hugging and ladies and gentlemen thank you for joining us for the fourth issue briefing this afternoon Simmons summit on the Global Agenda Day 2 this one is particularly interesting and particularly relevant for the venue here, it's on the future of cities and I cant think of a more future facing then our host here in the UAE. Now two billion extra people will be living in the cities by 2050 the UN believes and Not our numbers, what's quite clear is that if that migration is going to be managed in an efficacious way then lots of work needs to be done not in terms of planning, in terms of building up-city economies. I'm very glad we joined here by two experts in these respective fields. I'm going to waste no more time introducing myself, but I will introduce them briefly and then ask them to make some opening remarks. I'm joined by Susan Zilinski, managing director of SMART at the University of Michigan in the USA. Yng nghymru, Rosine Sallu, gyda profesiol yng Nghymru Lleithwyr Cwarn Yw'r Fylltafol Cymru, Cymru Unedigol, ac yng Nghymru Llyfrgellol Llyfrgellol Llyfrgellol Cymru, mae'n ymdegwch i ddweud y cyfnodol ar y cyfnodol o'i cyfrifolau. Rosine, gallwn gweld yn fyddo chi, ac yna'n ysgrifennu ymdegwch ar y cyfnodol o'r cyfnodol yn ei wneud yn y rhaid, i'r ddweud â'r cyfnodol, o'r ddweud yn y cyfrifolau ymdegwch? Before the age of nation states, the so-called Westphalian system in Europe and in other parts of the world, governance was really a matter of cities or of city regions. We tend to forget that in the age of the nation state. It's becoming even more important because of this megatrenda-verbanisation that we have in the 21st century.ödol, mae'n gweithio i'r ffordd yn 50% o'r hwyl populadau yn cyffredig ar gyfer, ond mae'r gweithio'n 80% o'r ddechrau'r cyffredig o'r wyf. 60% o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o Chyna yn y bwysig yn 2020 o'r ddweud o'r gyffredig. A'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cyffredig yn y ddweud yn y ddwaith yn gweithiau, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cyffredig yn y ddweud yn y ddweud o'r gweith yng nghymhiliadau, Myricting Darkness because the projections are That the urbanisation that we're going to see over the next few decades about 90 to 95% of it, is going to happen outside the west. And the really big growth is going to come in what the MacKinsey Global Institute calls Middleweight cities cities with a population between five and ten million where we're going to see a much bigger emerging Yn ymdilyniad llwyddo mewn gwirionedd, ac mae'n digwydd o ffocl o bwysig, dyn ni'n mynd i ddechrau mega'r cyflau cyflwyno cyflwyno a oedd ymdilyniadol. Felly, mae'n rhaid o'r cilio sydd eich cyflwyno rhaid o'r cyflwyno, ac mae'n cyflwno i gynnwys cyflwyno, a'r cyflwno i gyrweithio gyflyg, yng Nghymru? How they plug into the world economy? What are city economies doing right and economies doing wrong in general? What would you like to see as an academic studying the competitiveness of cities? What kind of best practices are many cities missing out on? Well, my council, we did a report on the competitiveness of cities last year. It's on the forum website. We covered about 35 case studies, some big cases, some smaller cases. We had a simple taxonomy. We looked at the policies that regulate the business climate in these cities. Firstly, secondly, we looked at the institutions of the city. In other words, the decision-making framework. Thirdly, the hard infrastructure, roads, rail, airports. Fourthly, a bit more difficult, the soft infrastructure or connectivity, including the digital economy. We use those four pillars and also how they come together to assess how cities are doing. Our case studies are a mixture of those that have been rip-roaring successes, like Singapore and Dubai. Those that have been failures, perhaps like Chandigarh in India, which was terribly over-planned. Those that have succumbed to urban sprawl because they haven't got the governance and the infrastructure right. All the way to those that have hit rock bottom and are attempting a turnaround. Detroit is one of our big cases and the jury is out on Detroit because it has hit rock bottom. It's only attempted the turnaround just in the last few years, so we'll see. We also point to cities that are good or best practice examples of genuine innovation. There are several in the United States that were industrial cities that grew big and strong in the 19th century and then went into post-industrial decline, but which have found their niches in all kinds of new, mainly services activities as a means of regenerating themselves. I believe Anil Menon from Cisco, who is a member of our Future of Cities Council, wrote a blog claiming that he believed that Kansas City was one of his favourite smart cities of the future. Just to put that one out there. Now, Susan, plenty of ways to bring you in, but before I do, if I may, let's just stick on the urban vision from the economic perspective. In Africa, we're seeing a decoupling from industrialisation and urbanisation for the first time. Is this sustainable or is it something that African cities, for example, need to get an industrial policy? Well, I'm generally a skeptic on the kind of industrial policy where government believing it's more intelligent than market actors