if you so choose. See now, this gets into Kay McLennan's point on the fact that all this rigging and all these other technologies are of course a barrier for students or a barrier for educators who really want a simple way to think about their content and to think about their identity and getting all these things ramped up very quickly. So of all the technologies you're showcasing here, is there one that you recommend for educators or for social use that's fairly lightweight or has less of a steep learning curve? Well, you're gonna have a learning curve with any one of them. If you wanna keep things so that, the two that I would think that are really good, or let me make it, yeah, two that I would think have good potential here when it comes to education and for community to help develop. If people were to get on board and start helping with them, they could really take off. One is Make Human. Make Human's been out there for a while now, but it doesn't have a lot of people contributing content yet. I mean, I've seen some things like a Wonder Woman outfit that's been shared, but that's proprietary stuff that not everybody wants to use. It would really be nice if people would jump in and start helping to develop that because that could be a very robust platform that can be used for Open Simulator, for other virtual worlds. It could become a tool set if we help to grow it, but it takes people getting behind it to make it happen. And the thing with this is once you've created it, you can have it already rigged so you don't even need to use Avastar to bring it in. You could bring it in because it already has an Open Sim skeleton that comes with it. I believe, I haven't done that route on the, I did it on the Maya side, not on the Blender side, so but I believe because it has it already rigged for Open Simulator that it's already set up for that. The other one that's pretty good is this one I just learned about about two weeks ago and it's called 3D humanoids. It's by a gentleman named Manuel Bastioni. I believe this is the same person that, at least I heard just the other week that that was the same name for somebody that made the Ruth 2.0 avatar. So they might already be connected with Open Sim as well, if that's the case. So this would be a really good one and it works in Blender, it's a Blender plugin. What it basically gets down to is people are gonna look to see what has the best capability and community. So if you have a technology that's fairly easy for folks to jump in and use, but that also has some powerful tools for folks that wanna take it to the advanced level and that has a good community that's sharing things, then that's gonna make all the difference in the world. People love to get behind things that are going places. If we could help these open source tools out, in this case, the 3D humanoids and the one before that was Make Human, that would probably do a lot to help advance this community by further extending how these tools can be used. Hey, son, Andrew, I know we normally do questions at the end, but this is a panel, right? And we're a community. So Andrew is asking about, it's nice about the pre-rigging that you mentioned with the last tool, but now the question is, what about bento bones? Anything to add on that? Well, bento is the Second Life Linden Lab application. I know they've been trying to bring the same thing into Open Simulator as well, but I'm not real familiar with where it's at at this point in OpenSim. Do you know where we are at with it? You know, I don't know, but Franz Charming, I know has been demoing bento at the Nonprofit Commons meetings on Friday mornings at 8.30 a.m. They do meet in Second Life, but we do bridge across Open Sim in all worlds. But as far as the technology, I'm not up to speed on it. So, but I do think it's interesting. Okay, so Andrew will have to field that question for later so you can talk to Sun Tzu offline about that. Remember, for anyone listening or here in the crowd, please send me your questions. We will certainly try to tackle them. We have a few minutes left. So now, so now, Joey, as we think about this, oh, you didn't have to close out your slides. I love having some content up there. Oh, it's okay. Yeah, keep something up because I want to see something, right? You know, me, I need overstimulation in a big way. Well, that's a good one because, you know, we had a comment. It wasn't a question.  She has quite a bit of research in tropical simulations and medical simulations, but as we think about identity here, and we're looking at all these, all these different representations of you, isn't that what we're seeing on the slide that's coming up? Oh yeah, these are all avatars that are made. But I noticed there's one that, at least one that's missing because I don't see a representation of your avatar.  And then I think there's some cartoon characters you did when you were going to school. Did you get a degree in game design and graphic arts and animation? It was mostly animation and special effects work is where I primarily focused my studies. But I did creation and things like that as well, but it's towards the end of the course, you focus on what you enjoy best. And I personally am very much into the movement. And that's something too to think about. When it comes to your avatar identity, it's not just how you look, but it's also how you move. It's all about different curves, you know? How you walk, how you fly, all that stuff makes a difference. So what I tend to do in Second Life, I'm probably kind of a little bit like Peter Sellers version of Second Life. I'm like a man of a thousand avatars. I like to change avatars a lot. You don't usually see me as the same person every day. I'm not that way. I just like to express myself in a multiplicity. And, but the one thing I try to keep similar, at least in the human characters, is the way they move. And I do that by using the same kind of animation overwriters so that my avatar, when you see it move, you know it's me. Okay, so that's the common denominator there is the fact that in OpenSim, we have animation overwriters that allow you to customize how your avatar moves, walks, sits, et cetera, dances, and so forth. Back over to Dieter as we're warming up and thinking about bridging this technology. And by the way, we have some examples I'm gonna be weaving in here just in a moment. But Dieter, when it comes to avatars in Cyber Lounge, and as far as movement, I know we've talked about voice and we've talked about drag and drop technology, but what about the avatar and the identity? Now you will be amazed because we are already using the same tool. So for example, the avatars you are now seeing in Cyber Lounge were created with Make Human, a little bit pimped in Blender and then exported for a web-based format. I also use the OpenSim skeleton for the avatars. The only difference is I'm using an external self written animation engine. So it's also very easy for users to create their own animations for the avatars. Hey, that's great. I've been in your world quite a few times, but not just through Cyber Lounge. Haven't you been working with the Infinite Metaverse Alliance and Singer Girl and some of the folks who've been doing some amazing testing and breakthroughs on their use of web worlds? Yeah, so Singer Girl and I are working together very closely on many, many issues and we also want to tackle now the avatar topic because maybe when you were in Cyber Lounge, you noticed I'm more the programmer, not the artist. So there really is a demand for customization of avatars and I think the base technology already is there. Now we have to bridge the pieces together, but the workflow to create avatars will be very much similar to the one