when it comes to contracts that are of very high value, so contracts that you could be actually worried about, for example, we would like to buy an apartment, right? And it costs a lot of money and you don't want to have the risk of someone uploading a deep fake, right? So in these cases, the best verification is human verification and we are going to have lawyers on board who are going to go through this and they are gonna verify it themselves to make sure that no one gets harmed by using our services. Hi, this is your host, Sopran Parthian. Welcome to Let's Talk About AI. And today we have with us, Simon Redick, lead blockchain developer at Voigt. Simon, it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, thank you for having me. Tell us a bit about the company Voigt. So, Voigt is basically pioneering when it comes to combining legal services with the blockchain technology as well as the ZK Snarks technology. So essentially we are merging AI blockchain and ZK Snarks into one, allowing users to essentially interact with legal services in a more seamless way. So our artificial intelligence algorithms allow for legal document creation by just having a conversation with the assistant, which is our own AI algorithm. After the conversation is over, we are able to create the legal document and support the user in any way possible. Of course, we are going to discuss how is Voigt going to integrate ZK Snark technology in its solutions, but before that, tell us a bit about what is ZK Zero Knowledge Snarks. Essentially, a ZK Snark proof in general ZK Snarks technology is a technology that allows you to prove something without showing it to the third party. So, usually projects use the ZK Snarks technology in order to provide anonymity in transactions and sometimes for proving that the blocks of the blockchain have been verified. But whereas Voigt took a bit of a different approach with ZK Snarks, Voigt has integrated the ZK Snarks technology into our solutions, not only to help with the transactions anonymity, but to actually enhance user privacy and security in their legal contracts. So what this means is if a user creates a contract through our platform, let's say this is a contract that proves that you're working at some sort of a company and you're earning, let's say $1,000 a month.  But you don't have to show all of the other information of the contract. So for example, you want to lease a car. In order to lease a car, you have to prove your financial eligibility, right? So you come to our platform, you upload your contract, you can generate the ZK Snark proof for your income and for the company that you're working at. And then you don't have to sell out your information to the bank or the other information or to the car dealership, which makes this solution more robust, more secure and generally protects your personal details. Can you talk about what kind of market or industry you are catching to? We are honestly tackling a very big audience, you could say, because we would like to revolutionize the legal sector of, well, at the beginning, one country, but then we'll move on to other countries and in general just revolutionize the legal sector of the whole world. We would like to be a hub where we handle the legal transactions, the legal agreements of all the countries in the world and make it so that no matter where you live, you can still use our platform and help yourself with the legal obligations, right? So if you would like to go to a lawyer, maybe just visit our platform, it's gonna be not only cheaper, but most cases probably more reliable. What kind of adoption of blockchain technologies are you seeing today? So right now this is an infancy stage where most projects do not actually have a real world use case and usually the solutions that the blockchain projects provide, these solutions are usually only for the web-free community, right? So for people that are actually knowledgeable on how to set up your wallet and how to pay for transactions, how to look up your contract, this is all complicated stuff. We at Viatar are taking a little bit of a different approach. We actually would like to not only address people of the web-free industry, but in general, every single human that is out there that has access to a phone that can download the application from the app store and just run our application and there you go, you have your own legal consultant in your pocket, which makes it seamless and you don't have to know a whole lot about blockchain because we handle that stuff on our end. I want to talk about one of the hottest technologies or topics these days, which is generative AI, chat, GPT has made it very, very popular these days. What kind of scope do you see for generative AI in this blockchain space? Well, generative AI is interesting, but it's actually very dangerous as well. So when you are having a legal contract with another party, in a lot of the cases, you are going to have to identify yourself, at least in the basic manner, so we know who you are and who you are signing the contract with, right? So when you have a full, I wouldn't say the centralized platform, like completely the centralized platform, but full online platform, you have to upload your pictures, for example, for the verification now with the generative AI, as we all know, it's actually quite simple to create deepfakes, which in return could cause some trouble, especially in the legal aspect, right? So Viad is investing a lot of money into R&D to stop the deepfakes, but we are also considering other strategic partnerships which could allow us to not be able to, for people not to not be able to actually upload the deepfakes to our platform. So the only way to combat the generative AI is to actually have a better AI and detecting the deepfakes, right? Are you always seeing any abuse or misuse of generative AI for creating fake legal documents? Essentially, when it comes to contracts that are of very high value, so contracts that you could be actually worried about, for example, we would like to buy an apartment, right? And it costs a lot of money and you don't want to have the risk of someone uploading a deepfake, right? So in these cases, the best verification is human verification and we are going to have lawyers on board who are going to go through this and they are gonna verify it themselves to make sure that no one gets harmed by using our services. Of course, it may not be possible for you to share some name, but if you can share what kind of companies, industries or kind of use cases that are leveraging your solutions. Like I said before, our product is focused not only on the crypto native people, but people in general. A good example that some of my co-workers came up with is that sometimes you're getting letters for you to go to court and to handle something or for example, didn't pay enough tax, et cetera. Now, this is very stressful and problematic, especially when you realize that lawyers are extremely expensive. So our way of handling this is, all you have to do is download our Viad application, have a chat with the assistant, explain the situation, upload the scan of the letter that you got and you are going to be handed a solution straight away. If the algorithm itself is not able to provide you with a solution and step by step guide on what to do, then in that case, in the extreme case, we are going to be connecting you with a real time lawyer that's going to explain everything step by step and this way, you are sure that you're not gonna be left behind and that you're not gonna be able to do something, right? You know what you're gonna have to do and it's not gonna be as stressful as it is today. And what do these solutions look like? I would say this is a mix of all. There's going to be a plan, like the legal sector is huge. Everyone realizes that it's not only, by answering questions, you cannot really solve a lot of problems in the legal sector. So we have to be ready to deliver all kinds of services that will fill the holes and create the whole legal sector ecosystem that we are dreaming of. So there is the legal document creation, creating proofs of the documents, very high standard verification of your identity, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many layers to it that it's easy to get lost, but for a user that just comes on our platform for his everyday needs, the platform is extremely easy to use because you just open the app and straight away you have the dialogue and you can go ahead and ask him any question. Since we were talking about AI and I want to go back to that question again, what kind of AI are you using internally? Essentially what we are using is a combination of machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms usually solve the easier problems, right? The easier problems, whereas the deep learning algorithms or creating the neuro model, these models usually handle the big stuff, right? So for example, for example, as a company that handles legal stuff, we have to be able to access all of the law that is currently in place at a certain country. So in a lifetime, we do have web sockets open that are scraping the data for all of the newest laws that appear in every country. And thanks to our proprietary algorithms, many deep learning algorithms, we are able to filter out all of the text and actually find out what you can do in a certain country, what you cannot do and what you have to do in the case of X, right? But we do also have algorithms other than ours, right? ChargeGPT for example, right now we are talking about, talking with another company about algorithms allowing us to resolve disputes between people. So the scope is huge and it's at the core, it is our proprietary algorithms, but they are boosted by all sorts of different algorithms that in combination they just essentially create via it. Are you serving only the local European market or you're looking beyond Europe as well? We are gonna be tackling one country right now at the beginning. I'm not gonna be able to say which country yet but it's going to be released very soon, where we are going to be in talks with the government to essentially add our services to the everyday administrative life. But in the future we do aim for our platform to work essentially everywhere in the world. Simon, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about the company and I would love to chat with you again soon, thank you. Thank you very much, thank you for having me.


