Hello everyone. Before I start I would like to thank UNU wider for inviting me to speak today and welcome to my presentation. So I'm a graduate student at the University of Oxford and this is the work I've been doing over the past 18 months under the supervision of Cheryl and Fu at the Technology and Management Development Centre in Oxford. So today I'm going to tell you about Chinese FDI, managerial knowledge spillovers and localization strategies and I'm going to present findings from a case study of the guinea and construction sector. So a few words about the presentation. I'm going to start with a short introduction. So a few words about the methodology. Then we'll talk about managerial knowledge spillovers in general in the guinea and construction sector. Then we'll turn to the specific case of Chinese construction companies and finally we'll talk a bit about localization strategies before concluding. So my research is basically at the convergence of two strains of literature. The very large literature on foreign direct investment, FDI and economic development and the literature on China-African investment flows. So in terms of literature on FDI and economic development it's been debated very largely over the last two days in the conference. So there is a general consensus today that FDI can contribute to economic growth in developing countries by providing capital, creating jobs and most importantly by leading to productivity improvements through spillovers. So just a little recap on what exactly is a spillover from FDI. So when transnational firms invest in a country they have to overcome a certain disadvantage because for instance they don't have a very good knowledge of the local market. So they have to have another advantage to overcome this weakness and usually it's technology or advanced managerial skills. But when they invest in that new market they're not always able to internalize that advantage and domestic firms can learn from that. So this is what we call a FDI spillover. So in the literature numerous authors have shown that spillovers from FDI are not systematic, that they only occur under certain circumstances and the literature has tried to identify those determinants of FDI. And especially there's been an emphasis on the source country of FDI. So different authors have shown that depending on where FDI comes from it can have different impacts on the recipient country. For instance there's a question of the technological gap that is how different the technology used by the transnational firm is from the technology used by domestic firms and how much they're going to be able to internalize that new knowledge. But also cultural distance, geographic distance are also factors that matter. So in that context we have increasing China-African investment flows and so of course the question is do these investment flows from China have a different impact in terms of knowledge spillovers than FDI flows from maybe more traditional sources such as Europe or the United States. The focus of my research was specifically on managerial knowledge spillovers for several reasons. So first in the two previous presentations we've seen how important management is to lead to productivity improvement especially the last one. But for some reason managerial knowledge spillovers have been understudied in the literature. Most of the literature focus on technology transfers and technological knowledge spillovers. There's also the fact that management as we've all also seen is very culturally determined and it's composed of both explicit and tasted components being related to experience and culture. So it's likely that managerial knowledge coming from China is going to have a sort of different relation to managerial knowledge coming from Europe or the US. So my research question was what is the impact of Chinese FDI in Africa in terms of managerial knowledge spillovers. And I studied that question in the context of the Ghanaian construction sector. So why Ghana? Why is the construction sector? Ghana as probably most of you know has been one of the few success stories in Africa and it's been receiving a lot of FDI most recently because it discovered all in offshore. Anyway there's quite a lot of FDI going on so it's a good potential for knowledge spillovers. And especially more and more FDI is coming from China. Why is the construction sector? Well it's the most dynamic sector in the Ghanaian economy at the moment. It's also a sector that's very dominated by foreign firms, both long term European firms that have been there for 20, 30, 40 years. Some of them have actually settled in Ghana during colonization. But it's also a sector where Chinese firms are increasingly challenging those long term actors. So there is a good potential for managerial knowledge spillovers from Chinese firms or European firms that are present there. So I used a qualitative approach. So for those of you that are not very familiar with qualitative research it means that there is an inductive and iterative research process. So data collection and data analysis are conducted simultaneously rather than sequentially. I can tell you more about this in the questions if needed. And in the tradition of development studies it was an interdisciplinary research. I used insights from management studies but also anthropology and history and economics to sort of come to a coherent ensemble. So I did 10 weeks of fieldwork in Ghana over the summer 2012 and I worked mostly via interviews. I interviewed actually 39 people through 31 interviews including six foreign construction firms, three of them European and three of them Chinese, plus a lot of actors connected to the construction sector in different ways. So government agencies, trade unions, academics and also domestic firms, suppliers or subcontractors to foreign firms in the construction sector. And I triangulated my results with the existing literature on those topics. So both conflicting and supportive literature to strengthen my analysis. So I first look at how spillovers, managerial knowledge spillovers occur in the Ghanaian construction sector. So actually I'm going to show you the next slide, hopefully everyone can read. So basically you have different channels of spillovers. So the foreign contractor is here and the main recipient of spillovers are the employees in the foreign construction companies, mostly managers because they have the absorptive capacities of the education and the training necessary to understand foreign managerial practices. So local managers can learn new management skills through different channels. So I'm not going to expand too much on that, but basically you have formal training, but you also have a mostly experience that plays a very big role in managerial learning and also mentoring which is sort of at the crossroad between training and exposure. So it's a dietic relationship between a foreign manager and a local manager that leads to skill development for the local manager. So how does this transfer into the local economy through labor mobility? So basically those local managers that have been foreign trained can then move on to working for competitors, domestic competitors or for construction consultancies which are not exactly competitors. So it's important to note that this labor mobility is constrained by simply the means of the domestic firms to acquire foreign trained employees. So my research was not exactly on this, but it's possible that those managerial knowledge spillovers are actually insignificant, first because there is a limited number of local managers that are trained in those firms and then because it might be difficult for them to return to the domestic sector afterwards. But that's sort of another issue. Then you have local linkages that are another way for managerial knowledge to be transferred and they distinguish between subcontractors and suppliers. Subcontractors are actually really important in the construction sector. It's one of the specificities of the sector. So through their interaction with the foreign managers in the foreign firm, they can also acquire some form of managerial knowledge and I believe that these spillovers are more important for subcontractors because they tend to work on site for an extended period of time and directly under the authority of foreign managers. Whereas suppliers, especially in Ghana that has a little developed manufacturing sector, it's mostly import companies. They have different processes and different managerial needs and they also have limited interactions with the foreign firm. So those are basically the channels of managerial knowledge spillovers. Then I looked a bit at the determinants. So absorptive capacity, it's been covered a lot in the literature. So it's about the educational level basically of the recipients of managerial knowledge. So in Ghana, education levels have been rising quite fast. So that's a good thing. But in the construction sector it means that really it's mostly going to be local managers that benefit from managerial knowledge spillovers and most of the unskilled labor that is very numerous in the construction sector is not going to benefit that much maybe because they just don't have the capacity to learn and reproduce those foreign managerial techniques. Something that is very specific to managerial knowledge is, for me, the importance of interpersonal interactions and trust. So we've seen that local managers within the firm are the most likely recipient of managerial knowledge spillovers. But this will only happen if they have a good and constructive relationship with foreign managers. This means that there needs to be trust between the two parties and a desire to learn and to teach on both sides. So that's really important and that's actually going to support my next point. So those structural constraints, I mentioned them a bit before. So there's limited labor mobility and for domestic construction firms there's also limited access to finance. Construction is very capital intensive so to start a construction firm you need quite a lot of startup capital. So this means that for local managers that have been training for in firms it's very difficult to start their own firm afterwards because they may not have the access to the capital that's needed to start their own firm and reuse that managerial knowledge. So now for the case of Chinese construction companies. So there are three main challenges that are I think specific to Chinese companies. The two first ones very quickly because it's going to be very dependent on each firm and we should not generalize to all Chinese firms because they are all very specific and we really cannot make them into one homogeneous group. What I observed is that there tends to be less local linkages in Chinese firms. It's also something that has been observed in the literature. Chinese firms tend to be more vertically integrated to control their costs better because their primary advantage is the price when they enter a new market especially in construction. So if they are more vertically integrated it means they use less local subcontractors, less local suppliers so those channels of spillovers are reduced. So the second question is about the level of advancement of the managerial knowledge in Chinese firms. So this is very difficult because it's something that's very difficult to quantify. It's