presented by Sun Tzu right now. Hey, thank you. And coming into the chat, the local audience is noticing that I put up a link for web worlds and worlds are spelled with a Z at the end. So it's web-worlds, that's a Z.com. And when you load that, it instantly brings up, what's interesting about that is it brings it up so fast. So obviously if a hundred of us hit this all at the same moment, this could be, how robust is this, by the way, Dieter, if we all hit it at the same moment? I think that's what I'm asking here. I kind of want to talk for web worlds, but I think right now, as we made tests, I've tested or made load testing with up to 40 avatars present without big problems. The more avatars there are present, the resources inside the browser will get, let's say a bit reduced because the browser usually only lets you get about 1.5, 1.7 gigabytes of memory This is not a problem you have as a native viewer. This is just a browser problem and we have already discussed tricks to address this problem. The main problem right now is more with voice because WebRTC, if you practice it or do it like in a book, it's just a peer-to-peer connection between browsers. And so it means if you have 10 people talking, you already have 81 peer-to-peer connections. And this is about the limits of between eight and 10 people talking, it's okay, but more will usually crash the voice system, not the rendering engine. Well, thank you, that's wonderful. We're about to wrap up, but in the chat, and then this is for the live stream audience, right? I want to invite everyone to check out the webworlds.com site that I ended, by the way, that's worlds. It is hyphenated and worlds with a C, right? And then secondly, a Singer Girl adds that the next phase has a classroom for teachers. So are there any questions? So far I've handled all the questions that I've seen. So please IM me if you have a last minute question for our panel. And let's see, I want to thank our panelists for supporting this session. And on a last thought, Dieter, are there ever times when it's better, and maybe this is for you, Sun, you can chime in here too. So let me know which of you would like to tackle this. Are there ever times when it's better to create new content rather than bridge it between worlds? Sun, I'll let you take that first. Okay, I'll give you a case in point. We've talked about this a little bit recently too. I think on some of the panels yesterday, they were asking, well, is it abandoning OpenSim to go to another platform? And I don't necessarily see that people are leaving one platform to develop on another. Sometimes we just want to bridge between multiple virtual worlds, and we want to test things out and see what our content is like. And it's easier for folks to take what they've already invented as a starting point. But then when they get to the next platform, maybe that next platform offers capabilities that they didn't previously have. Like case in point, right now I'm picking one of the or files from Linda Kelly, that's a ski lodge, and I'm developing that, but I'm putting a more realistic environment for the nav mesh for the land and the trees, making it look a lot better, and then also working on the playability for skiing and ice skating and things like that to make it more fun, and then looking for ways to make the lodge more social. So we can extend things, it's not just a matter of taking it from one place to another, but also using it in new and exciting ways and seeing. And I think for the creators in a lot of cases, they like that as well. But then sometimes too, we can also get onto our, we can kind of rest on our laurels of only going and taking old content and pulling it over. Sometimes you have to start fresh because starting fresh will take it in new directions that you otherwise might have missed. Well, thank you. And I see we're now out of time. So I wanna thank Selby Evans, Sun Tzu, and Dieter Heine for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. And following the session, the next session will begin at 10.30, in other words, in a few minutes, in this keynote region, and it is entitled Bringing Literature to Life in Open Simulator. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 17 poster expo in the OSCC expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo two region, along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo zone regions. Again, thank you. Many thanks to our presenters and to the audience.


Good afternoon everyone. So welcome to our session, When Disaster Strikes the Cloud. I'm Michael Factor. I'm from IBM. I'm presenting with Sean Cohn from Red Hat and Ronan Katz from IBM. So we're gonna cover in today's talk and we're gonna split it. So I'm gonna take the first third, Ronan the second, and Sean the last. We're gonna talk a little bit about some level setting. What is disaster recovery, some concepts and basics? Then we're gonna spend the bulk of the time going into some detail about how we protect data and applications from disasters, talking about what's in Cinder today, what could have been, you know, stuff that just went into the most recent release, stuff from the Icehouse release, as well as looking at how one protects applications and not just the data because to recover from a disaster you need to be able to get your workloads running again, not just have your disaster sitting someplace else, and then finally we'll spend some time talking about what comes next, what still needs to be done, looking at kilo and beyond. So let's start off with some level setting. What is disaster recovery? Well, start with a definition. According to Wikipedia, disaster recovery is the process, policies, and procedures for recovery of technology infrastructure after a natural or human-induced disaster. In other words, disaster recovery is what is needed to get your IT running and up again in functional so that your business can be doing something useful after a disaster. Well, what's IT infrastructure? What are we interested in? Well, it's the servers, obviously. It's the storage, the network, the software, the configuration. If you look at this, it contains both data and metadata. Data, for instance, that's stored in storage, may be managed by Cinder. And it can be things like a database or a set of log files. Metadata is things like the configuration information, what VMs are running, how your network's configured, and so on. What kinds of disasters are we interested in? Well, when we mean disaster, we don't mean a disk crashed or server, you know, failed. We're looking at disasters which take out a data center, right? You know, things like floods, fires, terrorism, maybe even volcanoes, right? And so when you have a disaster that takes out a data center, that means you need geographic dispersion in order to be able to survive that disaster. So we talk about a primary, right? That's the data center where your application and your workload is running. And we talk about a secondary, which is where you're going to recover after that disaster. And in order to have the ability to survive a disaster, your data and metadata need to be available in a data center, in a location that's either on the secondary or some third location other than the primary. Because our assumption is after a disaster, the primary data center is gone, so anything that was stored at that primary data center is unavailable. So two key concepts in disaster recovery are recovery point objective, RPO, and recovery time objective, RTL. Recovery point objective basically says, how much did I lose? How far back in time does a disaster take me, right? Well, how far back in time the disaster takes you, right? The less data you want to lose, the more expensive it typically