Awesome already. Sorry for the wait everybody. How's everyone doing? Yeah, that's the most energy I've seen in a room all day And I hope we keep it up. Whoo All right, so my name is Katie Lampkin I am a PM at Intuit a platform and open source. I focus on our CICD platform So that's grant that scans from Jenkins all the way through Argo CD and Argo rollouts today Our presentation will be on click-free environment promotion with application sets and progressive sinks now allow Michael to introduce himself And I'm Michael Crenshaw. I am a back-end software engineer at Intuit on our Argo CD team That means I help keep our 50 instances of Argo CD running in about 20,000 applications sinking I also contribute heavily to Argo CD in the open source world Great, so let's go over our agenda really quickly today So we're going to cover today's problem statement, which happens to be our promotion strategy We're going to talk about the goals that we want to accomplish in fixing our promotion strategy What potential solutions are out there today and the solution that we are going to be discussing today Which is application sets and progressive sinks So just a little bit about Intuit right Michael alluded to a little bit of the scale at Intuit But Intuit is a very large company that powers very large platforms as you can see we have over 2,000 services and over a thousand teams that Run and power those services. So that means developer innovation and developer productivity is Extremely important to Intuit and you can see since 2019 We've had a 9x increase in developer productivity, which is great, but we don't want to stop there We want to continue finding what those pain points are for our developers Continue making sure that we can reduce that toil increase developer delight and see what we can do about continuing to improve our metrics So what problem are we going to focus on today? So let's take a look at today's promotion strategy, right? Like I alluded to previously our CI platform is Jenkins with a series of groovy scripts And we combine that with Argo CD and that is our promotion strategy today So what does that mean when an application developer wants to deploy their service to Kubernetes? They get a Jenkins pipeline that contains not only their build But every single step that they need to deploy to their individual environments dev test stage prod Sometimes there's a perf environments development teams also have the ability to create custom environments as well If that fits their use case so as you can see they're going to be many steps in this Jenkins pipeline And when they're ready to deploy to those environments We call Argo CD sync via CLI and invoke Argo CD to make those changes against those environments Now what are the downsides that are causing pain points with our developers? So no auto sync this process involves manual effort from our developers, which is not something that they want to do no get-ups We have a situation where a developer can't necessarily check get and see exactly what's running in these individual environments And we have these long complex pipelines, right? So I talked about that in the beginning and what are the pain points behind these long pipelines? Well, if a developer wants to go and introduce a change to these pipelines, which they often do for example Adding in a series of integration tests. They want to execute an E to E adding performance tests in perf Maybe it's adding security scanning at a certain level because this application is really important to our company And we need to make sure it's secure Well, when you have these long pipelines and you go in and you make these changes It can be very difficult for developers to make those changes and in return when we are executing these pipelines And we're actually deploying to these environments These build logs can be thousands of lines long and so developers troubleshooting failed builds failed deploys can take hours and Ultimately, they may not be able to do this by themselves and they'll have to reach out to a platform support team to assist them For our CI team 60% of our support requests today are necessary for troubleshooting failed builds So that's an undesirable non self-service experience for our application developers So what are our goals? What do we believe we need to accomplish in order to help relieve these developer pain points? Less manual toil, right? We want to increase developer productivity and that means removing that manual toil from that workflow Synchronization across all environments, which goes hand-in-hand with a get-offs declarative strategy We want to be able to say hey What's in git is what is across all of our environments and all of our environments should be the same and on the same version And finally we want automatic failure detection and we want an easy process for developers to troubleshoot these failures So what are some potential solutions? app of apps with sync waves great potential solution But unfortunately, you know with some industries that are heavily compliant You require an option you require an option for human approval and app of apps with sync waves does not allow for that option There's also no single manifest to define that strategy. So you're still in a position where you need to manage multiple manifests Cargo as I'm sure you guys have heard there is a great new open source project called cargo It has an awesome feature set also could be more than you need and Finally the topic that we are going to talk about today appsets and progressive syncs It's easy to adopt if you're already using appsets, which I know a lot of you are as I've already talked to you at the end It has advanced promotion strategies all located within a single manifest and it's already built in the Argo CD So when you're using Argo CD, you get these features right out of the box And I'll hand it over to Michael to talk a little bit more about application sets So as Katie said a lot of y'all know a lot about application sets already But for those who don't know I'll take a minute just to give a refresher Application sets are a CR custom resource just like applications And it's all about drying out the application manifest management in other words You don't want to have a bunch of application manifests When you could express things much more simply So an application set basically defines a source of truth. It can either be static or dynamic And that source of truth produce a list and that list is templated over what basically just looks like an application manifest So the sorts of things that you can do with that are have an application Automatically generated for every cluster that you have configured in Argo CD And that's useful for things like deploying cluster add-ons like it into it We deploy Argo rollouts and pneumaflow to every single cluster and rather than having to create a new application Manifest for every single one of those 200-ish clusters. We have We can write one application set and it can just create all those for us Something else you can do is make your developers lives easier One of the generators available for application sets is called the get directories generator So if you have a mono repo with all of the manifests for a certain teams or even the whole organizations Applications you just have one directory for each application and each directory contains your manifests The applications that generator can loop over those directories create all your applications point them to the appropriate directory And now your applications just exist automatically That lets developers self-serve they can create and delete those directories at will And it just happens for them like like magic. No manual creation and deletion of application manifests I see people nodding and laughing like this is an excellent idea. I love to see that It really does make life so much easier So I'll give a quick demo. It's so much easier to tell what a feature is when you actually get to see it in action So here I have an application set. I want to make it full screen, but I can't oh this thing's huge anyway So let me pause. I've got a generator, which is just a static list That could be something much more dynamic like a git generator cluster generator, etc But for here, I've just statically defined my dev and e2e environment So that's what I loop over and it's templating that information into an application manifest So I'm get off seeing my app set manifest I sync it you see two applications were created as child resources and Now they're created in the main interface where you'd expect to see them And I just go and manually sync them since I didn't define any particular sync strategy for this And I'll also click in and show you what the application looks like. It's just a service and a deployment So a really simple API If I want to make a change I want to add a new application or a new environment I do that just by going to git doing everything get off style. I add my new environment just in that list and check that in and Again in in a real environment these clusters would probably be defined as like Argo CD cluster secrets So you wouldn't be doing this in git. It would just happen when you register a new cluster in Argo CD But for the sake of just showing how it works you see that we've added a new environment That's the only line in the diff. I hit sync and now we've got our three applications super easy and Mainly it's just easy to understand you can look at that apps that manifest and know precisely what's gonna happen There are no secrets and no surprises So that's application sets That's everyone who's already used application sets over and over again and knows what it's about you can wake up now because this Is the new goodness Progressive syncs are a way to orchestrate the applications that are generated by application sets and you saw a second ago I just had to manually click sync to synchronize those apps with progressive syncs That just happens for you and it lets you gate each stage of synchronization each application or group of applications By healthy status this means that any application that you currently deploy That has the ability to go into it like progressing or degraded state is Supported out of the box by progressive syncs so things like deployment stateful sets Ingresses all of the things that are go CD supports out of the box with health checks and anything that you can create a health check for Which is any customer resource Progressive syncs can support and the way it works is we sync a particular step We wait until that app or group of apps becomes healthy And then we move on to the next step and sync those and so on and so forth So at each stage you're sure that what is actually being synced is safe to sync because the previous environment has confirmed that for you So again much much better to see it in action than just talk So I've got another get ops application set manifest and this time I've defined this new field called Strategy and then under that roll out sync and you can see I've defined three steps For the three different environments that I'm going to deploy to and each of these environments targets a particular label that I've defined on the Application so kind of a typical way people organize applications put a label on it. We're taking advantage of that pattern here So once I've synced it you see that all three apps were created and now the magic is happening so that first one is being synced it became a healthy now e2e is going to start syncing magically and that's going to become healthy as Well, and then the third application goes start syncing and becomes healthy, and I didn't click anything It just happened for me Well, I clicked sync on the application set, but you could still automate that and make that update through some automation So now I'm going to show you making a quick change Probably the most common type of change that you're ever going to make in your applications bump an image tag And in this case, I've just defined it as a value and the helm values block like Argo CD image updater edits that field So it would automatically do that Allow you to use this progressive sync feature So you can see the only change is just bumping that image tag. I hit synchronize again That could be automated, but now it starts syncing the new image tag goes to progressing and then eventually to healthy and This image tag tag 0.2 has no bugs has no issues So it is going to progress all the way through all of the steps and synchronize all my applications all the way through prod Again safely at every stage. I know that the previous stage became healthy before I synced And so I'll just pop into the app to confirm and convince everyone the image tag has been updated.  