hard to rank managerial systems or to say that one is better than the other precisely because you have all those cultural elements. But in Chinese firms themselves, at least those that I interviewed in Ghana recognize that management was one of their weaknesses compared to other foreign competitors. So there might be less managerial knowledge to be transferred from those firms. So this is sort of an open question. The most serious impediment in my opinion is that in the firms that I interviewed and the information I got about other Chinese firms is that you tend to have all Chinese management teams so no or very few local managers integrated in those firms. So as we've seen that local managers are the primary recipients of managerial knowledge spillovers. If you don't have local managers you basically don't have managerial knowledge spillovers. So it's the most significant difference. One point that I would like to make is that very often there is this perception of Chinese firms in Africa not having any locals at all. This is not true, at least not in what I observed in Ghana. The unskilled positions are filled by local workers in construction, especially where you have a lot of unskilled labor. It was all sourced locally. So I then wondered why you had only Chinese management teams because on the Ghanaian side people tended to interpret this as a political agenda or an exclusive desire to keep Ghanaians out of management teams. I think it's actually reasons that are much more practical. The thing is that you have very high transaction costs within Chinese construction firms if they want to integrate local managers. And these costs arise from the language barrier and from a cultural clash. So the language barrier there's actually been a lot of work on communication within the firm but not so much on language. So I would really recommend the work of housing and Philly on this. It's something that has been observed in other companies where managers may have more limited foreign language skills. The case of Japanese companies has been raised, especially in that regard. So the language barrier tends to create ineffective communication and mistrust. And it's pretty much the same thing for cultural differences which are particularly salient between Chinese managers and local managers. So you really had complete misunderstandings on both sides and that made it very difficult for Chinese managers to feel comfortable with integrating local managers in their management teams. So the intra-firm relationships were also very much affected by those differences and by this language issue. That means that not only you had no local managers in the management teams but also that relationships within the firm were affected which also could reduce any sort of knowledge transfers between the two parties. I argue that those two main impediments are actually supported by additional factors. So in terms of history I'm not going to expand too much on this but you do have factors that can explain why you have this cultural clash and why you have this language barrier. You can look at the history of British colonialism in Ghana and what kind of work structures it imported but also on the Chinese side the impact of the pre-reform years on working structures and also the relationship to English learning, for instance. In terms of time, Chinese firms have a limited international experience in Ghana in particular. Most of them were there for only five to ten years. That means they also have less best practices to refer to in terms of cross-cultural management. And finally in terms of money, Chinese expatriates today are still relatively cheap at least if you compare them to Western expatriates. So it's still affordable for Chinese construction companies to have very large Chinese management teams. So they're not under the same economic constraints to localize a managerial labor. But what I found out in my research and that's really important is that this is not a sort of definite statement about how Chinese construction companies can transfer managerial knowledge. So there was one of the firms that had started a very successful program of managerial localization. So they were preparing to replace progressively their Chinese managers by local managers. So this was inspired by the observation of other foreign firms operating in Ghana with very limited expatriate teams. So that was actually quite exciting because it was another form of managerial knowledge transfer in a way. And this was implemented with a complete rethinking of the management system. So basically before the program, you had this huge Chinese expatriate team trying to, like, each Chinese worker could cover different functions at the same time. And what they were trying to do was to redefine the management system so that everyone would have a specific function and to assign a specific process for each task. Okay, I'm going to conclude soon. So in terms of achievements, this had led to cost reduction because the local managers were cheaper than foreign managers. But it also led to and also better relationships within the firm. It was really clear in the interviews with employees that they had a much more cooperative relationship with their Chinese managers. In terms of challenges, it required a really strong commitment from the foreign management team and a certain number of resources to train the new employees and accept the productivity losses resulting from just the time needed to train those new employees. And this, of course, could impact managerial knowledge pillars very positively. So if you have more local managers, you're going to have more managerial knowledge pillars. So I argue, and this is my last point, that we could be moving towards fully localized Chinese firms. So there was only one firm that I interviewed that did that, but I heard about other firms that were starting similar programs in Ghana. There's also been several reports about firms in Nigeria that started similar localization programs. And it was really in the mind of the Chinese managers that I interviewed. I think this is because you have growing economic pressures, so Chinese expatriates are going to be more and more expensive, but also raising opportunity costs, because localization can lead to cost reduction but also productivity improvements. That is, if you have a local management team, it's going to be much more efficient to communicate with your local partners, your suppliers, subcontractors, your clients.  And finally, localization could become a corporate social responsibility issue in Africa for Chinese firms, and I think Chinese firms are very aware of that. That is, if local populations, local governments keep perceiving Chinese firms as not inclusive and being very secretive in a way, this could become a significant problem in terms of public relations. So, yeah, just to conclude, I think I've pretty much said this already, but some manager-in-large believers from Chinese firms are at the moment more limited because there's limited major localization. But we should definitely not assess the contribution of Chinese firms to economic development based on this sole remount. There's also a lot of other factors to consider. There's great adaptability showed by Chinese firms, so it's important to keep researching this to see how this is evolving and developing. And there is a potential for learning between African and Chinese firms, not only for African firms to learn from the Chinese experience, but also for Chinese firms to learn from the local practices and the cultural management that is required by the local operations. And in my work, I developed a bit more on the role of the government to support localization strategies, and I'm happy to take questions on this if you want. So, thank you.


Yeah, we're at the track covering the sport of Kings coming up this week like she's nuclear powered to time to make a horse of the year Atomica delivers a smashing win in the vice-royal trophy at Kimana spark where the 2023 horse of the year second runner-up ability Also grabs a share of the spotlight a time Barbados champion Jockey Anderson Trotman aboard sassy Makes the Easter handicap featuring Barbados look easy in TNT Hello world giving champion trainer John O'Bran a fifth champion stakes win in a row Barbadian sappet Joseph junior completes a ninth consecutive trainers title at Florida's Gulfstream Park and the finish of the rich Dubai World Cup Not what anyone expected Plus the usual check-in on Caribbean success on the North American continent or opening story coming from Jamaica The Easter Monday feature at K-Manus Park was the vice-roy trophy race in honor of the 1989 triple crown winner and three-time horse of the year only four starters But big names here including December's moot a mile winner the US bred rough entry with US based jockey Rago tear is aboard and the two-time horse of the year Atomica Reunited with six-time champion jockey Omar Walker who was aboard her the first time she raced almost two and a half years ago There's the field rough entry in the one box the one-to-two favorite number two is the two-to-one bed Is that a fact who beat both rough entry and Atomica in the chairman's trophy in January number three Atomica is a six-to-five Bet here's ace commentator brand Rickman picking up the call with the main contenders on the front end It's a jewel up front Atomica on the outside Is that a fact right there these two nose-to-nose rough entry waiting on them to fold as they leave the half-mile Pole and forget green gold rush at the moment and now Atomica is asked to kick as the rider adds a teaspoon of speed And Atomica now goes on is that a fact and rough entry hounding the leader as they leave the three-eighths pole forget green Gold rush needing a tow truck as they're about to arrive at the 5 16th and Atomica the super filly now begins to draw away from rough entry going in chase Is that a fact looks to have cried enough green gold rush not in it at all Atomica running the way She likes out in front. It's Atomica getting a cracker two of the left-hand stick They leave the three-sixteenth the filly is looking unbeatable at this stage. They run past the furlong pole It is Atomica. She's back to her best. Atomica is plundering this field in the vice-royal trophy She's running away from they have no answers and she will win by the length of an international airstrip Atomica by double digits is that a fact is second awesome this performance by Atomica in her second widest victory margin in her career Only her 17 length Phyllis Guinness win in 2022 was bigger Atomica's 15th victory this in 21 lifetime starts Omar Walker had ridden Atomica on her wing debut in December 2021 He was aboard her Monday for the first time in a race since then and says he was always confident a classy five-year-old Mere would give him all he expected of her If you want to get an iron I see that she's very nice So I was pretty confident just from a clean brief and a clean run She was a space nicely The Oak Ridge Farms Atomica by 15 and a half lengths as the six to five second favorite Is that a fact second the winning time for the vice-royal mile one 39 and two-fifths and now winning trainer Gary Sabrati who had a triple on the afternoon Obviously targeting another crack at December's Mute mile after two on-placed efforts previously in the