is. And it depends on your application, right? So if, you know, I'm working with my bank and making a deposit and then my bank has a disaster, I don't want them to lose that record of that deposit, right? Some applications need to have basically a zero recovery point objective. No data can be lost. Other applications are more forgiving, right? You may be able to lose seconds or minutes, hours, or even days and weeks of data. The less data you want to lose, so if you're sort of in this hour to seconds time frame, you're going to be doing some form of replication in which as modifications come in, either to the data or the metadata, they need to be replicated to a remote site. If you're more in the days or the weeks, and this may be what's done sometimes for some development environments, maybe a offsite backup is good enough, which after the disaster you would restore. Recovery time objective is how long does it take to get up and running after a disaster? Again, you know, more expensive the lower you are and where you need to be here depends on what your application is, right? Banks really don't want to be down, right? If you're supporting development, you can probably afford to be down for, you know, a little bit of time in the event of a disaster. The lower the RTO recovery time objective, the more active you need to be, right? You know, may need to have an active site with applications running in VMs provision. The greater the RTO, right, the more you can do after the disaster. So, one of the key things that I mentioned already is that to recover from a disaster, you need the data and the metadata available in some place other than the primary data center. Remember, after the disaster, that primary data center and anything in it may not exist. But the data and the metadata need not just be available, they also need to be available in a consistent fashion. If the data or the metadata are either inconsistent themselves or inconsistent with one another, we essentially have garbage. And informally, we can define consistency for the data as if a particular, if a particular datum is available, all the data that it depends upon is also available, right? So, if, you know, a concrete example, if I transfer money from my bank account to my son's bank account, right? If the fact that it arrived in my son's bank account is available, the fact that it went out of my bank account also needs to be available. And for metadata consistency, we need to ensure that configuration updates are seen in the same order relative to one another when we recover, as well as relative to the data updates, right? We don't want to see that we've transferred data for a new storage volume where we haven't updated the metadata update, the configuration update that says that storage volume exists. So, if we look at OpenStack, we see we have a range of different types of metadata, right? So, at networking Neutron, we have things like the virtual networks for storage. We have what volumes have been provisioned from Cinder, what VMs they've been attacked, what their types are. For VMs, Nova, we have the flavors of the virtual machines, SSH keys, and so on and so on. And one of the important things when we think about disaster recovery for OpenStack is thinking not just about the data, which is being put into the persistent volumes managed by Cinder, but also thinking about the metadata. So, now Ronan is going to take us through how we protect data and applications from disasters talking about some concrete work that's already been done in OpenStack. Thank you. So, first thing, data protection is part of Cinder if we have a persistent data. So, Cinder has a backup and restore facility allowing you to backup your volumes. So, basically what it allows you to do and in this example I'm showing Swift is doing a backup of your volume to Swift cloud and Swift have nice features which, you know, that cluster, object cluster could be replicated so it could be safe from disaster. And that's a nice facility you have in Cinder today. So, what happened after a disaster and I want my volume back and to get it from the backup? So, I just need to go and do a backup restore. One little bit of a problem is that the other cloud in my backup cloud is not aware of that backup because it's not registered there. So, one of the solution that went into high cells is the equivalent of electronic tape shipping, which basically allow you to create a backup on one cloud and restore that backup on another cloud. And basically this goes through the base mechanism of a backup export which creates you a backup reference to your object storage and you can take that backup reference and input that into any cloud and following that what you could do is very simply go out and do a backup restore of your volume into the secondary cloud and use the data on the secondary cloud, providing you with a backup restore style of disaster recovery. Cinder has more feature for disaster recovery. In Juneau, Cinder has initial support for volume replication. Basically what it allows a Cinder back end to advertise that it could do replication, basically providing a replication capability to the Cinder scheduler and volume that are created with the replication extra spec. You just, to enable replication, what you do is go out, create a volume type with this extra spec. It will build the replication true and when you do that and you have back end support replication, the scheduler is going to schedule, create your volume on that back end and the driver which support replication will create the volume on both back ends. You basically have a replicated volume in Cinder and for Juneau, the support for that for the IBM store wise and in the killer race, we have more driver expected to be in Cinder. So how does that work? So if you have a replicated volume and you want to switch to use the replica instead of the primary, what you need to do is basically do a replicate promote. Replicate promote goes out and make sure that UVMs will now be attaching the replicated volume, not the primary one. And if you want to reverse and go back to use the primary volume, the only thing you need to go out and do is replication re-enable, which in fact will restore the replication relationship but in this case in the reverse direction providing you with any updates that you're doing on your secondary copy to be promoted back to your primary copy and then to complete that you just do another promote command and you're switching back between primary and secondary allowing you to go back and forth between your primary and secondary volume. The other feature that went into Juneau that allows for disaster recovery is consistency groups. Basically that's the ability in Juneau to group volume together, to group volume together so they will stay consistent. As Michael said before, if you're writing data and it's written on more than one volume, we want to make sure that any operation that is being done on that group of volumes is being done consistent together. The base mechanism to use consistency group in Cinder is the volume type. It's based on volume type mechanisms and today what you could do is basically take a snapshot of consistent volumes and what needs still to be done to extend the mechanism that put in place in Cinder to support backups and to support volume replication. But then again, disaster recovery is not just about the data. It's not enough just to capture your data and make your data safe. You need to orchestrate your application and run that on the backup cloud or on your backup data center. So even if you're taking care of your data, you still need to do work with your VM instances, your network definition, your configuration, basically the metadata