themselves, pick certain sectors and say, you know, we're going to target these for success. Because that kind of industrial policy is littered with failures all over the world. The best industrial policy in my book is policy that provides an enabling framework for the whole economy. And then you'll see how the market evolves and you'll have different outcomes in different places. Africa has a problem when it comes to industrialisation because it's abundant in land, it's abundant in natural resources, but it's not abundant in people, not compared with Asia. At least that's the historical record. So, East and South Asia have done well and are doing well by taking poor people from the countryside and putting them into manufacturing jobs in urbanising areas. Now, that hasn't happened to Africa so far. So Africa has concentrated on other things like resources, bits and pieces of services increasingly. But Africa is probably going to be the biggest beneficiary of this so-called demographic dividend in this century. So Africa is going to become much more populated. And as Africa becomes more peopled, looking beyond the medium term, we may actually see a continent that might be able to specialise profitably in manufacturing, starting at the lower end as parts of Asia vacate the lower end of manufacturing because their real incomes are rising. We're already seeing this in much of East Asia, including China today. So that may be Africa's future, but it's not inevitable. It depends on getting the policies right and getting the institutions right and correcting the very large deficits in both compartments that exist to date. Susan, Rosemary was talking about sprawl being an unsavory and unsuccessful characteristic of a modern city. As an urban planner, what's your vision of a successful, smart city? Well, my focus is on transportation or sort of the urban mobility space. And I think we're one of the most exciting times we've been in in a long, long time. I mean, we have urbanisation and everyone's worried about the huge sort of crowding in cities. But I think what that's done for us is it's given us this great gift of having to think differently and think smarter. Used to be that we could think, oh well, I'll just get a Prius or I'll just get alternative fuel car and then I can move farther and farther and farther away and continue the sprawling pattern that has been set up at least in North America and also in some other parts of the world. But now we have this great opportunity to combine the urbanisation. In the US it's also 80% I think and I think China as well, 80% urban or at least urban region. And the mobility around that is mainly car-based in the US. And I think what we've got is the situation of urbanisation coupled with digital technology that allows for a much greater, more nimble, more door-to-door, multi-modal, IT-enabled transport system that doesn't require so much bricks and mortar, doesn't require such huge kind of capital funding. It says, ah, how can we, first of all, look at what we already have, look at the system that's already connecting. What kinds of multi-modal system do we have? And then how do we build on that? How do we identify the gaps? How do we move from there? So one of the things we've done to, I don't know, understand the complex system of mobility plus this new solution space around new services, new business models, new products, new modes of transportation and how they connect together as a whole with the user in mind. And we've been able to sort of begin to understand, well, what's your system? How do we add things, not even necessarily in terms of a master plan, which is sort of like a finite game. A master plan is something that you often think of as, OK, we're going to get that master plan done and then it's going to be finished. Then by this year, it'll be perfect transportation system or perfect design. But that's not the way, I mean, basically, technology is outpacing policy, especially in the transportation realm. So what this also means is because we don't know what we don't know, we have to actually develop these cross-sectoral alliances. We have to be working with each other. And so in every city we've gone to, we bring together people across the different sectors that are related to transportation. And it's many more than you think normally.  But actually, it's a huge industry cluster, the new mobility industry cluster that's grown out of this sort of shift, this sort of industrial shift. So what we've got is not only manufacturing but also transit, energy, real estate, tourism, economic development, finance, and then all of these disruptive new mobility enterprises, the Uber's, the apps, the car share, the bike share, and a whole bunch of informal transportation opportunities that are being linked in with the rest of the system in a door-to-door way. So I think this kind of, let's say this nimblness is spilling over into the sort of more policy-heavy countries and teaching us how we can maybe look at how we experiment with certain things, how we put things in place, how we pilot integrated systems linking all the different modes across. And I guess one of my favorite sort of frameworks for this is there's a person named James Kars who talks about finite and infinite games. And finite games are played with the