rich event As long as she keeps healthy and soon and right now she's on top of our game We just want to accept we can maintain this to the end of the year and see what happens also on show Monday the 2023 Dabu winner ability in the Easter Sprint Cup for which he was a big one-to-five favorite and did not disappoint Having raced third down the back stretch Quittening now toward the lead watched in the Combox by visiting commentator the voice of Gulf Stream Park Pita yellow 5 16 from home and up on the outside Here's the strong move from ability to go after God of love Ability now sticks a neck in front God of love tries to counter punch with a better for the inside spot They've gone ahead of KP choice and they're at the top of the stretch up on the outside It's ability rouse forward for a clear lead God of love is back on the outside to try to go make a rebid back to third It's KP choice. They come past the eighth pole ability starting to slip away here ability now by three back to second God of love down inside KP choice, but as they come home for the wire It's all ability ability and Jackie Ryan Lewis to dominate him here winning by seven in the end Ability was 2023 horse of the year second runner up to Atomica and rough entry and has no challengers here Champion jockey Ryan Lewis on an easy ride as a four-year-old Colt ability locks his fifth win in 11 lifetime Starts for owner and trainer Patrick Lynch Ability by nine and a quarter lengths in the Easter sprint cup as the one to five favorite KP choice and God of love chased in vain 107 and one fifth the winning time for the five and a half furlong sprint The other major event of holiday weekend racing in Jamaica was Saturday's King's plate last year's winner Money monster in the nine horse field But off the pace here as the nine to five bet Mamma Mia with Panamanian jockey Jose Osorio stages a successful front-running mission as the field come Thundering into the top of the lane Mamma Mia kicks a disaster slip away from them This could be a crippling move get a Pepsi's down against the real provocative or looks to have cried enough money Monster is running on the spot, but Mamma Mia the speedy one is speeding away from them arriving at the furlong pole It is Mamma Mia out in front and Osorio Jose Osorio It's destined to have his first win if he last get a Pepsi is charging Mamma Mia beats get a Pepsi the winner's name initial similar to last year when money monster won But this mm is champion owner Carlton Watson's Mamma Mia for champion trainer Jason the Costa Giving Panamanian jockey Husway Osorio his first minute came out of spark and last year's double classic winner Mamma Mia her first victory from four starts this year Mamma Mia the nine to five second favorite wins the Kings plate by a diminishing length on a quarter over the closing Seven to one bet get a Pepsi the defending champion money monster fifth the winning time one thirty five and two fifths for seven and a half furlongs To Barbados now where Saturday's main event of the Garcin Savannah was the Easter handicap over 7.8 furlongs with ten starters The 2024 Sander Lane Gold Cup winning Jockey Antonia Bishop was aboard the favorite super model They raced toward the back of the field early and check out the US bred three-year-old Philly's Zazzee Slipping away from the field on the veteran jockey Anderson Trotman watched in the come box by Dean Springer Zazzee has dismissed Jericho Ungone about four lengths clear The next day Phil Morris runs into third tough rags his fourth Renny is next one through a Supermodels from the best trainer comes the calling But as they come to the top of the stretch it is Zazzee and she's all alone Turning to the judge and as the trouble says go win this race and she says he'll care and quick as up nicely She comes to the middle of course. It's Zazzee under right hydra a film or supermodel cabito all trying to close But you can sing this field a lot of by they have been put to bed a time champion Jockey Anderson Trotman no rider in history has more wins that the garrison Savannah than he has Steering the three-year-old Philly's Zazzee home to a comfortable win One of two victories on the afternoon for the 47-year-old top jock Trotman The US bred Zazzee had a three-race winning streak snapped with a six-place finish and the country club trophy on go-cup day But responds with a massive win here for owner Nalicia Cosier and trainer Jean Marc Cosier Scoring in the Easter handicap by five and a quarter lengths as the nine to two second favorite chased by the 72 favorite Supermodel Zazzee clocked 138 and four fifths in victory over seven point eight furlongs TNT's Arima race club stages third race meet of the year at Santa Rosa Park on Saturday Featuring the champagne steaks on turf last year's triple crown winner in the headlines among the starters Although the informed four-year-old coach. Hello world last year's Dobby and Midsomer classic runner-up is the favorite two-time defending champion Superbird Surrendered his bid by being very tardy out of the starting gates, but the six horse field still served up a thriller Marvel vigour in the headlines That's the top two Princess Aruna is given her cue by Omar and here she comes three wide Hello world is racing in fourth spot then comes Leonardo angel Superbird has a mountain to climb they're getting ready to come to the top of the stretch in the champagne and Marvel vigour brings them in The headlines is buckling away. Hello world is coming up the rail then comes Leonardo angel princess Aruna is one-pacing now Inside the final 200 meters and hello Let us take it over on the inside princess Aruna is coming on, but hello world is coming right away And hello world adds the champagne steaks with a victory John Rupert on commentary first time ever on turf and the classy hello world gets the job done for four wins in a row Champion jockie brand boot ramp sing on an afternoon triple ahead of his departure for his annual Canadian stint The poon tip stud farms hello world by a length as the six to five favorite topping princess Aruna in a one-two finish for champion Trainer John O'Bran who wins his fifth consecutive champion steaks and ninth in the last ten stagings The winning time for the eight furlong trip 138 and three-fifths The Gulf Stream Park Championship season in Florida ended on Sunday formalizing a third consecutive title at that meet for the Barbadian trainer Safi Joseph junior Safi's last win of the meet came in Sunday's ninth race with Paco Lopez aboard the favorite class if I in a $59,000 allowance optional claiming event This a remarkable ninth seasonal Gulf Stream Park title in a row for the 37-year-old Barbadian With 66 wins including five steaks trams Safi Joseph is champion trainer by a long way Todd Pletcher the eclipse awards number one trainer in the USA a record eight times finishing second on 37 wins and Canada's champion trainer Mark Cassie third a further six wins behind Jamaican run Crichton was just outside the top ten in 11th spot The Dubai World Cup at 12 million US dollars is the second richest horse race in the world The meet was shown live Saturday on Sportsmax and the Dubai World Cup result a stunner as the nine-to-one pet Laurel River took control early like taking candy from a baby made the 10th furlong run look really easy on the Multiple UAE champion jockie tag or say Laurel River puts a big break on them here in the Dubai World Cup the best part of eight or nine lengths here and Juddmont farm Close they are 200 meters away from Dubai World Cup success here He's got ten lengths now on senior busker door. Kavir Khan drops away Uscha to sorrow coming from a long way back, but this is an absolute romp in the Dubai World Cup Laurel River Take a bow Laurel River trained by Bhupad Seymour Upsets in the Dubai World Cup by a striking eight and a half lengths the one-two finishers in last month rich Saudi Cup Senior busker door and ush but to sorrow forced to settle for the runner-up spots two or two thirty one the winning time for ten furlongs The update from Ghana now before we go the informed pancourst winning Sunday's Easter Cup feature at the Port Moran turf club Where the former Trinidad and Tobago da Buena on debut in Ghana soka harmony won in the stewards room Our usual week Italian wins now for Caribbean men in the USA before we go in the past week since our last show I've counted 11 victories among them the Barbadian jockie rocker point with two wins at Oakland Park and the Jamaican trainer Raymond Handel he had a Thursday double at New York's aqueduct racetrack We've been at the track covering top stores and exciting races in the sport of Kings Check us out again next week


Hi, welcome to SuperUserTV. Today, I have Sheila, who is joining us today to talk about what her user group is doing for the OpenStack 6th birthday. Hello, my name is Sheila Sabie. I work at Comcast as a community development lead for OpenStack, and I'm representing the OpenStack Northern Virginia user group. We are based out of Reston, Virginia. Most of our meetups are held in Reston, Virginia. We started this user group about, I wanna say, two years ago, and then it became official earlier this year. We have about 500 members. We get roughly 40 to 80 members that show up to our typical meetup events. Most of the companies represented in our user group are private clouds, public clouds. We have telecom providers. We also have people that are just experiencing or trying to get to know OpenStack or just learning or doing test beds for OpenStack for their company. For OpenStack's 6th birthday party, we have an event planned out of Dallas, Virginia. We're gonna have trivia, games, prizes, cupcakes, as well as music, and it's kind of gonna be a networking social, and it will be on July 28th, 2016, and we're really looking forward to it. Awesome, it sounds like your user group is really representative of the OpenStack community with the different organizations and different levels of OpenStack experience. I know you've been involved in the user group for quite some time now, so have you seen any kind of changes within the user group since you joined, or what kind of you think is next for your user group and even the OpenStack community in general? Yeah, absolutely, we're definitely growing rapidly. I'm probably going through 10 or 11 member approvals every single week, so we have a lot of people that are joining, and I find that we're expanding very quickly, so that's kind of a big change, and our turnaround for the events are, they're getting more accurate. We used to have maybe a 30 to 40% turnaround rate, and now I'm finding that our RSVPs are 70 to 80% close to what the actual rate is for people that show up to our meetup group. So we're growing rapidly, and we're looking forward to it, we actually, we grew so fast that we're looking for new space to hold our meetups, so our last one was at a different location, and I'm anticipating that we're gonna continue this growth. That's a great problem to have, and it's something that we definitely see with the bigger events that we're throwing with the community as well, so thank you again for joining us today, and I'm really excited to hear more about your party once it's been held and more about your user group once, as time goes on. Great, thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to it. Thanks, bye. Bye.


Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel. I hope you're well. So, here's the thing. A couple weeks back, actually I think it was in December, I reacted to the video that I did last year of all the series I had to finish last year. And it like didn't go that well. Take, flop, girl you have done it again. Constant lowering the bar for us all. But what I noticed, what I noticed from this, I just have a problem with finishing the last book in a series. Like I just don't finish the last book. Like I read the whole series and then I put the last book off. So that's what we're doing in this vlog. I'm just gonna be finishing off three series so that I'm done with them, so I've accomplished something at the start of the year so that the series I need to finish list goes down a bit. And I'm really excited actually. We're gonna talk about, it's all gonna be non-spoilery for these series, so don't worry. We can discuss like, wow good endings, I think they are for their respective series. So the books I'm gonna be reading in this vlog, let's go through them one at a time. The first is going to be The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl by Theodora Goss. Oh my God, I'm so excited. I'm so scared and sad for this series to come to an end. I've loved this so much. So if you don't know, this is a Victorian historical fiction book which follows Mary Jackal, Diana Hyde and other girls like Catherine Moreau, Justine Frankenstein, Beatrice Rappuccini who all have ties to men from classic Victorian literature. It's the story of them coming together in this found family and trying to uncover what has been done to them and what is being done to girls like them by these scientists, by the men in their lives. There was a certain cliffhanger at the end of the last book that makes me like, I just need to devour this straight away. Apprehensive, nervous, bit scared, also weirdly calm, perhaps on the verge of hysteria. And I've talked about this before but my favorite element of this is how Catherine is actually writing this story and the girls will cut in with comments about what is happening. I'm so excited to read this. I love the Victorian vibes. This series has been a favorite. The first book in the series was my favorite book of last year, the my favorite book I read the whole year. So I'm very, very excited to get to this. Then I'm gonna be reading The King of Crows by Libba Bray. So this is the fourth and final book in the Divana series. I don't actually end up reading this so. Should we speed it up a little bit? And then the last book I'm gonna be reading is Supernova by Marissa Maya. This is the third and final book in the Arch Enemy series which is like a superhero series where we have the renegades and the, oh my God, what are they called? Anarchists, I always forget what the baddies are called. And our protagonist, Nova, comes from the Anarchists and she infiltrates the renegades to find that information but she like kind of develops feelings and friendships with the renegades and it's like, oh my God. I have not read this series in a long time. I read the first two books in 2019. So I feel like I am gonna have to refresh my memory a bit but I have heard such good things about this last book in the series. A lot of people say it's the best book. It wraps everything up really well. There's some really hard scenes to read in it. And Marissa Maya's writing, I love.  Like I loved that series so much. I was a bit obsessed with it and then I've never read it again. So I definitely don't wanna reread it. I kind of wanna get the new covers. What do we have here? We're gonna finish off some series. I'm very, very excited to tick these off and see how these series end up. So that's what we're gonna be reading. A few moments later. I'm already much further through this than I anticipated being. I think about 45% of the way through it. I'm on page 186. I just can stop reading it. I know I haven't filmed any B-roll or anything yet, like any cute clips, but I just couldn't stop. I just love it so much. I just love it so much. You know what's the most exciting thing about winning? It's when you win. I love that feeling. These characters are just the best characters I've ever read, The Athena Club. I love them all so much. It's such a good job of sometimes I... Okay, hang on, let me collect my thoughts. Sometimes I think in feminist historical fiction, there's a tendency for the girls to become, to reject femininity.  I think that's something people critique, still conjecture the Ripper a lot for. But you don't find that with this. Because you have those girls, you have some like Diana, who are really brash and strong and boyish and then you have Catherine who's very sarcastic. You also have people like Beatrice who Beatrice is very interested in clothes and beauty and femininity. And so it doesn't reject that. Like it allows for all interpretations of women in this time period. Like, gender isn't something that's constricting them, which it would have been at the time. But it kind of breaks out of that a bit. But at the same time, it doesn't reject aspects of femininity that other books do. So I think it does that so well. I'm just loving following them again. Like I don't want to part with them at all. I just love them. Do you know how I feel about you? If there was any hope that I could actually be or it's one I aspire to, you know you're the one. We've got some amazing new characters on this. We've got Moriarty who like, iconic.  Oh, we had like Dorian Gray turned up like briefly, like a brief appearance of Dorian Gray who's apparently good friends with Watson. Like, I just love how it incorporates all these characters from our classics in such fun ways. Now, one thing I would say is that one of our characters is separate from the other characters. And I'm just not quite as interested in those parts of what I am. I'm becoming more interested in it. But there's something about just being back with those main girls all together that has the best dynamic to it, I think. They're the scenes that I look forward to and that I enjoy reading the most. So I'm hoping in the latter half of this book, they're all kind of gonna come back together again to solve this a bit. It's so fun. The perfect like, historical fantasy mystery book you'll ever read. The characters are still so witty and funny. Like, I fell straight back in love with them as soon as I started reading it. I don't wanna spoil what's happening but Sherlock and Watson are playing a big role in it again and I love them. You know, Dracula's been in it. Like, it's just so complex and layered and it's so much fun. So I'm just gonna finish this today. I'm not gonna check in with you again till I finished it because I can't take it. I need to just consume it. So I'm gonna go read the rest. I wish script let you speed it up faster than two because like, if I'm reading physically as well, my speed is like a 2.2, 2.3. So I wish I could go that little bit faster. But anyway, that's irrelevant. Oh my God, I'm just so excited to finish it. Okay, I'm gonna go finish it and I'll give you my thoughts on whether it's a good ending to the series. Although I'm sure currently that it will be. A couple of days since I finished this because I've had to like, emotionally collect myself. I refuse. I refuse that this is the last book in this series. Like, I'm not having it. I'm sorry. I think I'm having a meltdown. Oh, oh, oh. I can't, I can't emphasize, I'm shaking. I'm still not ready. I'm not accepting this is the last book in this series that does not make sense in my world. It's not happening in my fantasy. I'm not having it. I'm not, I'm not having it. Like, period. Like, fucking, I'm not, I'm not, I'm still. Just wanna sit around me over a minute, gather my thoughts. These characters are, I'm gonna cry. Oh my God, these characters are the best characters I have ever read. The character development in this is incredible. The heart that these characters have, I just love them so much. I love these girls. I love them so much. I want this to be an 80 book series. I'm sorry. I did go and I did some research on this because it's important. This is like what my brain is like holding onto at the moment. And someone asks, is there gonna be more books? And Theodor August said, the publisher only bought three, but I would love to write about these characters again. So can we make it happen? Like, who do I need to email? Who do I need to pay? I will pay. I will pay. Like my mental health depends on it. I'm sorry. This, I need 10 more books. Oh, let's be realistic. The fact that Theodor August is willing, we just need publishers to like commit. It means it's within our reach. I'm so sad. I'm not accepting that this is it. Like, I'm not. It was the perfect ending, but it was also the perfect ending that like left you open to more. Like there were so many mentions of different adventures they'd gone on together since the book. Like because obviously they arrived in the book much further in the future than the events that are happening. So it's like all the time we rescued this person all the time we went here and I'm like, I need to read it. Like I can't, I'm not having it. I loved it. It was the perfect ending to a series. The characters were just paid so much respect. I thought like the ending, like the ending of the book was so good. Like I got a bit emotional. That was going anything. There's like, like we always, always with these books there's like a big battle scene at the end. And the way that it paid homage to all of these girls, I got a bit emotional. Like I thought it was just done so well. I love you, Mary Jackal. I love you, Diana Hyde. I love you, Katharine Moreau. I love you, Justine Frankenstein. I love you, Bitches Rappuccini. Mrs. Paul, Alice, Lucinda, all of you. I love you so much. Like I can't, I can't take it. It was perfection. I loved it. Please, if you haven't already, start this series because it is the best series known to man. Like I just love it so much. Like it's just perfect. The writing is amazing. The way that Katharine is brought out through the rest of the book is amazing. That's like how St. Louis is amazing. The Victorian setting is amazing. Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same. Totally unique, completely not ever been done before. Unafraid to reference or not reference. I already want to reread these books. I think this series is going to become like my comfort series that I will just come back and reread and reread whenever I'm going through a difficult time. Just like put a bit of that audio back on. Like it just calms me. I'm getting so emotional because I just love this series so much and I refuse to accept that it's ended. So I will catch me reading the first one again soon. There's been a bit of a change in what I'm reading in this video. Nothing drastic, but I am writing like my last essay of this semester currently and I just need to do it. Like I can't, I need to just commit myself to that. So I'm no longer going to be reading The King of Crows because this is like long. And in its place, I'm putting the hand on the wall by Maureen Johnson. And now this isn't technically like the lot, but it is kind of, this is a bit complicated. So this is the end of the original trilogy of this series and there is going to be another book. But I listened to Maureen Johnson speak about it and she said that like this is the original trilogy and then any further books are no longer taking place at this school and they're kind of like expansions on there. So I think it's going to become almost like, I think Maureen Johnson wants it to become like a proro, I can never say it, I'm sorry. Someone in the comments would be like, it's pronounced this way. Yeah, I think it actually wants it to become like a very long series, but this is the end of the original trilogy. This is just a lot less intimidating for essay writing Megan. So we're going to go for this, but I am still going to start with Supernova next and we'll read this last. I'm going to go start Supernova and I will check in with you when I'm about the third of the way through with my thoughts. I will not read on to 50% like I did with this one because I could not constrain myself. I feel like I haven't done a good enough job of summing this up because I'm still so emotional, but I will try in my end of month wrap up. That's not happening. All right. To like do this better justice. I feel like I haven't done it justice because I am so emotional and like my happiness is so tied into this book. You just need to know how incredible it is and that you need to go read the first one right now and that I am going to be petitioning. Who publishes this? Whoever the publisher, whoever published this, they are going to be getting a lot of letters from me. Saga Press from Simon & Schuster. Check your emails. Through Supernova. I just realized I sit in basically the same place in all my check-ins in this vlog. I am so sorry. Please forgive me. If you remember, this is the superhero versus villains series. When I started reading this, it did throw me for a loop for a bit because I think it's quite young YA and there's nothing wrong with that but just the writing, like you read it so fast but it's very, how does one say this? It feels very simple, you know? Like the way that characters think is very basic. Like they don't think in nuanced ways. They don't make decisions in nuanced ways. It's all about the plot being super fast paced. Every single scene doesn't have much breathing room because it's just so fast paced. And of course that's great for reading fast. Like I think I just read like 60 pages of this in half an hour. Like you can read it really, really fast if you set your mind to it but it did throw me for a loop and I didn't feel really that engaged with the writing at all to begin with. However, however, however, I think the plot has just gone down a direction that I'm really glad that it has. I think without spoiling anything, like it easily could have been way too similar to books one and two and it's kind of gone on a very different path and I'm so glad that it did because otherwise I think it would have felt way too stagnant, way too predictable. Whereas now I could not tell you what's gonna happen. Like the other two, like you know what's gonna happen. But this one, I feel like kind of what you expected the end of the series to be or like maybe by page 300, 350 would happen has actually happened about the 100 page mark. And so I feel like it has opened the story up to a lot more possibilities. It just made it much more interesting and exciting. And I was like, oh, okay. I'm really interested in having that conversation. I have to tell you that. Okay, like I see what you did there. Okay, and now I'm much more intrigued to read on. So I am getting more used to the writing. I think it's just the kind of thing you have to just get used to. I do have something very exciting to show you actually quickly before I go away and read some more. I actually just backpack. Okay, first of all, do we love it? Yes. She is exquisite. I love her, I love her and I love her even more. There's something about pink and gray that just like gets me. Anyway, I'm getting a bit off topic. This is from Seventeen London. This is the Canary Wharf. And they very kindly set this to me. Like they just wanted to send it to me to see if I enjoyed it. It's totally up to me that I show it to you and I'm like, well, I have to because it's so exciting. I just love it. I've worn it out a few times.  