or the workload. So basically extending the concept of Cinder data protection into a workload protection. A workload is basically all the resources or all the definition you have in your environment in order to run your application correctly. So what OpenStack has for that? So in OpenStack, application can be easily defined using heat. So we have this hot template, the heat template that we can use to define applications. So they group all the features of application together. But one problem, not all applications are template-based. So many people are using OpenStack CLI directly and are not going to heat stacks. Moreover, deployment tends to change over time. We never have a static thing. Always changing in our deployment. We have more volumes. We are adding future machines. So basically what happens is that template and stack doesn't always stay consistent. They change over time. At least stacks can change over time. Well, template, you know, someone needs to go out and do that. And that's not always happening. And moreover, all these definitions are very cloud-specific. Everything in the template is going to be working on this specific cloud. Unless we have a replica of that cloud with exact definition, exact hardware, exact setting, not everything are going to work on the other end. So we have some tools that, for example, can take an actual deployment in a cloud and create a template for that. Some kind like reverse engineering, what we actually have running on the cloud. So there's two like flame and reheat, which we can find in the open source. But again, this template or newly created template just going to fit this one cloud that we're running on. It's not really going to fit on the other cloud. So what I want to show as part of this is a short demo how we could do a disaster recovery for workloads that we are shipping with IBM Cloud Manager as a technology preview.  We're logging into an OpenStack Cloud as an admin. And we can see that we have applications, in this case just a WordPress blog, a very simplified application for this example. And what we'll show is that you could easily orchestrate the backup of this application using panels which we added to Horizon and just create a disaster recovery policy and just name it and basically start and edit the disaster recovery policy to add resources to it. So in this example, we're going to go out and edit this policy, this WordPress protection policy, and we're going to add the resources that are associated with that policy so they're going to be protected together. And in this case, when I'm talking about protection, what's going to happen is that going to be packaged and put into an object storage. So here we are adding resources, just in this case, just a VM. And after that, what we could do is basically go out and trigger that protection policy. So what does that mean, go out and trigger in the policy? So we're going to package all the resources in that policy, basically the virtual machine, the image that it's using, if it had any volume, the volume going to be backed up using standard backup and everything going to be put in a Swift object storage and that package would actually be retrieved at any time to any cloud, not just the same cloud but it could be also considered as a backup restore mechanism restoring the actual work to the same cloud but it also could be restored to a different cloud entirely allowing us to move our application from one cloud to another. So basically what we're seeing is the process of the protection where we're actually taking a snapshot of our VM, uploading the data to Swift and then we can see that at the end of the day, we have a point in time stored in our object storage. So the only thing we need to do following a disaster is just go out to our backup cloud or secondary cloud and go out to the restore workload panel and we can see the list of point in times which we have backed up and just go and select one of them. In this case we have one and just click on restore and the nice thing about this is what happens now is basically we are executing, we are deploying a hit stack. So what we see is that the whole redeployment process on the recovery site is being done using hit and hit is being able to orchestrate the recovery of the application back into the cloud and we can now see that everything regarding that workload has been restored that include images and SSH keys, network configuration that we have back and we have this blog running on the other cloud and following this it's time to talk about the road ahead and at the end of the lecture, Sean will be taking down names who want to do work in OpenStack, so good luck, Sean. Thank you, Rene. All right, before we go and look at the road ahead, as you've seen, we're trying to solve a big problem and this big problem is bigger than one service in OpenStack. The fact that the foundation work was already laid in terms of adding replication piece is the foundation that we believe is the right way to go, right? Without being able to replicate your data outside of your current data center to somewhere else, you don't have backup, you don't have availability when it comes to disaster and failure and when we talk about disaster recovery, the notion is more than one site, right? It's bad enough that we have to deal with the application workloads and high availability within a single site and as you know, it's a very big complex problem that we're dealing today in different layers of OpenStack but looking at even multi-site, that I think it's a bigger problem to solve and the good news, we've laid that foundation and as you saw, we have like initial work done by IBM with StoreWide already supporting this. We're going to see much more vendors who's going to work on implementing that replication piece and let's look at the road ahead and just to give you some examples of other platforms and where we are. Does this work? It doesn't work. All right, so let's start with OpenSource after it defines storage that I know everybody knows about which is Ceph and Ceph already has what we called, as you know, there's seven tiers of disaster recovery, right? And the first 304 basically deals with basically a hot standby approach. So where we are right now in the Ceph lock is we have a good expert ability of the snapshots as well as ability to expert incremental snapshots. So in a sense, it's a good foundation for dealing with manual disaster recovery, meaning I have that thing going down from some reason, my data center got overheated or out of power. I can protect that workload that run on Ceph with the block bet again and even do incremental backups, right? So this piece is already there. The key part is actually looking at the notion of doing it in more than one site, right? If I have more than one block backend like in Ceph, how do I actually get things replicated between backends, between sites because I need to have that notion of my workloads being served at the other sites. And some of the activities, ongoing activities actually on Ceph late in block is of course the RBD mirroring. This is a big feature that's being worked on. Another one is actually making use of the new API for volume replication between RBD backends, right? So that's another one that's coming up, right? And we look at the multi-site in an object world. So this is a lot of the things you can do today as well with Swift. You can actually have something very similar what you do with Amazon as free when it comes to the different options you have with disaster recovery and all under one name space. This is all there. This is things you can do right now in your data center if you choose Ceph. And again, the big part is how do we synchronize between