That's maybe the simplest version of progressive syncs This one is a bit more like what we do it into it And we actually use this to deploy the metrics extension server that Leo demoed a couple of talks ago We use progressive syncs to deploy the same server to every single cluster add into it And I'm going to simulate that here You won't see our actual production setup because it's like hundreds of apps, but here. I've just created eight Items in this list. I've put two apps in the development environment Two apps in the development environment three apps in Ede three in prod And I wanted to pause here and point out one more field that I said Which is this? Max update field. So sometimes when you're syncing a bunch of applications at once Maybe you have a cluster that is sensitive to like lots of churn And you want to slow things down for a particular step This lets you say only sync one app at a time or you can use percentages to and say only sync 10 percentage 10% of my apps at a time So now that I've defined the strategy I've defined three ways. I'll go ahead and sync up this app You can see eight apps were created two on the top are dev And then we've got a row for Ede and then a row for prod which you'll see when I scroll down those first two apps synced simultaneously, so that's already a difference from the previous demo and This wave has been configured with max update one So each of these apps is going to synchronize one at a time and then finally we go to prod which is going to synchronize simultaneously and In this case, I've deployed a change which is Safe, so everything's just going to be deployed out with no problems And this is just super pretty to watch like I've been given permission to quote Leo saying that like just loves this feature for deploying the metric server It's just satisfying to watch it go through the waves and everything deploy safely and correctly So I'm going to bump an image tag this time I'm going to cheat a little bit and break one of the tags. So I think the tag for Team either four or fives application for Just so you can see what happens when stuff breaks in a progressive sync, but the other one's still the same I'm just bumping the tag to point to If you notice there was some templating going on in there. That's a feature an application set I won't detail that too much, but you can template stuff with go template and app sets So again, everything goes out of sync the first wave starts syncing Simultaneously and it's going to become healthy because the point two tag as we saw earlier is fine and safe In this case we go one by one again the first one goes healthy This is the one I broke and I set a progressive progressing deadline for five seconds. So very quickly It's degraded and now we stop and in this case It's a bit like if you had an application that went to a degraded state You want to have an alert something to let you know something went wrong and then you go back you make your change It's going to work its way all the way through those waves again And eventually you're going to you're going to deploy a safe and successful change So that's what all that looks like. I'm going to pass it back to Katie this sort of Recap what this actually solves for us So wow Right, I mean within 20 minutes. We solved all of our problems It's huge Michael's a genius But really this solution has solved a lot of the pain points that we had previously right and just to cover a few You saw that, you know, we press the sync button. We can automate that but besides that sync There is no manual a toil for the developers have to deal with right and that has at increases developer delight by ten fold Right that increases our delight by ten fold. So that's huge The other biggest pain point was the automatic failure detection and the ability to troubleshoot failures throughout this process Which as you could see using the Argo CD UI is extremely self-service and very straightforward to see that broken heart Which we all fear but are all able to look into and actually determine what was that failure We can recover and we can do it seamlessly while reducing our support requests and making it more self-service Right and finally one of the biggest things at all One app set manifest, right? We all deal with thousands and thousands of lines of yaml It is a problem for us is a problem for application developers And so the fact that we can reduce that and manage everything with one application set manifest is a huge win Maybe we should have titled the talk don't fear the broken heart like boys recall Katie mentioned I'm a genius I should point out quickly that the person who wrote this features Matt Groot from LinkedIn and this whole thing came out of a Discussion we had at the first in person Argo con in Mountain Dew And then like people have built on it from there So a lot of hands have gone into building this things you need to know about where the feature is as far as application sets go They're GA. They've been around a long time. They're in good shape Progressive sinks is in alpha I chatted with someone in the hall who's given it a try they encountered a bug You're gonna encounter bugs, but the fact that we've had a few reported means that people want this they're adopting it And I'm really excited to get more bugs. So I hope you all will give it a try and submit tons of issues As far as future enhancements go UI support could be better like I sort of contrived an example where we can have these nice three rows of Applications we need something where like the UI just groups those for you no matter what Collection of applications you have and tells you here's your steps. Here's your max update setting Regina Voloshine is already working on an application set support for the UI. They're open PRs It's a big task, but it's underway, and I think that progressive sink support would be the next step Something else we could do is provide reverse order app deletion So people use app set progressive sinks a lot because they have dependencies and sometimes you want to unwind things in the opposite direction So you don't have dependency conflicts. I'd like rollout analysis that is beyond just what you can do with health checks It would be really nice to do arbitrary analyses to make sure your application is functioning Well and potentially stop a progressive sink Technically you could write a custom CR and put a health check on it to do that for you We might want something a little more powerful than that Or a little more built-in maybe and then finally shared rollout strategies for multiple apps sets This is another one There's already an open PR in order to drive things out Maybe you have one strategy that you love and you want to make available to other teams This would give you the ability to create a CR build one update strategy and let people use it across However many application sets that you want And as Michael stated these are the enhancements that we're currently thinking about right now And that have currently been brought up in the open source community today for this feature for this alpha feature We would love to continue to hear feedback from you guys. So please participate in issues within GitHub participate in CNC of Slack Reach out to us if you want to have conversations with us. We are very approachable people. We don't look very intimidating But you know whether if you want to see us in person in the halls here at Argo con or cube con reach out to us over CNC of Slack As you can see into it is also really big and open source So if you want to keep up to date with what into it does an open source whether be with the Argo project or other open source project please scan the QR code and follow us on into an open source LinkedIn and Finally if you thought this was just the greatest talk of all time Please give us feedback via this QR code. Otherwise. Thank you so much No, just kidding if you we would love to hear your feedback all good and all opportunities for improvement So please submit your feedback for this QR code here on the right. Thank you so much everyone Good canaries can kind of be embedded in this So if you're using an Argo rollout and you've got a canary strategy set up It already knows how to mark itself is degraded if something goes wrong Progressive sinks gonna notice that it's degraded and it'll behave exactly how you saw when I intentionally broke one of the apps So sort of layers on top of it, and that's the power of health checks for for progressive things Good question, so the question is is it possible to have a soaking period for example? I have something run for a week and then promoted after a week I'm not sure that I've recommend progressive sinks for something that's going to be that long living Because I want the state and get to be very close to the state in live I would move that back to CI if you're gonna have a whole week For a shorter period of time, there's currently no feature to add a soaking period I could imagine hacking on something that has a health check that doesn't go from progressing back to healthy for a certain period of time You could hack in a CR that does that So it's possible, but not a built-in feature You had mentioned air gaps being a deficiency in Argo CDs app of apps Do you see air gaps in this solution? And I guess I was wondering where do you see that kind of fit in if it does I miss the first part you mentioned app of apps Oh air gaps, so meaning like an approval process like maybe everything progresses and accept production Yes, yes, I didn't didn't demo that but basically you can define a step that doesn't automatically sink It just says wait here and then someone else has to hit the sync button in order to proceed So you could definitely auto-sync it all the way up until prod and then have someone human click that Hi, thank you for the talk. Does this work with an app sets in any namespace or? Absets in any namespace. Yeah, it should just work Yeah, that I'll try it out brand new feature 2.9 was released this morning last night depending on exactly when it hit That has absets in any name space and this should work for that You showed the the rollout hitting the failure point and stopping So when you fix that does it automatically continue or do you need to now start over from the beginning? It depends on how you fix it I think that the way you'd probably want to do it is go back fix the image because this is like sort of a bug in the Image issue. I think you'd want to roll it all the way through Yeah, if you're gonna bump an image tag you you have to update it all the way through and it is gonna take some time Yeah, so if it was just something like hey the image wasn't available After a while it may fix itself and then continue rolling forward without intervention Yeah, if you if there's some manual intervention you can do to unblock that one app Yes, it will just continue progressing the moment it hits healthy It'll just go on like like it would have from the beginning and then one other thing was I think from the demo I've got this though is that you were you were showing this is a multi environment with the implication of multi cluster So the the implication here is This would need to be run from a single Argo control plan to achieve that, right? You wouldn't be able to do a single one per cluster correct app sets are scoped to an Argo CD instance So this has to be per Argo CD instance. Thanks. You probably do some kind of magic to deploy apps across instances, but you know You mentioned the progressive isn't an alpha states Would you recommend it for production instance of Argo CD or would this be experimentation for now? Well depends on how production production is Our our team we kind of know what apps at progressive sinks is so we're willing to use it for Production things for us. I would not pass this to other into it teams yet I would want to see it a little bit more stable. Thank you The question is can you gate it with outside approvers? And you want to do that outside of Argo CD In my opinion you always gate approval and get it always starts in get I dislike solutions where you have to use some external system and hack some communication between it and Argo CD Yeah, I think I think you have to have that approval all the way back yet You know someone has to approve the PR. Adds Argo CD Argo CD sinks. What's in get it has no concept of Is this a person who is allowed to? Synchronize this part of the application set Technically it has our back. You can have some person who's allowed to hit the sync button to initiate a progressive sink Maybe but in my opinion it all starts in get if you have to gate who is allowed to merge that PR I mean get gets your state. You got a you got to make sure the right people are merging application sets currently can't have Different types of sources due to the limitations of the templating system. There's an open PR Jeffrey muceli has put in a lot of work to provide a way to have both helm and customized in a single app set That's 2.10 territory We might be about to have to jump off stage Yeah, please find us. We're happy to continue answering other questions after the talk. Thank you. Thanks so much