But the few times I have gone out to town for everything shut down for like errands and stuff, I wore it just to test it out and see if I liked it and I love it. It's got like a bajillion pockets. So like this can come like that if you want it to be bigger or if you don't need as much, it can look like that and you can clip it so that it stays like that. It is massive. Like on the inside, I don't think I can demonstrate to you how big it is but it has more pockets in here. It has, so you can't see. It has like a ton of different sections in it. Like it has two or three different sections in this main bit here and I love it. I really, really love it. I have a discount code. I have affiliate discount code which I think it's just Meg with Books if you wanted to go check out the website and purchase one of these. Like I said, I would really recommend it. It's great quality material. I don't know if I can describe to you how big it is. And I'm also gonna be running a competition to win one of these over on Twitter. All you need to do is go and retweet and like that tweet and be subscribed to my channel which if you've gotten this far in the video you probably are. So just go and retweet that tweet and you can be in with a chance of winning this. Yeah, I loved it. I would definitely recommend it and make sure you check out the giveaway on Twitter. I'm gonna go read to 2,000 the way through this and then I will check in with you again. I'm now 2,000 the way through so I'm on page 358. It's good and all, but I don't feel particularly invested. Like I'm gonna finish it obviously. Like I'm gonna finish the series but it's just kind of feeling like a three star at the moment.  Do you see how that's incredibly offensive? Yes, I do, that's why I said it. And then maybe it can turn it around because I know a lot of people say they love the ending but it just feels a bit basic. Like I'm not that attached to the characters. I'm not that invested in what's happening. I'm not that invested in the romance because I feel like it just can't, I just can't see a way forward. I just can't see a way forward. I'm gonna be glad that I finally finished the series. I don't know, we shall see. Maybe I'll change my mind. However, one thing I will say is I've read all of Marissa Mayer's books in the past other than her new contemporary. One thing I appreciate about her stuff, I won't say which book or books this pertains to because I don't wanna spoil anything for any of the other ones. But you're not always gonna get a happy ending.  Like it sometimes may end in the way that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable. So I can see this not ending the way I want. Like I can see it not ending nicely. And like part of me wants that destruction. I'm gonna go finish it and then I'll let you know my thoughts in the morning. Okay, so I can't remember how positive or negative I was when I last checked in. I do not remember saying those things and those things were not meant to be. That was not meant to be serious. I'm gonna give it two stars. So here's the thing, the end was shy. I was 80 pages from the end and I was like, I just wanna DNF it. Like I don't even wanna finish this. That is 80 pages that you've been leading up to for the whole book series.  Like I could have DNF'd it. Like it was not good. The cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity and the gumption. So many things happened at the end that were just contradictory. Like one thing would happen and then a little bit later something else happened that just made it completely inconsequential or relevant like it never happened. And it was just so annoying to me. And like the way that the characters acted, the way the characters acted is so unrealistic. Like there were no repercussions for certain things. Like, I don't wanna spoil anything obviously, but like some people would just like just forgave certain things in a second in a way that is totally unrealistic. Like it pissed me off. It is miffing me off somewhat. How can some of our characters do the things they're doing and not face repercussions and other characters just forgive them and everything's fine and they're like, no. I don't understand how people thought this was a good ending. I could not visualize that's always a sign of like bad stuff, bad stuff to me is when I can't visualize what's happening. Like in a fight scene, I can't picture it in my head and that was a problem I was having. Just like when we spend a whole three books leading up to a certain point, you want there to be long-term repercussions, short-term repercussions. There wasn't either of those. Like things were brushed over so easily and things happened.  Things happened for the ease of it rather than it being logical. So things that made the story easier to occur like things that moved the story on but didn't really make logical sense happened. Do you know what I mean? Events that make no sense that no one would make those decisions or whatever. Like things that just make it easier to carry on with the story and have the plot arcs that you wanna have and have the character arcs that you wanna have. They happen but they make no logical sense. I think you can tell by my face that I'm extremely tired today. It was disappointing. It was really disappointing. I think superheroes aren't really for me anyway. Like I don't really have an interest of ever reading a book about superheroes ever again. It's just not for me love. It's just not for me. It's not for main park. I feel terribly ill all of a sudden. Now I'm going to read The Hand on the Wall. It's over there. I don't want people to go pick it up but the final book in like the original Trudy Devious trilogy we're gonna read that. Hopefully it'll be like a nice quick read. I'm hoping that I love it. I'm sad about the ending of this one. That's the thing as well. I think endings of trilogies like endings of series can be so disappointing. I think that's another reason why I steer clear of finishing series because it's so much pressure to end it and to end it in a way that you enjoy. And then this was just like, is that it? Is that all you've got? Anyway, let's go read The Hand on the Wall one. Hopefully it will be better. I am now a third of the way through The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson. This reads so fast. Like these books are the perfect palette cleansers. Like they are perfect quick reads just to get you back on the horse if maybe you've been in a reading slump. We are at Ellingham Academy which is this academy for like the gifted and talented. In the 1930s when it was set up the owner's wife and daughter were kid, were like taken, were abducted. It's following that mystery and who did that and a mystery of a current day with deaths that are occurring in each book. This one is gonna be like wrapping that all up. So like this is wrapping up the whole mystery which we've been discovering for three books. I am enjoying it so far. I think it's just like a fun, really enjoyable series to fall back into. I really like the flipping back and forth between the 1930s and the present day. We seem to be following some kind of different characters which we haven't followed in the past before. So I'm enjoying that. Now, here's the stitch. Wait a minute, I'm figuring this out. I'm like Scooby and Shaggy, I'm solving a mystery. I have a suspicion on who the bad person is but I don't want it to be them and I don't think if it's them it'll be set up particularly well. I've read a lot of bad reviews for this. A lot of people didn't like this as the end of the series. They felt like the villain wasn't led up to. And if it's who I'm thinking it's like not so much to do with their character and them as a person but more to do with like the circumstances and the motives. I don't think I'll be happy if it's them but I feel like that's the route we're gonna go down. I could be completely wrong but if you love murder mysteries, true crime I think this would be also a great place to get into murder mysteries if you haven't read them before and you don't wanna read like an Agatha Christie or like an older murder mystery or an adult one this is like the perfect YA murder mystery series and I love it. Like I said, you will fly through it. Like you could probably read this in an evening if you wanted to. Very, very easily. It's so much fun. I think what I enjoy about this as well is that it looks like pro pro acupolo. He like doesn't communicate his thought process with you like as he's figuring it out.  I connected the dots. I've connected the two dots.  That makes it really enjoyable cause it makes it easier for you to theorize along with her and like maybe connect some dots that she hasn't connected but you think should be connected. Very excited. I'm gonna go read some more of this and then I'll let you know what I'm thinking. Okay, so I've actually finished this. I'm sorry. This look has been a bit rubbish because I've filmed parts of it out of order and I hate that. Like I hate that so much. And I know there hasn't been a lot of like clips of me reading and like the B-roll. I'm sorry about it. I've been in a bit of a slump and so when I was just hitting a role with reading this I was like, I'm not gonna get up and film and disrupt myself. I'm gonna give it three stars. It's my least favorite of the series so far. This is why I don't finish series. I didn't feel like it really had its own story. The other ones have their like own individual mysteries as well as the overall mystery. And like that's how most series go, right? And then like the final book is figuring out the overall mystery that you've been building up to. Even fantasies have mysteries or conundrums at some point. But I feel like we had figured out enough, figured out too much of the overall mystery particularly in book two. Like there was so much that I thought I just knew that was revealed in this book. I felt like almost too much had been revealed and then the author was like, oh shit, where do we go from here? I just don't feel like there was enough for us to figure out for it to carry only the overall mystery. I think it needed something small and it just didn't really have that. The person who it ends up being like the overall baddie, like I agree with the reviews that it was kind of left field. It wasn't who I was saying I thought it was gonna be and that I didn't want it to be damned. It was someone else but it was like my thinking was along the right lines. It was a bit since when? What now? What did that happen? That doesn't make no sense.  Can we just get rid? Like he's just so annoying. Like he doesn't talk like anyone talks. He thinks he's it. He really thinks he's it and I'm like, my man, you're not it. The trouble you cause, you're not it. He doesn't speak like a real person. It gets on my nerves. I think we need to get rid of him. I'm glad that I now know like what the overall mystery is. I think perhaps the mystery wasn't complex enough to be carried out across three books. Three stars for that. So we've had like, what did we have? We had a five star, okay, the love of my life. I'm still not over it. Don't talk to me about it. We had a two star and we had a three star. So this wasn't that successful and we had a five star, but like this series is just like perfection. This is why I don't finish series because I just don't, I don't think they ever live up to it. Well, they do sometimes, but series are hard and the series are easy to start, but they're very hard to continue because you have that risk of like a disappointment. I hope you enjoyed this video even though it was all over the place. I do not want to come and edit this because like I don't know what my life has been. How is it taking me this long to read these books? We'll never know. But thank you for watching. I'm about to start some new vlogs, which I'm excited for. I'll see you very soon in another video. Bye.