the data centers? How do we have a full backup or a partial backup that we can use and as well deal with users, affinity, all that stuff. So the good news, a lot of this work has been already done in OpenSec in the object world and they can utilize today. So if you're using Ceph today, looking at this will be the right approach and of course if you need the block, this is coming up. And when we look at what it means to actually to create different policies. So we started to show an example of actually using object storage, right? To create your policies. OpenSec is all about choice. And if you look at what service you would like to provide, upstairs to your tenants, right? We can actually provide different levels of policies. And just like today we have different back-ends that can support different flavors if you will of replication because not all replications are being dealt the same, right? You have synchronous replication, asynchronous replication. We actually have different tiers only when it comes to that policy. You can do object storage, you can back up to Swift. What it means in the end of the day you are going to have more choice in OpenSec to back up your workloads. And some of this as I mentioned earlier is like active to cold standby which is very makes sense in a cloud operating model, right? Because not everyone has the luxury of setting up a full new site, full blown with all your hardware there. The whole ability of the cloud is actually spun up instances when you need them. Disaster recovery is one of them. So if you have a disaster I need that workloads to be actually being served from other place. This is where the new policies can come up to speed, right? And we're going to have more matching done between what can be offered on the bottom all the way up to the tenants. And again this brings also a big understanding of how do we actually back up from our traditional environments to cloud to OpenStack or even between OpenStack to OpenStack, right? Right now we're still trying to solve the problem with a single OpenStack deployment. This is where we are right now. We're taking baby steps. But one day we'll be able to actually move our workloads from my private cloud OpenSec implementation maybe to rec space, right? Everything is there. All the APIs, everything is there. I can just do that. That's for me because I don't have to spend that big money just to make sure that my workloads work. In a sense this is disaster recovery in a hybrid cloud model that can be done. So this is the vision. This is where we want to go. But we're taking as I said baby steps to get there. And as Ronan mentioned we need augustration, right? It's good that we can kick replication or even change the direction of replication but how are we going to augustrate it all? You just saw that we were able to add consistency groups in Gino which is a big step, right? Because today your workloads doesn't specifically ride on only one. It's a multi-tier, right? So you can have different volumes that that application is spun off. You have database, you have log. You need to actually make sure that everything you capture and want to basically reload on the DR side is consistent, right? Meaning I'm doing snapshots. That snapshots need to be taken at the same time for me to actually load that application in the target side. So in a sense, yes, first of all we have to fix things around Cinder because we've got volume replication in place. We've got consistency groups in place. They don't talk to each other at the moment in terms of API. So that's something obviously on Cinder's plate to deal with. But it's not all about Cinder. I need Nova. I need Neutron. We haven't even touched about the users. I have different tenants users on the DR side. I have different network topology on the target side. How do I make that changes when I load that instances back? I need some orchestration tool and this is where heat can actually come into place and help that. And when we look at some of the works already in the plan for killer release for heat. So heat is starting to deal with bigger problem like rollback snapshot and rollback. The ability to take a chunk of snapshot and be able to rollback them. That's key. And we're going to see much more granular work being done in heat to orchestrate larger if you will disaster recovery points. And again, we need to make all that changes all the way down to the guest. But it's not all about having a single consistent initiator that will go to the other side and actually make sure that now I've laid down my new topology on the target side. What about the application consistency? So another thing that I actually on the plate right now for killer release submitted by Itachi, but long known in the QM world with Libvert is the ability to actually FS freeze, do a file system freeze for your workloads, right? So if we look at the work that's been done, this is already the code is merged. So to those of you who doesn't know QM OGA, QM OGA is basically you can load it in a guest. It's already supported out of the box in roll 7. What it does, it actually, if you look at the slide here, it goes and queues the open system. So the file system actually allows you to give a window that we can take that checkpoint, right? So wherever snapshot you're going to take, it's going to be file system consistent, meaning if I reload it on the target side I can actually load it, right?  But it's not the end. This is just the start because we also need to take about application consistency. And the good news QM OGA also deal with that. How many of you used in your traditional virtualization application consistency backup with replication? Raise your hand. How many use Linux? MySQL to backup? Windows VMs, et cetera. So QM OGA actually has the notion that after you deal with the application consistency, it's support to be assessed for Microsoft Windows out of the box. So in roll 7 we actually installed the provider, the VSS provider as part of the deployment when you install the guest tools. So if you're running any top of Windows workload application, it will go ahead and automatically the consistent checkpoint when you create a live snapshot. In Linux, it's actually opens the door to more hooks, right? It allows you not just to deal with the faucet itself, but also inject a script that can quiz basically the database or any application. And most of the databases actually already support some level of hot backup mode so it can easily be scripted. What it means? It means that the next step for us is to actually come up with solutions that we're going to make use of this new technologies that's coming to board. So by the time we do our site evacuation to the other site, we can actually have the protective data, the metadata as Michael mentioned earlier which is a big piece of it, right? Each one of the services in OpenStack has its own metadata, has its own databases. We need to actually capture the state not just the data and move it to the target site. And the next one I want to discuss is actually even the bigger problem. Disaster recovery, as we mentioned is a big problem to solve. We cannot do it in one release in OpenStack. We know that but we're taking, as you see, there's a lot of building blocks that are taking place actually getting us where we want to go. But when we look at disaster recovery at scale, it's even more complex problem to solve because we need actually to deal with maybe a full data center and then prioritize that work and basically get actually triggers, right? So if today we have a lot of the customers that I'm working with are basically the first phase, right? They're doing expert, they're doing import, totally manual work. This is the whole