So what if I told you that you can make a lot of money online by binge watching TV shows and movies on platforms like Netflix and HBO, Hulu, Disney Plus, and whatever the other platforms out there for media streaming? Well, that's exactly what I've been doing for the past couple of years, making a lot of money online over six figures every year from watching a lot of TV shows and a lot of movies and using it in a way that I'm gonna share with you in this video today. So I know I'm gonna get crucified for this, right? By the hustle crowd, you can't make a lot of money. If you watch TV, right, you can't watch Netflix, if you wanna be successful, I don't think that's true because it's helped me make it to make a lot of money online. And in this video, I wanna reveal to you how you can do the same, how you can binge watch TV shows and movies and turn that into a sales machine for you and your business. So let's dive right in. Now to make this work, there is one requirement and that is that you need to be creating content somewhere. It could be a social media platform, it could be an email list, but you need to be creating content. Now my preferred platform, as you probably know, is email. I do a lot of different social media content as well, but it's all repurposed from the daily email that I send out. So pick your social media platform. I recommend if you don't have an email list, start with social media and start posting content and building an audience there. That is the requirement in order to make this strategy work that I'm about to share with you in this video. Now one quick thing, if you're a writer and you wanna start building an audience and creating content on the best writing platform, I think the best place to start is on Twitter. I have a tutorial around how to grow on Twitter fast and grow an audience there. So I'll link to that below in the description. You can check that out if you're interested. So back to the video. How do you actually turn these TV shows, right? How do you turn your binge watching habit into money in the bank for you and your business? Well, most people when they watch TV shows and movies, they're just mindlessly watching for entertainment, right? When I was in college, I used to be able to sit on the couch. I wasn't a fraternity. I'd sit on this dark brown couch and just watch hours and hours of TV every single day. I remember I watched Breaking Bad five seasons of Breaking Bad in five days. So we watched entire seasons every day for five days and we finished the entire season and I actually watched Breaking Bad three times now all the way through. So I spent a lot of time in college and even after college and even now watching TV. And in college, I didn't really use this strategy. I wasn't creating content. So I was just mindlessly watching and being entertained by the TV show. And basically in a vegetative state, just watching and staring at the TV for 12 hours a day. And that's what most people do. And that's not what I'm recommending you do here.  So don't be like most people. Don't be like me when I was in a fraternity in college and just watch 12 hours of TV without any benefit to you. I want you to turn your brain on as you're watching TV and movies. And the way that you're gonna do that is what I'm gonna share with you next. So here's what to do.  I have an iPhone, but if you have an Android or whatever phone you have, that's totally fine. And I want you to take out your phone and pull out your notes app. So on my iPhone, I just have the Apple notes app. If you don't have a notes app, go download one for free from the app store, whatever phone you're using and create a note in there called idea file. Now what you're gonna do with this idea file is whenever you are consuming anything, right? A TV show, a movie, a podcast, a reading a book or something you're listening to on the radio that catches your attention, right?  These are all ideas that you can use for content, for products, for emails, for social media posts. And each of these posts or pieces of content can generate a lot of sales for you. So for example, I have a lot of different products and programs and services and consulting that I do around digital products and email marketing, email copywriting. So whenever I'm watching a TV show, for example, last week I was watching the new season of Lucifer or I opened up my idea file and I just jot down anything that comes to mind. So I have 34 email ideas, I'm looking at my computer here, everything around vulnerability and psychology, decision-making, human desire and emotion. I have 34 ideas here that I can use for different emails and social posts. And each of these different emails and social posts can generate hundreds if not thousands of sales each. So you can see what I'm doing here. You can see the strategy, right? I have a way to capture the different ideas that I'm having from consuming different TV shows and movies and pieces of content on podcasts or YouTube videos or whatever it is, right? Reading a book and I'm taking all these ideas and I'm using it to create content that relates whatever I'm selling or whatever I'm offering to that TV show or that movie or that thing that I'm consuming. So I've been using this strategy for about the last year and a half, two years and I can directly attribute multiple six figures in sales for my products and programs to different ideas and emails and pieces of content that I've created from watching shows on Netflix and HBO and watching movies and turning that into pieces of content and emails. And that's the entire strategy and process there, right? I'm consuming different TV shows and different movies and podcasts and books. I have an idea file to capture the different insights and ideas and stories that come through consuming. And then I turn those different ideas and insights into sales generating content and emails for my business that sells my different products and services. So this is how I binge watch Netflix and HBO and Hulu and I make a lot of money from it online. I take all these things that I'm consuming and I turn it into content that actually makes me money.  If you know how to leverage it. Now the first step for you is if you're not already creating content online, make sure that you start creating content and building your audience now because it takes a while to get started. But once it gets rolling, this is the most powerful thing you can do, right? Create content, build your audience. And then once you start doing that, get in the habit of capturing your ideas, using the strategy I just laid out here from anything that you're consuming in your life. So that's it for the entire Netflix binge watching strategy for making money online. If you guys enjoyed this, give me a like and also comment below what TV show or what are you consuming now that could be turned into money making content for you and your business. Let me know below in the comments, I'd love to hear from you. Also, if you wanna learn how to turn the content that you are consuming into emails that sell and content that sells, make sure you join my free Facebook group, email marketing rain makers. In order to join, just go to email rainmaker.com that's gonna take you directly to the group where you can join for free. And you'll learn how to write emails that sell from these different ideas and different things that you're consuming. So that's it for this video. Hope you guys got some ideas for yourself on this and I'll see you next week. Take it easy.


So, up to this point we have programmed our objects by dragging scripts directly into them. But you should probably also know how to control multiple objects from a single script. Now if you know you're only going to control position, rotation, and scale, you could probably use transform variables. But today I'm just going to show you game object variables instead. Right now we just have a basic rotate script attached to this object here. But what if we wanted to control a different object from this script? Well it's easy. Remember, any time you want to control something, you make a variable for it. We want to control an object. So our variable is going to be a game object. And just to make it easy for you to see, we are going to name it Anna. Because last time I went to a Starbucks, Anna made awesome coffee. So save and in the inspector, drag whatever object you want to control into your game object variable. Okay, so this code controls the object it's attached to. That's why when we run the game, the only thing that spins is itself. But how do we get this code to affect the object that we've dragged into our variable? Well here's the trick. You add the name of the variable to the front of the code. And now if you run the game, you will see that this object is being controlled even though it doesn't have any scripts attached. If you drag a different object into that variable, that object will be affected by the code instead. Now this is useful because if you have an object with many moving parts, instead of programming and dragging code into each part separately, you can create one code that controls the movement for everything. Anyway, hope that helps. And as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.