This is Stadium in 60, a quick update on the Titan's new stadium. The new Titan Stadium is being designed with sustainability in mind. Most stadiums built in the 1990s were designed to last 30 years. This stadium is being planned with a much longer lifespan in mind. Adam Neuse is a Titan's Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer. This is a legacy project that is going to be something that is going to impact generations to come. And when you think about that, you think about functionality, long term, sustainability, long term. Some of that comes from the fan experience, not just for our kids, but our kids' kids. Kellan DeCorsi is the Titan's new stadium project executive. You know, for the Titan's organization to have a home that the Titan's fans can just embody and own and have that home field advantage every given Sunday, I think is amazing. But then just what it means for the events on the next level to have these events that we don't get, March Madness, college football playoffs, a Super Bowl, hopefully, those are things that I'm just so excited about. Nashville's rising, but this will take us to the top. For the latest news, visit titansnewstadium.com.


All right, let's get started. Hello, everybody. My name is Gaurav Gupta. I am a BVF engineering for cloud and infrastructure for a company called Snapdeal. And in this presentation, I want to talk about the journey that Snapdeal took from moving from a public cloud to a hybrid cloud based on OpenStack. So what are we going to do in the next 45 minutes? I'm going to try to give you a brief introduction about who we are, what do we do, to get you an idea on why did we need to build our own OpenStack cloud, and why did we do that? Also, some technical overview of our Snapdeal cloud. We'll share some key learnings, some insight details about the cloud. And if time permits, we'll go through a brief demo of our infrastructure as a core capabilities. All right. So Snapdeal, we are an e-commerce company. We have one of the largest e-commerce marketplace in India. We have more than 50 million products in our catalog.  We are a marketplace, so we also have a seller base of more than 300,000 sellers who come to our platform to offer their products to the customer base we have. And in the last few years, like I said, we've seen phenomenal growth on our business, on the amount of transactions we are doing on our platform. And we are just getting started. Just to give you an idea, India right now has about 370 million people who are connected online, out of which about 50 to 70 million people are doing transactions. So there is a huge population of people who are yet to come and make transactions online, which is all the traffic that we will receive. If you extrapolate that for a few years, the projection side that we are going to cross are more than 500 million internet users who will be transacting. Most of them will come from mobile, and that's what we are also seeing in our platform. More than 70% of transactions that happens on our site are coming from mobile devices. So what did we do with regards to OpenStack? We built our own cloud. We call it CIRIS. And CIRIS is a private cloud based on OpenStack. We have more than 16 petabytes of storage that we have built for our infrastructure. We are running in three different regions with the capacity of more than 100,000 cores. Our networking is 40 gig from servers going to the Spine node and 100 gig on top of it. So very fast network. And we are doing all of that with 100% automation and deploying everything using Ansible and automation scripts that we have written on our own. We did all of this in the last one year. And then we came out a few months ago when we launched our cloud. We got to know that we are in the top 4% of global OpenStack deployments in the world, which is both a proud moment as well as very nervous to see that we are running such a large OpenStack cloud. But happy to be here, happy to connect with the community. And we would like to get more engaged. So far we've been working in a silo, primarily because there was a large amount of work that we had to do in a very short amount of time. And we are very happy with our OpenStack deployments and like to show some more details on that. We are running in a very high core density racks, more than 3,500 cores per rack in a completely redundant, pod-based architecture. So why did we build a private cloud? So cost was one of the major factor. Like I was explaining before, we are a very large hyper-growth company. And as we saw our business grow, our infrastructure requirements also continued to grow. And our bills on the public cloud side were phenomenal. And it had to sort of, we had to find ways to reduce that bill or control that one. And doing it in the public cloud was very challenging. And when we did the analysis, it was very clear to us that at a certain growth, at a certain scale, public clouds stop being cost effective. They are OK if your growth is unpredictable. When you're starting up, I think one should go to the public cloud and get their business established. But once you hit an inflection point, you need to start looking at some alternative. And for us, it was building our own private cloud. When you do that, the economies of scale also kick in. And then you start getting the benefits of cost. So cost was definitely one of the key reasons for us to start looking at the problem. But how did we make it cost effective? Firstly, our entire stack is built on open source technology. We did evaluate some enterprise technologies like VMware and also open stack commercial offerings, distributions. And when we evaluated the cost of the scale at which we were running, it was very clear that we had to build it ourselves. We had to build it using open source components. We also did that. We also took into account the operational cost of creating a cloud. So we did this with a very small team of engineers who have spent a lot of time in past building enterprise products so that they can understand and embrace what open stack offers. And not just use it, but also sort of understand it and embrace it. So it was very important for us to make sure that the team is appropriate for maintaining, for building this particular cloud platform. And we also converted a lot of our capex into optics. For example, for all the hardware equipment that we are buying, we have taken it on an optics model. We have negotiated power consumption with the collocation provider so that it's all bundled in into the operational cost of the data center. And by doing this, we are able to do apples to apples comparison of what is the cost of running a private cloud versus what was the cost of running, of us running in a public cloud. And clearly, there were cost savings. The next big reason for us to do this besides cost was performance and security. We wanted to get more performance from our infrastructure. And in a public cloud, you are restricted because, again, you're in a shared tenant environment and there's only so much performance that public clouds offer. They can offer you a lot more, but with a very high cost, but it is restrictive for the large scale that we were looking for. So by building our own private cloud, we were able to now optimize for self-use. We are able to put advance security appliances, DDoS prevention, intrusion detection into our data center. So definitely a step up into the security that public cloud offers. And lastly, data sovereignty and compliance was also a big reason for us. So Snapdeal is an ecosystem. We also have a digital wallet, which required us to make sure that all the data that we store, the money that we store in the digital wallet, remains within the boundaries of India. And at that time, the public cloud provider that we were using did not have a region in India. Hence, we had to look at least for that particular application to be hosted within the boundaries. So that was also one of the reasons for us to start thinking of building our own private cloud. So to summarize, these were the four reasons because of which we built it. Cost, performance, security, and data sovereignty. But we didn't stop there. Our private cloud is 100% hybrid. What that really means for us is we have set a definition, and I'll read it verbatim, and then we'll go over that. A true hybrid cloud expands seamlessly to public cloud and abstracts the underlying infrastructure away from the applications. So they can be dynamically assigned and reassigned to run in different parts of the cloud. If some of you might have seen the presentation in the keynote today, where there was a presentation of launching a workload in OpenStack and AWS at the same time, I think what we are trying to do is that on steroids. We practically have a hybrid cloud, which is extended from a public cloud all the way to our data center. And our applications are launched in a seamless fashion on OpenStack-based cloud or this public cloud provider. And the application does not know where they're running. So we have completely abstracted the infrastructure layer from our application layer. And because of these reasons, we are using OpenStack purely as an IaaS provider to us. We are not using a lot of PaaS projects that are in OpenStack because of the limitation that they catered for the OpenStack-based clouds, but not for public clouds. We have written our own PaaS layers on top of OpenStack to be able to do both of these things for us transparently. So why did we do hybrid cloud? One of the main reason is bursting. We are an e-commerce company, and we have seasonal traffic, just like in the United States, you have Thanksgiving. In India, you have Diwali, which is this festive season, it's going on right now. A lot of traffic comes to our side during that time. And we wanted to make sure that we have the capability to burst out in a public cloud if we ever run out of infrastructure in our private cloud. The second big use case for us was disaster recovery. So given that we are now going to be running in a private cloud, we needed another similar data center or an extended region so that we can create a disaster recovery zone. That would require twice the CAPEX, twice the OPEX, for building the particular cloud. But instead, we decided to use public cloud as a disaster recovery zone. Now, everything that we do, all the data, all the applications, are seamlessly copied in public cloud all the time. And if a disaster happens and our primary data center goes down, we will be able to move 100% into the public cloud. All right, so let's jump into some of the technical details. So Snapdeal was born in the cloud. We are about six years old, and we pretty much use all the popular open source projects under the sun. This is not even an exhaustive list. It's something I just put together this morning to just give you an idea that building a cloud for us was more than just building the infrastructure. It was about how do we migrate and run all of these applications in our cloud. And we already are running them in the public cloud. Now we had to first migrate it and then seamlessly run it at that performance. We are also microservices based. So we had 500-plus services running in our infrastructure, talking to each other. And we had to first understand their architecture. We had to understand their dependencies on each other. And then create a mechanism by which we can migrate these applications from public to private without taking a downtime of our business. That was the key requirement for us. So overall, this project for us was only half of it was infrastructure. The other half was making sure the applications are handled properly. So if I look at just our architecture of a single node, of a single server, this is how it looks like. So we are using Ubuntu as our host operating system. We evaluated Ubuntu, CentOS, and we chose canonical in Ubuntu because of its deep integration with OpenStack. A lot of large deployments like ours were using Ubuntu. And so those were some of the reasons. Some of the kernel version and everything was more tested with the OpenStack versions. And then we combined it with OpenStack. We are using Kilo 4. So we are still on a very old release relative to what we have just launched just now. But the reason for us to do that was because we stability mattered more than features for us. And for the reference architectures that we did, for