way. We want automation. OpenStack is all about automation. We need to know first of all when a failure hit us bad so we can actually trigger the policies we discussed earlier, right? As you saw from the demo, we had to push button to do the failover. Is that good enough? I'm not sure. If you need to give 99.99999 service to your cloud tenants, that's not a solution. It's a good way to wake up the admin in the middle of the night, right? Just to push the button. So where we want to go is automated procedure and a lot of the work is being done. First of all, the OpenStack at J new approaches actually started to look at fencing using pacemaker for example to actually trigger that and they provide the monitoring piece as well for the infrastructure actually to detect that failure and take an approach. So in a sense, if you tied that to what I said earlier about the different policies and service tiers for disaster recovery, not all workloads have been born the same. Not all of them are mission critical, right? It's like 30% maybe mission critical. I want to be able to set for that 30% a policy that whenever something bad happened, right? It's not just have a ability. It's something that happened to the site level. It can automatically trigger all the automation piece and be able to spawn it off in the other cloud and believe it or not, my tenants user would not even know that something bad happened. This is where we want to go. We're not there yet, but at least we have the vision to go there and then taking down the line there. Last point regarding schedule that was done in Juno, in NOVA work is the simple tagging. Simple tagging actually can allow you to create a new tag for automation. In this case, automatic recovery. What it means we can actually use the NOVA client to go and monitor and look for that tag so whenever it spawn off, we can actually pull the trigger to do that failover. As you can see, the progress on disaster recovery is taking place in so many places today in OpenStack. Since there is the foundation, we're using heavily dependent on heat for orchestration and as Ronan mentioned, we need other tools as well to do the various engineering if you will, just to deal with the other site needs. But we also need to solve the problem from the compute side because this is where the triggering monitoring piece is going to take place. A lot of work is still in front of us but at least we have a good starting point. One thing that is really behind is this. How many of you have read this book already? Zero. You know why? It's not there yet. We're basically calling for papers to pick up the glove and work with us in the community of OpenStack to generate the book. All of you know we have a good starting point with high availability guide. I call it a baseline guide but it's the fact that customers still coming to us and say how we get this high availability set up, it means that we haven't solved this problem yet. So obviously we need to get this piece in place because that's the foundation but we also need actually to make sure we have a good guide in place to document what we have right now. If you look online, there's the Recover Cloud off the Disaster section which is currently very one page in the admin guide. Don't use it unless you really read it thoroughly and again it's not there. It's really a year old and it's not reflecting anything that's being done right now in OpenStack. So clearly as you saw we've done a lot of progress in the last two cycles and we continue to do the process but we need to capture that. So at least for the first tiers of Disaster Recovery the manual steps are outlined and everyone using OpenStack today can protect his workloads even with like basic object storage to Swift and enjoy this fruit. So that's our next step to just to get whatever we've done right now out there and of course the more work we're going to have, we're going to update that guide as well so we're basically calling for Voluteo to see how. I think we've concluded our time and it's a good time to call back my colleagues and take some time to do Q&A session. So who's going to want first questions for anything you've saw today? All right, no questions. Yeah, go ahead. Do you want to use the mic? I had a question around if tomorrow I have to implement this in a public cloud. So a public cloud vendor really wants to leverage this functionality. What's the deal? How can you do that? The entire Disaster Recovery. So it could be that the tenants are actually running on premise and they're using a public cloud for an extended data center and they want to use the public cloud side as a recovery site. So I'm going to start and then let my colleagues continue. The good news, as I said, there's a lot of manual steps that you can actually do today. I gave the example earlier of SAF. SAF you can actually pipe one command line to do a lot of the work for you. So it pretty much depends what choices you're going to make as your back ends and then look what automation pieces you can solve today. I don't want to say it's not possible. It is possible, but it requires a lot of work just to get it automated to a point where you can actually deliver service upon. The good news is you can actually protect your workloads today. It's not complete, as you saw. A lot of the pieces of consistency is not there. But there's a good starting point. Just to add to that, basically today for a lot of things you need cloud provider support. For example, if you use SAF for your back end, you need it to support backup for SAF. But eventually I think as we go forward and we have more feature in OpenSTAP, we would be able to use the public interfaces to do disaster recovery. So that's the goal. If you have, you can use the public interfaces and make disaster recovery happen. So you could do that on your private cloud. You could do that on your public cloud. Again, it's going to be your choice. So back up to a Swift on a public cloud since you're asking about how to go from a private cloud to a public for DR. So the simplest way is simply to do a backup into Swift on one of many providers who have Swift on public clouds. And then afterwards you bring up OpenSTAP on various providers who are able to bring up OpenSTAP on public clouds and can restore. Are there questions? My question is more with the direction of taking heat into account. If you have Solometer and there's an application we're just taking around, there's an application which is doing some counters on some tennis, etc. If you use heat there, it's not going to work, right? What are the alternatives? And that's what I saw that was obvious. So let me just repeat the question. We're starting basically leveraging heat, but heat is not solving all the problems. In a nutshell, E-Action mentioned telemetry. We're looking at telemetry as well, right? For some of the Augustation. The net is we don't have a full notion of Augustrator for disaster recovery out of the box. As you saw, this is a cross project within OpenSTAP. And actually there's a EFA pad going on right now for the cross project. There's a disaster recovery section there. A lot of vendors started to communicate that. So as a follow-up, I suggest capturing this as well as a requirement for follow-up. I can tell you that some of the work and foundation work we have looked at from the heat perspective does make sense to do things in heat, but we need to set the foundation, meaning we need to invest and create new features and you need to actually make it happen. It's not there. And I think it's time we need to clear the room for the next session. So if you have questions, you know, you will have the presentation on the OpenSTAP website. So you're invited to talk about it.