Hi, welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman here from the Wikibon office in Marlboro, Massachusetts and really excited to introduce a new member of the Wikibon team to the community. Joining me all the way from across the pond is Steve Chambers. Some of you on Twitter might know him as Stevie Chambers. Steve, thank you for joining me today and welcome to the Wikibon team. Thank you very much for the warm welcome, Stu. It's great to be here.  Well, I've been coming after you for a couple of years, so you've had a really interesting background. I want to talk about where things are in cloud, but first I want you to really introduce a little bit on your background, especially as we talk about this whole cloud thing as to where you got into it and what your journey's been for the last few years. Yeah, I'm absolutely happy to do that. I think I would never have thought that 20 years ago I would have been a mainframe systems programmer of the early tender age of 21 and how that would have been relevant to cloud computing today. Maybe that'll come clear during this call, but I started life in the banking industry and then I joined this kind of crazy startup called LaoCloud with a guy that you might be familiar with, Mark Andreason. They were doing this kind of interesting thing where they would run the infrastructure, not let anybody dictate how they did that and then give the customer this nice easy front end to consume it and a very prescient name in LaoCloud. So that was kind of my early introduction to what year was that because everybody says that cloud started with Amazon in like 2007. I think they definitely created the infrastructure as a service market, but before then LaoCloud was around late 90s. I think it was split up and acquired by HP and ADS around 2003, something like that. If I can just comment on that, it's the old what we used to call the XSP market back in the 90s and it's funny. I remember in the early days of cloud why did those XSPs failed and security was a problem and networking, which both you and I have some background in, was a real challenge and we'll get into that as we talk about cloud as are we still having those same problems. But sorry, let's please pick up the conversation, just good stuff. Absolutely, because what we were doing at LaoCloud was we were doing a lot of scripting and automation behind the scenes to allow applications to scale out. That was a kind of new idea in that days. A lot of the cloud, not cloud, the hosting providers in those days, they would send an engineer into the data center and he would build a server, rack stack and do all that good stuff. What LaoCloud were doing and the software that they wrote of course became Opsware. They were automating a lot of that and in fact customers were allowed to push their own code. It was a brand new idea at the time. But yeah, you're right, we still had a lot of challenges. For example, we did a lot of work with the UK government and they had specific security requirements. So there was still a lot of custom stuff at the back. But I moved on from there because this company called VMware was starting this crazy revolution called virtualization and nobody believed it would work. I remember people saying all that long time ago, it's just a fad Steve, it will never work. Who would want to virtualize servers? What's the point in that? Of course, history has told us a different lesson and it's amazing to think, I joined you 2004, joined VMware but it would been going for a few years since then. But history tells itself what a dominant thing they did. Yeah, funny Steve, you think back, you started with mainframe. Well, mainframe invented virtualization. I remember, I started working with VMware back in 2002 and right. At first, people thought it was some weird Linux derivative or they didn't really know what to make of it. And of course, no, it couldn't work. I mean, because especially, I remember when they came to us and they said, we've got this cool new thing. It ended up being called vMotion eventually and they're like, we can move a workflow without anybody knowing. And it's like, we say in tech, there's no FM, right? There is no silly magic, I guess would be the F or FM. But of course, VMware has been amazing, what they've done and you were there through some of the early days. And now, of course, VMware is a significant player in the whole cloud conversation. But go ahead, pick up from VMware. Absolutely. I mean, the company did a fantastic job and there's many a story about VMware. I think what's interesting though is certainly, in the UK and across Europe, I would say a lot of the Europeans are quite cynical when it comes to new technology, perhaps a little bit less easy to embrace brand new things, right? So just think about cloud, just leaving that to one side of the head at the moment. One of the things we had to do back in the early VMware days was convince enterprises that they would not only benefit from things like virtualization, but there were barriers that could be overcome. Just one simple example that I got every single place that I went was in North America in Europe was when you have to speak to the networking guy. So this server virtualization also introduces things called the virtual switch. So you have to go to a network guy and say, hey, I want a trunk port from your switch that you manage into this server, which had never really been done before. And they were like, no way, that's crazy. I'm not having server guys. And we started to see the silos emerging, these enterprises and think we're going to have to win over each one of these enterprises, the management people, network people, the storage people. You see what I mean? All these different people were brand new to virtualization and we won them over bit by bit. And that for me is kind of similar to cloud these days because this is also changing the way these traditional silos do their jobs. So you come in up against, it's a different barrier, but you still get the barriers in the organization. And sometimes now you get the virtualization guys who didn't exist 10 years ago, the virtualization guys are saying, hey, I'm not sure these public clouds are good idea. I've got all this flexibility on premise, how times change. Oh gosh, Steve, you're preaching to the choir on here as I've often said, it's a general saying we have, especially in the networking world is that the technology stuff is pretty easy. If you take the seven layer stack, it's always layers eight and nine that trip us up. So the organizational, political that are going to trip us up. And boy, VMware made a lot of things awesome in IT, but we also spent over a decade trying to fix some of those interlocks between networking and storage. And starting to finally get to the end of fixing some of those issues, but boy, it's been a long hard road and created a whole lot of other organizational challenges and other inefficiencies. I mean, hey, quick, so quick question for you. Back when I was in the vendor world, and when I joined the analyst world, we said, the challenge with IT is we spend only about 10 to 20% of our budget on the actual gear and licensing and everything. And we spend the other 70, 80 plus percent of it on keeping the likes on, doing break fix, tweaking everything out like that. The sad thing I'd say is I don't think VMware moved the needle. I don't think we've got any change in the efficiency of IT. Absolutely, I got greater efficiency with some of our hardware, but it seemed like it kind of got made up with having to work a little harder on the storage or the networking of the interlock. And there's new solutions today, I think, that are starting to move that needle. I'm not trying to blame VMware for that change, but I'm just curious your response on that statement. Yeah, I could think of an example of where you could see problems happening, not with virtualization, but how companies were using it and the benefits they were getting. And I remember working with a customer in the US and they had more ESX hosts, VMware hosts, and they had virtual machines, which was really strange because today you get, what, 15 to 30 or whatever virtual machines per host, depending on the host. But they had more hosts because they were really good at deploying hosts, but they were really bad at getting application people to use them. And what was happening was they were going to the application teams and they were saying, hey, come and use this virtualization platform because it saves our team money. And so the application guy is going, well, what's the benefit for me? And so there were many examples like that around the world of where the virtualization benefits were good for one team, but they asked another 15 teams around them in IT to change the way that they operated. So those barriers were kind of interesting. So the other thing that I saw as well, and this made me move, believe it or not, and everyone said I was crazy to go from VMware to Cisco in that a lot of the virtualization programs, and especially if you think about today's mantras about software defined and software-led infrastructures, a lot of the virtualization programs founded because the hardware wasn't right. So you had this great virtualization platform that would work really well on the latest and greatest hardware from AMD back in those days and Intel, but a lot of the hardware wasn't configured right, it didn't work right. And then Cisco came out with this, hey, we're going to do the infrastructure underneath differently, and it's just going to be virtualization aware, the network will be aware, the storage will be aware, and the servers will be aware. I thought that was a big change. So I decided to jump to Cisco at that point. All right, great. So we're almost 10 minutes in and we're still, a couple of years back in your career. So all right, VMware, you're doing Cisco, Cisco of course, a huge player in the data center. When they really entered the compute business, even though they weren't looking to become a general-purpose compute platform, really build a lot of the converge solutions out there, build compute with virtualization, really had a huge ripple effect through the whole industry there. So bring us through from Cisco kind of up to the modern day and the roles you played and how cloud played an even bigger part in what you've been doing. Absolutely. So the thing I saw when I was at Cisco was, that's great, that's solving another problem, but of course then another problem appears, right? So they made the virtualization and the service easier, but then it was like, how are you connecting to the business? And we were working on a project for a bank in the UK where it still took a team of 15 bright people from multiple different vendors and partners and from in the customer to build the kind of total solution. And that's where the converged infrastructure market came from. And I think VCE did a great job of taking away another problem of bundling all together under one skew, all the infrastructure you need, all the way up to the hypervisor, don't worry, we've solved all those problems for you. And in fact, I remember just as I was leaving VCE, they were getting so good at that and so fast at it, they were going too fast for customers because customers are used to projects, infrastructure and virtualization projects taking multiple months. And here's VCE delivering this in six to eight weeks. So that was kind of interesting. But again, once you solve that problem, then another problem appears. And that's when we started to get into, you know, we've been delivering these infrastructure projects to service providers, to banks, cloud was starting to emerge. Of course, Amazon have been doing a great job over a number of years. I can't believe it's nearly 10 now. So customers were saying, well, how do I get all those cloud benefits in my own environment? Now we're hearing service providers doing that. We're hearing large banks do that. And I decided at that point to go and join Canopy Cloud to be their CTO to see if I could help solve the next problem, which was how to make cloud easier for a range of customers. Excellent. Yeah, so talk for a minute about just Canopy Cloud, you know, what did they focus on? Who did they target? Where do they fit in kind of that whole cloud picture over in Europe? Yeah, so Canopy, it was a standalone entity, it was invested by Atos, EMC and VMware. You know, if you put those components together, you've got customer base, established markets, established contracts with big companies that are looking to move to the cloud and they're looking to work with a trusted partner because I think, you know, everyone realizes who's tried that or who's thinking about it and those that have done it. There's a lot of risk in moving to the cloud, right? And I think, you know, we've been talking about the hybrid cloud, which I think we'll get to. So what Canopy was doing was saying, look, there are some proven technologies and some proven methods so we can at least give you some cloud capabilities on your own premise. And that's where products like the Enterprise Private Cloud came together. So we built and tested an Enterprise Private Cloud. We effectively simplified it down to a few SKUs.  