the amount of testing that we did in Kilo, we found Kilo to satisfy our requirements. And for, again, the size of architecture that we had, we wanted to stick with stability. Again, we're using KVM and Kumu as our hypervisor. And all of this is getting automatically deployed using Ansible. So this is the box of our infrastructure. We have the capability today to add hundreds of nodes, physical servers, into our infrastructure in a single day. We are able to create a single pod, a single rack, completely automated, and add it to our infrastructure cloud within hours. And we do that all the time. On top of it, if you look at, we are using CentOS as the operating system for our virtual machines. Given that we are a private cloud, we control the environment, and we have standardized all our applications to run on CentOS. On top of CentOS, the first thing that we do is, we do service discovery of our applications. So we are using a project, open source project called SmartStack, which gives us the ability to do service discovery, as well as load balancing. So in the web world, most of our applications are multi-tiered. And they have a layer of web servers talking to some sort of a database, MySQL, Mongo, Cassandra, whatnot. And then they offer services which are accessed by other services over RESTful API. So this creates a very dense graph of service dependencies. In a public cloud, you would typically have a layer four, layer seven load balancer, running as a central load balancing service. And when service A wants to talk to service B, it talks to the load balancer, and the load balancer distributes the traffic. In our architecture, we have made it completely distributed. So we're running a small HAProxy on every web server that we are launching. And the application running on that server talks to the local HAProxy whenever it wants to reach out. This creates a very distributed load balancing architecture. But again, it has the challenges that now with thousands of nodes, you have to program all of the attributes and all of the endpoints on that particular on each of the HAProxy nodes. So we're using ZooKeeper for propagating that, and Smart Stack as the architecture which is programming this. We're using another open source project called Terraform. This is similar to, if you guys are familiar with heat, this is similar to that. This is the orchestration tool, which is talking to OpenStack and talking to the public cloud for launching the infrastructure. This is, it has integrations with public clouds like AWS Azure, so that from a single pane of glass for us, there is no UI, we are still using CLI. But we are able to now orchestrate virtual machines in different cloud seamlessly. Our application stack is managed by Salt. And we have written our own custom scripts and automation software in Python. So this particular block, the top block is the application stack for us by which we control it. Now this does not contain the application itself, which is going to be on top of it. From the infrastructure side, we have made the OpenStack control plane completely redundant. We are running, this diagram shows three, but in production we are running five independent controllers of OpenStack. We have made sure that our control plane and data plane are completely separate. We do testing like we shut down our complete control plane and then check if our OpenStack cloud continues to stay up. Because a control plane dying should not have any impact on our data layer, which is where all our applications are running. Now that was very critical for us, so we designed it for that. So this diagram shows you that how a whip is transferred from a primary node to a secondary node. This happens transparently. And then all the services are running everywhere. And then most of them, like RabbitMQ and everything, are running in almost all the control nodes. We have designed a highly scalable storage layer as well. And when we were working on our storage design, it was evident that we had to build multiple kinds of storage because one storage was not going to solve all the needs that we had. So the biggest storage that we have is based on Ceph. We have two separate kinds of Ceph storage. One is using magnetic disks. This is the largest Ceph storage we have. And this is primarily used for booting the virtual machines. So all our root volumes come from our magnetic storage of Ceph. And we use them for things like logs, which are, again, low performance, but you require a lot of disk for that. This lowers the cost of running this Ceph cluster. But if any application requires high performance and high redundancy storage, then we also have an SSD Ceph cluster. And yesterday, several talks, Walmart was talking about that, that they have a very similar architecture of a SSD Ceph for high performance applications and storage for high performance applications. And we have a very similar architecture. So this is about 10 petabytes of storage is coming out from Ceph. But we also had a requirement of many applications who needed local SSD. For example, there's a database called Aerospike, which is a low latency key value store. And it requires a raw disk to be given to the database application. And there were several others like that in our environment. So what we've created is a host aggregate where virtual machines are able to get a local SSD as well. If you look at the cost of these two things, the SSD storage is going to be the most expensive storage. So given the size, we had to balance between the two. And for SSD Ceph, we have used a replication factor of 2. For magnetic Ceph, we have used a replication factor of 3. For SSD storage, which is local, we are saying that the redundancy of the data has to be with the application itself. The infrastructure is not going to provide redundancy in case the disk fails. So we've kept the three different kinds of SLA and given it to the applications. Now most of the applications which are using local SSD are already in a cluster and clustered environment. For example, Aerospike has its own replication mechanism by which it replicates the data into multiple nodes. And it can tolerate a node failure very easily. But what is very important when you're doing clustered applications, which is pretty much all the applications that we have, is that you have to be very careful of VM placement. If in a cluster, you ever place two virtual machines on the same host, then when a single node will fail, two virtual machines will die. And most likely, you will have data loss. So what we have extended on top of OpenStack is the capability that when you are launching a cluster, you're defining anti-affinity rules over there. And our anti-affinity rules goes like this. First is that there's an anti-affinity of a pod. Then there is an anti-affinity of a rack. And then there is an anti-affinity of a server. So if I'm launching, say, a six node cluster of anything, let's say MySQL, then first the rule will apply that I'm going to place six virtual machines across six different pods. And the definition of a pod, and I'll come to that in the next slide, is basically a combination of three racks. So if I can find six different pods, I'm going to place these six virtual machines across these pods. So the chances of an entire pod failing is relatively low. But say if I am launching a cluster of, I don't know, 50, 100 nodes, then I may run out of pods. I may not have these many pods available. But I at least make sure that I have redundancy across racks. And you can extend this logic to say, if I can't get that, then at least I will have redundancy across servers. And if that is also not available, then I will fail that operation. I'm not going to go and create a cluster of you, because that is extremely dangerous. So we have used these kind of techniques to make sure that we are able to recover from a single node failure. Moving forward, we also have a very large data lake for our big data platform. We are using HDFS for that. And that is built on using, again, spinning drives. This is petabytes of storage available for our big data platform. As an e-commerce company, we do a lot of analytics on the data that we collect. Every click, every scroll, every view is data for us. And we crunch that.  And that goes in the Hadoop platform. And lastly, we do have a little bit of enterprise storage as well. This is, although we would like to avoid it, but there are some use cases for which enterprise storage works very well. For example, we are using enterprise storage for keeping backups of our data. Data is extremely important for us. And we sort of give in at that point in time and at least store a copy of our data into enterprise storage, and a few more use cases like that. But the use is very, very minimal. One very important thing that I want to point out that I've also sort of spoken with a couple of other companies who build OpenStack is that we're using Chef Storage for our root volumes. So 100% of our OpenStack cluster now boot from volume. That creates a big failure domain and dependency on Chef itself. But so far in our experiments and in our experience, it works reasonably well. And it gives us the flexibility to now do live migration and things like that. So for networking, we're using Clause network architecture. Basically, it's a spine leaf architecture. We have spine switches, which are 100G. And they're going to top up the rack switches for each of the rack that we have, and which are going to the each of the server with a 40G connectivity. This gives us the redundancy that I was talking about. And it also gives a very highly performing network all the way from a server to any other server in the network. This gives us the ability to now use all the storage in the network. We don't require a lot of directly attached storage at all. This also gives us redundancy at any point in time. Even on the top north-south traffic, we have high end load balancers because of the traffic that comes in to our data center.  The three rack that you see per pod is what I was talking about in the previous one. So I just want to quickly show you a high level view of what an application migration looks like for us. This is a very simplistic view. But if you look at on the left-hand side, let's say this is a public cloud view of a single application.  And these app servers are accessing data from, let's say, a MySQL cluster.  So the first thing that we do is we create a replica database on our private cloud. And then we set up replication between them. So this gives the ability now that the data is completely backed up from a public cloud onto our own infrastructure. The next thing that we do is using Terraform, as I was talking about, which is our orchestration layer. We launch a replica of the same application into our own cloud. Now, at this point in time, there are two copies of the same application running. But the data is still being accessed by the primary, which is in the public cloud. We just have a replica with the exact data completely in replication sync. Now, to make that happen, we had to make sure that the process of launching an application is 100% automated because this could not have been done manually. And this is what I will show you in the demo. So from the point that a developer checks in the code to the point that it gets deployed on a server, the entire pipeline is automated for us. Next we do is we open up this application for read only so that we can do basic verification check. You can run simple checks to make sure that the connectivity is there, and then data is consistent. Once the verification step is done, we point the DNS from the primary application to the new application, which is running in our cloud now. And then we blow away the primary copy. Now, at this point in time, the application is pretty much migrated into our infrastructure. After that, we can delete or blow away all the older databases, and then launch a new database, or reuse one of the older ones, as the read copy. This goes back to the disaster recovery use case that I was talking about. For all the databases that are running in our private cloud, there is a copy of the database in the public cloud as well for disaster recovery purpose. So what were some of the key learnings from the entire journey that we had for the last one year to migrate from a public cloud to a private cloud? So first thing is, for