What's the word y'all? For the first time in the Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Clay Thompson era, the Warriors are now 02 on the Playoff Series and it ain't looking good. Now Wise Man once told me a Playoff Series does not start until the home team lose the game. So technically the Sacramento Kings have just been taking care of business, but even though that's the case, it's been hella impressive. I mean the Warriors came into this series even though they're the sixth seed as the favorite to win it all. And I think a lot of that has to do with the reputation because in this era, no team has really beat the gold and stay Warriors in the series as long as those three players having healthy. So with that and with them coming off an NBA Championship, they were given a benefit of the doubt. And guess what? Wiggins is back, Gary Payton is back. Oh yeah, they're gonna beat these boys that have close to no Playoff experience. And through the first two games, I mean, I gotta say I am extremely impressed with the Kings. Unfortunately part about game two is that all the conversation is gonna be dominated with Draymond Green and some bonus conversations who was in the right, that the refs make the right call by Jack the Draymond Green, yada, yada, yada. And I'm not saying it should have been talked about, but I think that's gonna be taken away from the greatness that we've seen throughout these two games. Game one was this offensive explosion for both teams. And I think game two was more grinded out. You saw these coaches make some adjustments so it's not a super high score game. Now it ended up being 1-14, 1-06. But for these two teams, that's kind of a low score game. You know, the Sacramento Kings are the best offensive basketball. 1-14 is like, man, we gotta get it together. They shot less than 30% from three in one a playoff game. That is something I did not expect from the Sacramento Kings at all. This game was the second worst three point shooting game they've had all season long. And when it stakes it in all time high, they still won. I love getting tools in playoff series because you get to see coaches make adjustments based on game one. One of the adjustments we saw from the words, of course, is bringing in Wiggins back into the starting lineup and putting them on DM Fox. They used that length and hopefully that could deter DM Fox from having another crazy performance. And it worked out kinda, you know, DM Fox had to work for all 24 of his points. So I would say that was a plus from Steve Curry. The one thing that run me the wrong way from Steve Curry though, is that at the end of the first quarter, he was doing the interview that they do in between quarters and he was asked about the turnovers. And at that point, the score was 23 to 17. So the Warriors have it put in the claps off. 17 points in a quarter from the Kings is awful, especially considering how good they are on the offensive side of the ball, right? And he was asked about the turnovers and he said, I don't think the turnovers are a problem right now. And then for the remainder of the game, this team has turned the ball over 100 different times. Now, turnovers are something that have been consistent throughout this warrior run. They got such a free-flowing offense and they're trying to make reach two steps ahead of their defenders and stuff. And for the most part, it works out. But for him to just go out and say, ah, we good on that front. And then to see his team continuously turn the ball over was really funny. I think the worst part about all of this is that these two teams have given us banger out the banger, two strict games where it's just been really good basketball. And the conversation is going to be geared around Dremon and some bonus scuffle slash stomping, whatever, whatever. And you probably clicked this video thinking I was going to talk heavily about it. I'm just not. I just, I don't have the energy to get into the middle of the Warriors fans and the Kings fans argue, oh, he did it because he grabbed his leg. Well, well, grabbing his leg doesn't warrant getting stepped on. We ain't even stepped on him. Step on him too, too hard. Oh, he was acting. I just, it's not, it's not worth it. I went on to Twitter for 30 seconds right after Dremon got ejected. And that's all my song. And I was like, that's, that's enough of me. We not even going to talk about it more than the 30 seconds he's gave. The MVP of today, 100% has to be Davion Mitchell.  People keep talking about that one clip of JR Smith where he was an old man in the three talking about how Delevedova gave it it's all and it still did not matter. I'm seeing that right now in Davion Mitchell. Davion Mitchell came into the NBA with the nickname off night. And the reason he got that nickname is, hey, if he's guarding you, you're gonna have an off night.  I love that Mike Brown recognized that they needed him to hound Steph Curry or they needed somebody that was gonna chase him full time down the stretch. And even though Kevin Herter, I keep doing that by the way, Kevin Herter didn't have an amazing game. He had a better game in game two than one but didn't play down the stretch because what Davion was doing on the defensive side of the ball was something that if, if they have a thing, like I noted the calves have the chain and they get the junkyard dog chain and they have anything like that. Davion Mitchell deserves a 1,000% and then down the stretch, a guy that has not been a good three-point shooter in his NBA career had the confidence to take the biggest three of the game and he knocked it down as a dagger.  But like, when I look at these star players, these all star players, both of these dudes might end up in all NBA for God's sakes. These type of games are dope, but it's like when you're in the playoff scenario, you kind of need those other dudes to step up. At least that's the way I look at it, right? For example, Steph Curry gave you 28 today. You can kind of expect Steph Curry to have performances like this pretty regularly because he's Steph Curry, right? Now we need people like Jordan Poole to do literally anything of positive. Like boy, he's been a tough watch through these two games, let's be real. You need somebody else to alleviate that pressure because the stars are gonna be the stars. I think that Wiggins was fine today. I mean, you can tell that he still don't have his legs completely, but I've been actually impressed with a guy that's missed 20 plus games straight of the NBA season. He was just thrown into the playoffs and he's been at least decent. He ain't been to Wiggins that we saw in the last championship run last season, but he's been better than I expected him to. And then the rest, I ain't got nothing to say. Let me Google, when was the last time Moses Moody got PT before tonight? Oh yeah, he did play in that game a couple of days before the playoff. The last game in the season with the Warriors won by 50. A game that I forgot kind of happened and it happened like five days ago, I feel like he played like 30 minutes then. But before that, I mean, his minutes is three minutes here, DMP here. And he was just thrown into the fire because Steve Kerr did not trust Jordan Poole down the stretch. Oopsie, he didn't like what he was seeing from Jonathan Caminga. And I don't think he was wrong for throwing Moses Moody into the fire because they just needed some type of ump. For into the stat, I'm looking at, teams that go up 2-0 in a playoff series, NBA playoff series have won the series 92.8% of the time. That is an absurd number. I mean, as of right now, the way it's going, the Kings just got to go into the chase center and steal one of the next two when it's practically over because it feels like the Warriors are the version of the Warriors we saw in the regular season, which is the ones that cannot win on the road. Both of these games, they're right there y'all. The Clutch player of the year steps up and makes a basket here and there and then they get something. They get a Davion Mitchell 3.  