So effectively, it was making your cloud a lot easier. And then customers were saying, well, I like working with a service provider. In fact, I like hosting my stuff with Atos for example. So we would be doing a service provider cloud for them. And then customers were saying, well, how do I join that service provider cloud with my own premise stuff? And I also like to use Azure, I like to use Amazon or Google. How do I connect those? And so, you know, we've moved through the decades, we've moved through all these problems one by one. And I think we're now a cloud interconnection problem. And that was the one that we were solving at Canopy now to connect the different clouds. Okay. Great. So after Canopy, you went to another very large player in the cloud environment. Let's talk about Microsoft and the Azure group. I've been on record saying that when it comes to hybrid cloud, you know, Microsoft probably has the best story out there. And definitely if you look at just the customer base they have in both on-premises and public cloud, they play both sides of that real well. You know, VMware, of course, great position on-prem, but still early days on the public cloud. Amazon, you know, really didn't even admit that there was such a thing as on-prem until really recently in a real position in the public cloud. And Microsoft really does span both those environments. So bring us through your time at Microsoft. Well, you nailed it. I mean, that's why I joined Microsoft, right? So at Canopy, I realized that, you know, to be fair, I think the marketing was ahead of where the products were at when it came to building a cloud. My personal experience of being a CTO is that it was a struggle to get the components to work well together. I found where to spend quite a lot of money on getting the right brains in the room to solve the problem. And there were indicators like that and quite a few of us, I'm thinking the vendors are not quite there yet, right? If I just followed some of the marketing online stuff from many of the vendors, if I wasn't as cynical as I am with my British cynicism, I would believe it was here today. I would believe that private cloud and hybrid cloud was here today and I could just go and buy it from an online or sweet to sales guy. That is definitely not the case. You can see vendors, I wouldn't say they were pivoting their products, but they're evolving them as we speak, which is a bit of a problem when you're a cloud service provider and you're going out selling a capability almost in line with the way the vendors are developing the products, because if a vendor chooses to go a different direction, you're left holding the baby with a promise and a contract with a customer and, of course, you're executives expecting some revenue. So I looked around and I thought, who's doing this best? And I genuinely believe Microsoft had the right approach in that they had the application and the data parts of the portfolio. So cloud is not just about infrastructure, it's about applications. That's what businesses care about right at the end of the day. They had the ID part down. So they had the Azure directory. That often gets glossed over, but it's incredibly important if you and we have this challenge at Canopy about how you synchronize customers, SaaS applications with their past platforms and their on-premise hell of a challenge to fix doing ID. They also had nice little things like store simple, so they have the cloud converge storage where you have an on-premise unit which connected back to Azure storage, you have the concept of hot and cold. It's almost like a layered model. Microsoft seemed to have an answer for every layer and under Satya's direction, cloud's becoming foremost. You could see them starting to coalesce their architectures together and their applications and I just thought they were going in the right direction. So I think back a couple of years ago, one of the challenges we had understanding kind of that on-prem piece is what's the difference between advanced virtualization and cloud? Microsoft, great story there because they start everything cloud first. They've got the Hyper-V solution, but the code starts in the public cloud and when you get the on-prem version, it's going to be a lot of the same code. It's really the management and orchestration. I'm just curious, do you have a viewpoint as to it sounded like you were saying the vendors are all pivoting and they all had, I've got virtualization and I've got some kind of automation, orchestration, bits that I'm putting together, but in your mind, what's the difference? First of all, I hate to get in the definition of words, but are there private clouds? Is the on-prem version cloud or is it just something that attaches to something outside our data center? Put you on the spot and what's your thought on that whole debate and how that's played? I think a lot of what people call private cloud is advanced virtualization. I really think it is. My interpretation of if something's a cloud or not is I look at it from a user point of view and I look at how I interface with something. I want to use an API because I'm an advanced user, but I want my non-advanced users and business users. One of the things we're looking at can appear is who are the people using the cloud? You have managers giving approvals, you have business people and procurement needing to procure things through your cloud interface. A lot of those functions don't really exist in some private clouds. I think some of the vendors are bolting those things on. If you look at some acquisitions that some vendors have done over the years, they started buying business frontends to put onto their clouds. You can see that they thought that was missing at the end of the day, but I think some of these things don't work well together. You have this advanced virtualization platform in the middle that, yes, you can give Joe blogs a logon and you can go and deploy virtual machines, but do you know what? I think that's fallen out of fashion. Deploying virtual machines, is that really what the cloud's all about? When I was at Microsoft, we ate our own dog food. I was using Office 365 online. I was storing data in the cloud and on-premise. For me, there was the whole cloud application piece, the SAS bit. That's definitely cloud, to any business user. I was at an event yesterday. It was an SME event. I was talking to both consumers of IT and some of the partners that delivered to the SME community, and they just talk about apps. I said to some of the guys, there was one company, they were an audit company. I said, so what kind of virtual machines do you consume? Now, I knew the answer, but I was just trying to be controversial. He's like, what on earth are you talking about? He said, all I need to do is make sure my bookkeeper can access this. All they care about is the applications. I think sometimes in the industry, we're asking the wrong question and trying to solve the wrong problem. People in the industry that we know, Stu, they think moving a virtual machine between on-premise and a public cloud is the panacea of cloud. I don't believe that's true. I think we all need to get to the bottom of really what cloud is. I think the best place to do that is from the consumer's point of view, not from the vendor or the cloud service provider's point of view. Yes, Steve. Once again, boy, we're in agreement because as an infrastructure guy, I've known the only reason infrastructure exists is to serve that application. The problem that we have is there's what we would call the legacy application was built with the bottlenecks and challenges that infrastructure has traditionally had. Wikibon's co-founder, head of research, David Floyer often says databases were designed knowing that there was a disk with this kind of latency. There's only so many checks and locks that a database will set up because it was designed for the infrastructure it was going to sit on. Today, if I can remove those bottlenecks with things like Flash, with really scalable architectures, the applications that I had can't take advantage of it. Wait, what can I build a new application that can just get orders of magnitude more performance and deliver that value back? It's not, oh, who has better IOPS? The user, can they get greater productivity, can they just accomplish a lot more? When we say in the big data space, it's about taking that data that I had and allowing me to create new businesses or get new insights so much faster or just that I couldn't do before, new sources of information. Infrastructure and cloud needs to be an enabler for that application. It's really about that application modernization that's going on, that infrastructure needs to support it is kind of where I look at things and as infrastructure and as cloud, you're the servant for those kind of pieces. Yeah, I don't know, Stu, what do you think? Is it like the human condition where we have to have one answer for every problem? It seems we're not okay having three answers for a business because I know some people who still work in the banking industry and they tell me there is no way these applications are going to move off the IBM mainframe. They run best there, we're really happy with it. We love what IBM are doing with their latest release for the Zed series. We get some parallel security and inspection on the mainframe. Why would we want to move it? But we do want to put some of our new stuff on the cloud, so it's okay, isn't it, to have some mainframe, some on-premise data, some cloud stuff. I think it's fine to have a mix but sometimes when you talk to industry people like you and I, sometimes it has to be all cloud and in fact we've just seen that recently with the UK government that there's some great strides being made towards cloud first policies, except some of the customers are saying we're now getting fed up of this digital by default dogma. So that's what non-technical people are accusing the IT industry of doing. So I think we need to listen to these people. So Steve, there's like a bunch of different points there that we're probably not going to have time to get into but absolutely look. I always look at our job is to help give guidance to the user as to the spectrums of offering. It's not a one-size-fits-all and one of the biggest challenges you have is there's 50 solutions out there and I can't even compare 20 of any of those together because even just take Amazon, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, there's some pieces that line up pretty straightforward and there's others where it's just like there's, can I build something like this on Amazon to compete with that? Sure. Or can I run some of this over here? Yes, but it really is what we always say. It's horses for courses. There are many solutions out there. That being said, sometimes having, I want the default to be this new choice is to help us get over that inertia because this is the way we've always done it and it has sucked, but it works. So can we get people to make that change, take advantage of that opportunity? But some things aren't going to change. Even Amazon, who is the king of saying, it's all going in the public cloud and we're going to do everything. When we pushed Andy Jassy at AWS re-invent with the analyst crew, we're all sitting there, room of analysts in a nice private meeting and we're like, all right, what percentage of Amazon.com runs on AWS? And the answer was most of it because in a deep dark corner somewhere, there's that financial application that runs the company's finances that's not running on it. And it's probably got something that looks much more like what your banking customers have in their data center that they don't want to get up, get rid of. So it's great to say, we all want to be digital. We all want to be in the cloud, but the reality is there's usually going to be a natural equilibrium for most customers. In some cases, it's great to be all in. And in other cases, there's mostly in, but there's some pieces we're going to get out. A big challenge that users have is IT is always additive. We never get rid of anything. So we had the mainframe, we added the open systems and we kept some mainframe. We added on top of that software defined in cloud and I've got all these pieces. And from an operational standpoint, you've got stovepipes and silos. And I can't share all my information well. So yeah, can it all be open source and all be Linux flavors underneath somewhere? And we'll just containerize the whole thing. We've got 25 minutes. And the first time I'm going to say the word Docker. I mean, come on, Docker is going to solve all these problems for us. Probably within the next 18 months, I figure. So at least, look, I mean, everybody knows that if they followed me, I'm a huge fan of what Docker is doing. Containerization, I think, is a huge wave. But it is not a silver bullet panacea to solve all of these challenges. I love, Steve, you're bringing up things like Active Directory in the cloud gets glossed over by most people. It's one of the foundational things that Microsoft has always done well. And you're starting to see some of the other cloud providers, the big guys, talking about it and trying to catch up in that space. So for you, Steve, what is the state of hypercloud? The title we put on this segment was, is it reality or hype? I'll tell you, from my standpoint, most customers have something on param that they feel is getting towards cloud. Whether or not it fits there is probably up for debate. And everyone is using some public cloud, and they're all using some kind of SaaS.  