OpenStack, on it, don't just operate it. We practically have knowledge of the OpenStack code so that if a problem strikes, we are able to go and debug it, fix it, patch it ourselves. This is very, very important for us, because if it happens at, say, two in the night, there is no way for us to reach out to anybody else and come to come and help us to fix it. Our entire business depends on it. And that's the key learning for anybody who's trying to use OpenStack for production environments, that you have to really own it. It's your code. It's your software. You can't point fingers at anyone. So you need to learn how to fix it as well. Keep it simple. That's what we did, at least. We are not jumping into any of the advanced features, advanced projects of OpenStack yet. We might do that over time. Many of those things, we wrote it ourselves. But our mantra from day one was, we will deploy something that we understand. Design the control plane to be highly redundant. We talked about that. And automate upgrades and tests frequently. And we do that a lot. Our entire OpenStack build is actually, we patch it. We do bug fixes on it. And we regularly put it in production. And in an automatic fashion, without taking any downtime of the infrastructure. So it's highly recommended that you test the part of upgrades because that's going to bite you in the ass when it comes to upgrading to, let's say, a major version or to do a bug fix in production. We've also built a capability to build OpenStack on OpenStack or to launch OpenStack on OpenStack, which basically means that for any time that we want to do a bug fix testing, we are able to launch a brand new OpenStack environment on our cloud itself. So that gives us a lot of ability to do continuous integration and testing. Yeah, this is something that was eye-opener for us. Understand your applications very well. You'll be surprised what's underneath. And we found that a lot. We thought that we knew our applications. We thought they behaved a certain way. But once we did the migration, they didn't work in the first attempt. And there were all sorts of things going on, especially around the dependency graph. There was applications which were bypassing the API layer and talking directly to databases. They would break. There were cron jobs running, which were not part of CI CD. They would break once you do the migration. So there was a lot of learning process for us. And one thing that we did as part of this migration is we didn't migrate as is. We fixed our application, which was running on the public cloud. And then we migrated it. So we then sort of inherited the mess. We cleaned up the mess, and then we migrated it. Then again, automate and monitor everything. I mean, that was the key for us. We were talking about thousands of servers and hundreds of applications. We couldn't possibly migrate it unless we knew what was going on and how they were behaving. So building automation and monitoring on top of it was extremely critical for us. All right, so with this, I'll just give you a quick demo and just walk you through some of the processes of how we launch applications in our own cloud. I'm just going to do a quick time check. So in this demo, what we are trying to do is we are trying to launch a brand new application called Hermes, completely from a CLI and using infrastructure as code. So first thing what we do is we create this thing called a new service on our application, which is basically which creates a YAML file for us, which describes what are the different properties of this application. So right now, we are just saying that it's called Hermes. We've given some email addresses of who's the owner of this application and which group owns the application. And this is the list of our platform, which are basically deployed automatically using the code that we've written. So you are seeing Aerospike, Cassandra, Elasticsearch. So in this particular case, let's say it's a simple Tomcat service. And we will select that particular service and launch it. So over here, what we are specifying is what's the repository from which the code for this particular application will come through. Specifying the port, 8080. And once we see the YAML file that is being produced by that particular script, this is what it looks like. And this is a very simplistic view of an application. But you can see the basic things.  What type is it? It's in an Nginx service. Where is the repository for this application in GitHub? And what ports does it run on? The load balancer port is what I was talking about in Smart Stack when we were running a local lecher proxy. That's for that. And it also specifies what are the minimum number of instances or some maximum number of instances that you need. And of course, the CPU and memory configuration. Now this information, the CPU and memory information, is interpreted by our code. When we are launching a virtual machine, it's going to launch a virtual machine of this particular size. It is also going to keep track of how many instances of this virtual machine of these VMs are running. And it will always make sure that it runs the count that you have specified here as the minimum number of instances. So if you specify that you want a minimum of 10 instances, it's going to track that at any point in time you have at least 10 instances running. And if one dies for some other reason, some reason or the other, it's going to launch it automatically. So in the interest of time, I'm just going to fast forward some of this. So once you check in this particular file, by the way, so in this demo, what we did was we created an application and a MySQL also. So we've combined them together that there is a dependency between the two. And we pushed this file into our infrastructure repository, which creates a merge request in GitHub in GitLab.  I'm going to skip this part. So this is just showing that in Jenkins, it's going to accept it, and it's going to go through the pipeline of running all the CI CD tests, and then accepting this particular merge request, and then giving it to the orchestration code that we had to go and talk to OpenStack or the public cloud to run this particular thing. In the checks, we do things like there is no conflict of ports, whatever you're specifying in terms of the size of the virtual machine, the dependency, the application, they all exist. And in the end, it's going to create a new tenant in our OpenStack cloud. And given that we are a private cloud, we could potentially run everything in a single tenant environment. But what we have done is for each component that we have, it runs in its own tenant network. And it's completely sort of restricted from access from any other tenant. This was done for security reasons, and it was also to make sure that we understand what our applications are doing. So if an application requires to talk to somebody else, it has to be specified in the same YAML file that I was talking about to say, I want to talk to service B on port X, Y, Z, and then the specific security group would be open. So in this particular example, since we were launching a new component, a new tenant environment was launched in OpenStack, and virtual machines were created inside it, and all of this was done using the scripts. So this is showing that now there's a project called Hermes, and we can go inside that. And we can see that there are two virtual machines that got created. One is a MySQL server, and other is a Tomcat or an Nginx. And we can access this particular Tomcat to see if there's any application running on it, which is basically simply showing you that it is an application that is connected to the database it has launched. Now, this entire thing could have been done in the public cloud as well. You could have specified any number of instances. It would have launched that for you. So that concludes the presentation. We can do questions after that. Thank you. Yes? Yes. And we actually understand that challenge. So what we do is we keep ourselves at least in our example, the Kilo train. So we do pull all the changes that are happening in Kilo. And any change that we make on top of it, it's a separate code base. We understand what changed. We are making and what changed what code we are picking up from the community. Now, we actually had that problem when we moved from Kilo 2 to Kilo 4. It was a large change for us. It was sort of a hairy merge for us to make sure that any code fix that we are doing and whatever we are picking up on the community. But at that point in time, we didn't have an option because we didn't want to move to liberty. We made this cloud in a matter of about one year, which meant that there were so many intermediate steps that we did. For example, we launched a Devintest cloud environment first, which went into production earlier around January, February time frame. Now, there was what we did not want to do is we didn't want to launch a production environment on an open stack software that we had not tested. So there were reasons for us to do that because we trusted the code that we were running. We understood the code. And it's going to have challenges when we will move a major version like liberty. But at that point in time, what we will do is we'll create a parallel environment. We will probably install liberty on one of the more stable versions of open stack and then migrate our workloads on top of it rather than doing this. So it's a thing that we understand. But given that what we were doing at that point in time, we found it more appropriate to own it rather than keep on with the latest code. Yes, I think you asked first. On top of SSDs, yes. So many applications are running on top of SSDs. Databases are actually, when you say databases, MySQL is actually not one of them. MySQL is using a local data copy, a local disk, because some of our databases require very high throughput. And a local SSD is going to give you that kind of performance. But many others like Mongo and Cassandra, for example, they are using Cep SSD. There are other examples of databases and also message use like Kafka that are using Cep-based SSD storage. I have a relatively small team. My total cloud platform team is about 25 people. That includes the data center folks as well who go and do racking and stacking and maintaining the physical infrastructure. Yes, then I'll come to that. I don't see, based on the experience that we've had, that there is a certain application that needs to run in a certain kind of a public or a private cloud environment. But if I were to think about it right now, I would say that some of the enterprise softwares like ERPs and Oracle and things like that, they're better suited in a private environment than in a public environment. But that's also changing. For us, what was more important is that our applications are able to run on either of the platform, and that's what we try to achieve. Yes, I can share that a little bit. So like I was telling you, we did migration in a few phases. First, we migrated our Dev and Test environment, which was also fairly large and growing. ROI for Dev and Test data center was only eight months. So within eight months, we were able to recoup all the investment that went in. And from that point on, it was a very small incremental operational cost. For the large production data center that we have built, our calculations of ROI are 1.6 years, which is again extremely, extremely cost beneficial. Yeah, this question here. So the question is that if you shut down the control plane, how will the north-south traffic happen? So we are using provider network. So our north-south traffic, which happens, it goes through a separate network itself. And our control plane network is completely isolated. So even if that shuts down, or there's an issue there, our data plane traffic continues to work. Yes? Somebody had a question? Yes? So why do we do the migration? Because, like I said, we were 100% running in a public cloud. We created a private cloud, and we had to migrate our applications to it. We could not shut down our usage of public cloud and create brand new infrastructure, because our business runs here. So the entire thing had to be migrated, and that migration also had to happen transparently. That means when traffic comes to our site, they don't know where they're going to. But I think that's all the time we have. Thank you, everybody. All right.