And then Lowkey got me a little afraid that this might be the end of an era if this series ends here. Like, if this series is, if this is a one and done for them, it might be end of an era because we know Draymond Green wants some money. I know he has an option and we'll see exactly what he decides to do with that option. But with the stuff that happened preseason before the season started between him and Jordan Poole, him wanting a lot of money, Clay Thompson just came out, said he's expecting a max extension. I don't know what to expect, but I do really enjoy watching their big three play together. And I have enjoyed it for the entirety of it. Even the Cavaniers, I enjoyed it. I was rooting against them because I don't like to see super teams win, but I enjoyed the basketball that was played. I love the connection that Draymond Green has with Clay Thompson and Steph Curry. And I'm just a little bit afraid that we might be seeing the end of an era because we know it's gonna have to happen eventually. I don't know, man, the city is bumping. They're up too old. We'll see what the rest holds. Asked me to talk about Philly versus Brooklyn. Hey, I ain't got nothing to say, man. Jacques Vaughn is really trying to prevent Joel and B from getting off. But then you got the others. And the others have been stepping up. Terry Smatsy specifically tonight. I hope them close their game out. So that's it. Well, get out of here. I do want to say thank you all so much, man, for all the support over the years have got us to this point where today we were on ESPN talking to Steven A. Smith about hoops. Like if I could go back in time and tell my 12-year-old self that one day you'll be on ESPN talking ball, like I wouldn't believe myself. You know what I'm saying? So we accomplished something Houston and it still ain't really hit me, right? But seeing all the support across the viewers of this channel, the new people seeing the appearance on ESPN and hitting me or follows and all of the messages I got from people across the globe really made the lot to me. And I don't know if I can even really put it into words how much y'all's support has meant to me. And I try to pay y'all back with the content, right? Trying to put together A plus content whether it be on this channel, that channel, that channel, because that's like my way of saying thank you without literally saying thank you. But this is also me literally saying thank you. I also gotta say thank you to Stephen A. Smith, man. Because he has been a real champ through all of this. You know, he invited me into his podcast. We've had a great 45-minute conversation. And in that, he was okay with the criticisms that I've thrown him on his show, you know what I'm saying? Because the part of the show is disagreeing with other people. You know, that's what we do, right? And he was okay with it. And they count him in a lot. I ain't gonna say no names, but I've made videos like having a conversation with somebody, not in a literal sense, but like them being on TV, I disagree with their take and me having my own opinion about their take and they didn't like it so much so that they blocked me on social media and things like that. And that could have went that route. But instead, Stephen A was like, I'm gonna, he basically took me under his wing, y'all. Which again, is crazy to say aloud. Go to Stephen A. Smith's Twitter right now. He follows 17 people. Some of those people are Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, ESPN, his self first take.  He follows 17 people and I'm one of them. And again, none of this is really registering to me completely, but I wouldn't be able to do any of this if y'all weren't watching and y'all weren't showing love. Cause I would just be a dude in my living room, in my work office, talking to a camera. I've given me a voice and I'm trying my hardest to do right by y'all and do right by everybody by using this voice in the best way I can. So again, thank you.


Today, there are over 244 million international migrants in the world. For many of them, returning home will be an important part of the journey. While some migrants reintegrate seamlessly into their countries of origin, many face challenges that they cannot overcome on their own. The communities, regions and countries to which they return may not have the infrastructure and resources to facilitate successful reintegration. IOM advocates for the adoption of an integrated approach to reintegration that responds to the economic, social and psychosocial needs of returning migrants, while also benefiting communities of origin and addressing structural challenges to reintegration. With funding from the UK's Department for International Development, IOM has developed a handbook on the reintegration of returnees, unable or unwilling to remain in their host or transit country. IOM's reintegration handbook aims to provide practical guidance for the design, implementation and monitoring of reintegration assistance. It also emphasises the importance of partnership in reintegration programming. Conceived as a hands-on tool, the handbook targets key stakeholders involved in the provision of reintegration related support at different levels and at different stages, including project developers, managers and case managers, but also policy makers and other reintegration practitioners. An integrated approach to reintegration explains the assessments and resource considerations necessary to facilitate the sustainable reintegration of returnees. Reintegration assistance at the individual level guides case managers to engage returnees and their families in the reintegration process, taking into account economic, social and psychosocial factors. Reintegration assistance at the community level provides guidance for involving the community in reintegration activities and gives example of community-level reintegration initiatives at the economic, social and psychosocial dimensions. Reintegration assistance at the structural level focuses on ensuring coordination and coherence among local and international stakeholders such as government and non-governmental organisations and public and private sector in order to provide essential services to returnees in host countries and countries of origin. Monitoring and evaluation of reintegration assistance proposes ways to monitor and evaluate beneficiaries and reintegration programs systematically to strengthen future programming. To maximise its learnings, a customized curriculum based on e-courses and face-to-face trainings accompanies a handbook.