IT is either running some Amazon instances or some business unit went off and did it. And if I go check all my IPs, I have to figure out how much I have. And then I've got, you know, my internal IT, which I'm trying to make more cloud like. So I say today, you know, hybrid cloud is where most people are, but there's no set definition and everybody's hybrid cloud looks totally different. And it's a mess. And there's a lot of work to be done. What's your view of the world? Well, I agree with you, but I think it's okay to be a mess, right? I mean, that's just what life's like. And I, after the experience I've had of selling cloud related products and then building cloud services and seeing how hard it is and then seeing how customers have so many different requirements, I could never see the day that there's going to be one kind of, I just don't think it'll exist. There'll be one hybrid cloud kind of definition. It's necessarily abstract. And I think that's cool. I do think though, you know, and I don't want to sound, you know, but cloud is a journey, not a destination, right? And I just think we're going through a transition like we did with virtualization, you know, I mean, think back to the old days, building, I still remember building a cluster of eight hosts, putting VMware on it, deploying some virtual machines and standing back and saying, now what? Right? So that's not an end, right? That was just a way of us improving things. In this case, getting more density, you know, return investment, TCO, that good stuff. I think cloud is going to be the same. I mean, I just love the innovative stuff that Amazon are doing, Azure are doing. I saw yesterday, the concept of machine learning in the cloud explained to 200 SME businesses in the UK and it blew their mind. And the first question is, what is it? And the second question was, how do I get it? And I said to the ones that I spoke to, whatever you do, don't go to the Microsoft trial page because it'll just blow your mind, right? You need help to understand it. And so I think not only is it not well defined today, but it's changing constantly. So moving target and hopefully we can help some of these customers understand that and separate the week from the chat, if you like. Yeah, great point, Steve. So right, just to your point, number one is cloud is not a winner take all. Secondly, you know, the survey we recently did on infrastructure as a service, we've written a couple of pieces up on premium.wikibon.com is that most customers today have a multi-cloud environment. And that's their strategy.  Oh, yeah, of course we're doing that. And, you know, we're doing Salesforce.  So I want to push back on you, Steve, because when I look at cloud, there's strata today. So first, there's the big guys. It's Amazon, it's Azure, and maybe Google. And beyond those three, I don't put anybody else at their level. Then there's the next year, there's some companies doing great stuff.  You know, there's lots of room for them to grow and they will find revenue and markets and they've got customers. But I still kind of say there's the mega clouds. And then there's the other vendors who are also trying to help all these service providers. And you know, are there going to be dozens, hundreds or thousands of service providers is up for a lot of debate.  I'm curious as to where you kind of segment and look at the market today. Yeah, I'm used to you pushing me around, Stu, right? So I think, but I mean, what's the stat? Is it from IDC that public cloud represents like 7% of IT spending? I have to dig into those numbers. But, you know, if it is such a small amount, they've got a huge influence, right? I mean, I think the influence is way bigger than that number would suggest. I mean, look at how they're disrupting the CISCOs, the IBMs, as you've just said. But again, if I put myself as the CTO of the customer, and I'm looking at this, you know, the realities are sometimes your procurement strategy dictates your IT strategy. Now that might sound crazy. And to a real, you know, technology propeller head, you think you've got to go for Amazon because it's the coolest thing ever. Well, do you know what? I've got a three year agreement with vendor X. And it means I can do it even cheaper than Amazon with the discounts I get. You know, the realities behind the doors of an enterprise are very, very interesting.  I love the Azure stuff. That's really cool. The realities of doing business, you know, the procurement, the business heads, the grown ups, you might say, inside some of these businesses, like the banks and the retail and the education, you know, there are lots of reasons why they will go to IBM and they will go to VMware rather than use a public cloud. Yeah.  The financial levers are a big thing in there. I mean, look at converged infrastructure. When companies like VCE first came out, the challenge that they had was that, you know, the compute budget, the storage budget, the network budget were all owned by different people and in different upgrade cycles and trying to align those and put those together. What a mess. Yeah. Gave it a couple of years and most customers are working those out. You either start with a project or you align it and convergence and hyperconvergence grow in, you know, gangbusters. You know, so a premise we would put out there is that we think most users are going to move to more of a consumable, buy by the drink, not be locked into certain environments. Doesn't mean that they're not going to buy equipment, but I mean, companies have always had, you can buy our gear, but we're only going to charge you for what you're using. We have financial practice do there. The CFO absolutely wants certainty. He doesn't want to say, oh, hey, we went to this great cloud because it saved us money this month and the next month you blew your budget for the rest of the year and we need to sort that out. So I mean, do you see that as just, you know, a temporary thing that we're going to sort out or is this an impediment and, you know, we've overblown this whole public cloud thing and people are going to own their own gear a lot more. I think if I just think back, you know, especially last year when I was at Microsoft and we spoke to quite a few customers, large customers who had lots of on-premise stuff usually run by an incumbent service provider, right? So this might not apply to the SME kind of market, but a lot of big companies, they out, not fully outsourced, but they get someone to run their stuff for them, right? And I'm not sure if this answers your question fully, but, you know, whether they wanted to use public cloud or not. And I can remember one example where we were trying to get the customer to use Azure Storage because we did the sums and he could save a fortune and he thought it was great. He had to consume that via his service provider and there the problem started, right? So I think there are lots of barriers that perhaps people who are very technology focused perhaps might not get that, you know, the guys signing the checks have got lots of pressures on them. Sometimes they have to do a public cloud deal through a provider that incurs lots of other overheads and then public cloud isn't that cheap to them anymore. I think it's a very, very complex meshed market out there and looking forward to shining some light on it. All right. So I just want to give you the last word here, Steve. Lots more we'll discuss over coming weeks. I know people are going to look forward to all the research you're going to put out on our sites too, but you were just in an event last night. You talked to lots of users from big financials to kind of the SMEs of the world out there. What's their perception? Is cloud a top of mind issue for them or are other things kind of driving it and bringing cloud into the conversation? Where does cloud fit in their mindset today? So the whole event really was held by what I would call a disruptive or challenger bank in the UK for our North American readers. The UK banking market because of the problems we have has become much more open and competitive, which is great for business. I don't think that's any mistake in that the British economy is growing really fast because there's more investment in business thanks to that competitiveness. So it's about destructive and challenges. They had people like Uber there. They had people like Poundwell, the chief executive Poundwell and they had Microsoft there. They were just showing that these sometimes big companies were disrupting themselves in their own markets and sometimes new entrants were creating markets and that was the whole kind of thing. And then one of the sub themes in there was how technology sometimes it feels like a prison. You know, we're a prison to our mobile devices. We keep looking at it instead of talking to our family when really we always thought in the 60s and 70s in science fiction that technology was going to free us. And one of the things that cloud does or the uses of cloud is that it's helping to free people. So small businesses because it was an SME event, you can get someone to do your bookkeeping online. You don't have to go down to local bookkeeper. You can get it done online. You can get all these new services like SaaS applications online. You don't have to buy your own equipment. You know, and basically the message was your cost of entering a market because of cloud is much lower. And I think it's something Amazon talk a lot about, right? You can set up a business much cheaper these days because of cloud and that really resonated with the SMEs that I saw yesterday. All right. Hey, so Steve, we're going to wrap it there. You give great setup actually for the first event we're going to get you on camera of The Cube live at an event, MIT at their IDE event, which is focused on really the future of the digital economy. It's got people like Andy McAfee and Eric Brunyonson, which says, what does all this automation and robots and the whole digital economy, what's that going to do to jobs? Andy's very optimistic when it comes to these things and says we're going to find new places and jobs. But the service economy is under attack. If things go to cloud, what does that mean to all the administrators? So I'm sure we've got some really techy things that we're going to dig into that, but a little more high level business from the MIT Sloan School to talk about that. So looking forward to seeing you in London on that. It's that Friday, what's that April 9th or 10th? April 10th, we'll have that online. People can check that out on siliconangle.tv. Look for lots more from Steve and myself on premium.wikibon.com. Feel free to hit us up on Twitter with any questions or events we should be at, articles you'd like to see us cover more. Push back on us on any of the premises that we've got. What are you seeing out there in the world? We always love it, Wikibon. We were founded on allowing the IT practitioners to share with their peers. We want to help start that conversation, continue it, and share all the great things that the user community is using out there. So Steve, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks everybody else for tuning in for this segment and we will see you on the road and from our studios. Thanks for joining.


My reference set of one has been upgraded with the Air Acoustics AX520 amplifier. What is this amp? Why was it chosen and why did the set of one need an update? Confused? You won't be after the next episode of the Hans Beekhuyzen channel. Let me start with the amp it replaces. The Audio Note Soro SE Phono has been with me for 20 years but has in the meantime been upgraded three times by AudioMagic Peter van Wilenswaart. I had the pleasure of working with Peter for five years in the mid 80s after which he went through the local Audio Note distributor. He then founded AudioMagic and was one of the founders of Grim Audio. Over the years he has improved my Audio Note by replacing the potential meters, replacing the lint cable between the input board and the preamp by AudioMagic's silver disabling the tape and pre outputs, replacing all electrolytic capacitors at critical places by Jensen audio grade types and since audio equipment makes long hours at my place, tubes are replaced every four to five years. Last year new Dongsol ECC82 new old stock preamp tubes and Softek 5881 power tubes are installed. On my request Peter also created a power amp input that is selected by a 12v trigger signal from the external source. I have this to connect the left and right analog outputs of my AV receiver to. So when watching TV or movies the left and right channel are played over what normally is my stereo setup. The true qualities of my Audio Note are transparency, especially in the mid range and a wide and deep stereo image with proper placement. That makes reviewing equipment debris, especially when I had limited myself to equipment up to 2000 Euros. Encouraged by you, my viewers, that limit was abandoned. Even higher quality DACs visited the test bench and although still quality differences were audible, for efficient working I needed an even better amplifier. So I decided to replace it and I am sure I will find a good home where its qualities will be appreciated. So exit Audio Note, welcome air. This is of course kicking in an open door as the Dutch expression goes. But this chapter is widely appreciated so let's not skip it. A set of loudspeakers need to be connected. In my case these are the well respected audio physics Scorpios. Then only sources with analog outputs can be connected, like a CD player, a streamer or tuner. Volume, input selection and power can be controlled from the included sturdy infrared remote. In my set of one the MiTech Brooklyn DAC is connected over SPDIF to the Mini DSB SHD Studio Dirac processor that in turn is connected digitally to the Auralic RSG2 network player. For TV and film viewing the NAD T758 Version 3 surround receiver has its left and right pre-outs connected to one set of single ended inputs on the air over RCA cables. This way the left and right channels are reproduced by the stereo setup. The center and surround speakers are connected to the corresponding speaker terminals on the surround receiver. Dirac, at full bandwidth setting, not only solves room modes but also sound character differences between the speakers. Works like a charm. I must admit that I am far less critical when sound for video is concerned. On shows air normally shows its silver models but I have chosen the black version. Both me and my wife don't like shiny metal apparatus in our living room and that is where my set of one is placed. The AX520 measures 440 x 480 x 120mm and weighs a hefty 21 kilos. The front has only four controls, a volume control, a standby button, in the middle the dimmable display, then the tape output button and the input selector. All buttons have secondary functions like naming inputs, setting processor pass-through and more. To do this you really need to have the manual at hand since it involves irrational button sequences. On the rear in the middle the IEC mains input with above it the power switch. Below it two RJ45 connectors to integrate control with other air products. On both sides four balanced analog inputs on XLR and two single ended inputs on RCA. There even is a set of tape outputs which shows the age of the initial design a bit. The speaker cables are clamped in these binding posts that are optimized for forks. There are no digital inputs nor is there a phono input. Those sources require additional gear like a dyke and a phono pre pre. With the lid taken off we see the centrally placed large mercury magnetics transformer. Apart from a part number there was no further specification. It feeds the mirrored layout power supply for left and right channel on the board in front of it. As far as I can see the circuit board mounted against the front panel holds the controller electronics. Then two large heat sinks hide the amplifier boards. Against the back panel the input boards are mounted with in between it the motorized volume control on which later on more. This controlled over a flat cable coming from the controller board. Time for the real $10,000 question, why this amp? Of course the first argument was sound quality. I have been following the brand for decades now. In my country Michael Halver represents air, already at the previous distributor and now at reference sounds a company he leads. His demos at shows and in his showroom are always at 99.9% of what is achievable. I had also lent an earlier air amplifier from him years ago.  A good upright bass recording sounds so open and natural and the same goes for a glockenspiel. Strings are not velvety or harsh, they just are as they should be. It doesn't impress in a cheap way but with a lot of class. I did of course do extensive research on what my respected colleagues think of the AX520. I don't review amplifiers so for me it is hard to say if this is the best choice. So don't see this as a review, it's rather an explanation on why I decided for this amp. Eracoustics is somewhat a quirky company. All their products are balanced, used no feedback and used so called diamond circuits where possible, even in their power amps. And that's just the beginning, but let's take it step by step and start with a simplified explanation of the benefit of balanced circuits. Analog audio is nothing more than a varying voltage over time. In single ended designs this voltage varies between 0 volts and for instance 2 volts as with Redbook spec CD players. There is the ground, the tulip shaped contact on the RCA plug and the positive, the tip of the RCA and the voltage thus varies between 0 and 2 volts like this. The amplitude of the signal is the voltage between the ground plane and the top of the signal which at the blue arrow is 2 volts and at the red arrow 0 volts. When there is only a slight electrical pollution on the ground plane it will superimpose on the audio signal and cause distortion. If the ground plane is offset by a ground loop it will affect the audio signal as well. When we look at a symmetrical signal we see the ground level halfway the plus 2 volts and minus 2 volts. So the voltage is double that of a single ended signal according to Redbook specifications. Which is already nice. But when we look what happens when the ground plane is polluted we see that there is no direct influence on the audio signal since there is reference between plus 2 and minus 2 volts and not to the ground plane. That doesn't mean other things might not get wrong but the starting point at least is better. Air acoustics also adheres to zero feedback design. Negative feedback is used in most electronics to keep distortion low in the circuit stable. To explain negative feedback the layman's way you could compare it to riding a bike. Ideally you would keep your steers straight ahead but since you always cause some imbalance you automatically make small steering corrections to restore balance. Amplifiers that use feedback, and again most of them do, correct small errors this way. Let's see how that looks in a block diagram. There is an input signal that enters the amplifier where it is amplified and sent to the output. There is a tap in the output that sends the output signal to a feedback filter called beta that inverts polarity, attenuates it and sometimes also contains a filter. That signal is added to the input signal and since it has an inverted polarity it is effectively subtracted. Also like the steering movement it corrects the output of the amp. And just like with riding a bike it's always too late for a perfect straight course. You can consider that to be wrong or say that it's life's reality. And for a long time it seemed that zero feedback amplifiers was no reality. But already a few decades ago manufacturers, including Air, issued zero feedback amps. Yet another quirky approach to a simple circuit. Variable gain transconductance. To understand this, let's first look at how the average amplifier takes care of volume control. When a good network player is connected to the input of an amp, the signal potentially has a signal to noise ratio of about 120 dBs and a maximum output of 2 volts, or 4 volts if it's a balanced output. There are still old analog sources around, like tuners and cassette decks that only output 0.3 volts or thereabouts, which is a 16 dB lower level. An amplifier needs to be able to amplify these lower signals to normal playing levels too, so it has to have at least 16 dBs more gain than needed for digital sources. Above that you don't normally play music at full level so our volume control is needed. Let's say that the level is reduced by 18 dBs. Since an amplifier will only have a few dBs more signal to noise than the 120 dBs a digital player offers, the signal to noise of the audio signal is reduced by the amplifier noise. Let's say 105 dBs signal to noise remains. That signal is sent to the power amplifier to be amplified, resulting in the amplifier noise also being amplified. The signal to the speaker remains to have 105 dBs signal to noise at best. If the gain is further reduced, even less signal to noise remains. You could argument that at lower levels the environmental noise in the room will be louder and thus mask the amplifier noise. But then again Louis D. Fielder in the 70s proved that we are able to hear signals 20 dBs deep into noise. So what's there to say? Again most amplifiers work this way, but not the air amps. When a signal enters an air amp it is not attenuated. This is not needed since the amp has a variable gain, something that is only possible with zero feedback designs. The gain is set by two pairs of double pulse silver contact rotary switches connected to an array of hand selected precision resistors. These change the voltage on the input terminal of two pairs of complementary JFETs, so to change the current through the output terminal of these JFETs to the same ratio. In layman terms it changes the volume not by attenuation but by changing the gain of the amp. It maintains the full signal to noise ratio over the input signal, also when a lower playback level is set. The way the rotary switches are operated is remarkable too.  They of course need to be double since it's a balanced design. The mechanical construction is beautiful with two bearing mounted pressure rollers. Despite this it's somewhat noisy and actually surprised visitors for it sounds somewhat cheap. On the other hand it offers the option of working as a power amplifier for the left and right channels of a surround processor, as I mentioned in the beginning of this video. When you set the processor pass-through for an input, the amp simply turns the volume control full up. When switching back to another input, the volume control is set to the last level used on that input. Brilliant. Let me make clear that this is not my usual review video. Since I have not reviewed amps in this class for years, I would not dare to make absolute statements about the sound quality. As said, I bought this amp based on information in my network and reviews by well respected colleagues, topped off with listening sessions I did at the distributors or Wilson Audio loudspeakers. Due to Covid-19 I had to wait two months for delivery since there was a shortage of some parts. Once installed in my setup 1, the superiority over the audio note was immediately clear. The manual mentioned the burning period of 100 to 500 hours and although I did expect the sound quality to bloom somewhat over time, I did not expect the considerable sound quality improvement that presented itself over the first few hundred hours of playing. I used my setup 1 for long hours. Not only for my work but also privately for playing music and watching video. 10 hours a day on average I think. But if you just use the amp for listening music a few times a week for say two hours, burning will take months. So you better keep it on standby, consuming 40 watts an hour or even have it playing all the time if you can. High end audio comes with peculiarities. The Air AX520 will enable better and faster testing of digital front ends of higher quality. I will try to evenly divide my reviews amongst equipment in several price categories. That will not always be easy since getting equipment on loan on a certain date normally doesn't work, making proper planning a drag. But I'll try. The Air is a great pleasure to listen to and having an amp with a remote control makes comparing digital sources a lot easier too. Oh, if you wonder, the retail price in my country is €14,500 including VAT. Since my company bought the amp, I didn't have to pay retail price while tax deductions and investment subsidy made it more affordable. Good news to close this show with. There will be another video next Friday at 5pm central European time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to this channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and thus trustworthy. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I'm Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show all on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.