purpose of winning, and infinite games are playing the play. And I think with transportation it's something where we continually have to have the alliances there so that when the next Uber-like thing comes along and confuses us from a policy point of view, from a social equity point of view, we're able to immediately know who we can work with, what kinds of immediate sort of technology support solutions to put in, and what kinds of things we have to look at in the long term. What are the business models you're most excited about? Let's put Uber to one side because we understand Uber. I think we just, I've just back on my head around it. What else, I mean you study this area. It's a limo company basically. Yes, it's a limo company. It's not really the most innovative. Exactly, it even works at Geneva. What else is exciting in this space? Well to me it's fairly obvious from what I've just said. The most exciting business models is what takes us from mode to system, right? So what we had before is the information technology explosion, it's not exactly typewriter to laptop, desktop, printer, camera, all these things working in a customized way in an interoperable way. But there are now business models. One of them is called mobility as a service. We used to call it new mobility industry or new mobility in general. But now mobility as a service is taken off. So for example we gave an award, we have something called the Moby Prize which we award entrepreneurs that are in new mobility doing really cool stuff. But then we thought actually we should award cities and states that are incenting, they're doing what you're doing in terms of competitiveness or the encouraging entrepreneurship in this. So Scotland apparently has it in their constitution or their active parliament that they're to get their 100 million euro per year budget and have it matched to bring in tier ones and enterprises and have them all come together to develop these different industries and opportunities that are going to link all the modes of transportation on a platform. And there are a number of different platforms. We're also working with Finland and Sweden that have different approaches to those platforms. But basically to say how can this platform enable this multimodal door-to-door system. So it's supported by national government. It's developed within cities and tested within cities in Scotland and then it's going to be many of the different elements of it are going to be developed for export and developed with even some multinational tier ones. So to me that business model is just bringing so many different things together and from my perspective what I love about it the most and this is why I'm in this is that it's goal based. What are the kinds of things we need to be achieving in this world? How are we going to live? What are our goals in this region? What problems do we need to address? Therefore what kinds of innovations do we need to develop as opposed to we have this industry. How are we going to tweak these things and put them out in a different way? And that's really a stark comparison. And I really value the idea of building with what's there. And that's what we do. We sort of look at what's there and say okay what can we enhance and what can we make better. But I think in terms of how the business model has moved from something I can choose between a bus or a car into I can choose between one mode of transportation or a whole on demand a set of options that means I don't even have to own anything. I can get around whenever I want and it's all seamless and flexible. And very briefly how is Detroit doing just to go back to Rosie? Well I was going to say it is fantastic lately. I mean the mood has just changed. The soul of it has just turned around. And I can really feel the downtown if you go to the downtown it's already kind of shifted a fair bit and a lot more is happening. Go to go visit Susan. Rosie quick schedule for questions. Please do. Just wait for the microphone so our online audience can hear. Frank Cain from the national newspaper Nubby Dubby. The whole idea of cities being created most of the great cities of the world began organically almost satisfied people's economic and human needs London, Paris, Rome, blah blah blah. And for every city that you've mentioned as a great success recently created Abu Dhabi device of Singapore we have Canberra, we have Brasilia which are urban disasters really. So that's one question how far can people artificially create cities and secondly it seems that the ones that have been successful have been created in rather undemocratic places and I'm wondering if a lack of democracy is a prerequisite for urban success. It's a good question and a difficult one. So the organic visit plan. Indeed. Well let's not forget that nearly all cities that are old or ancient that have grown organically started out in authoritarian polities. Even London perhaps not New York. Well New York under the Dutch yes and others besides. I would put it this way to make a stab at answering your second point. It depends very much on the stage of development. If you're a poor country or city or region you can grow fast, you can have catch up growth by getting the basics right and that can happen under a variety of political systems. It's happened under some authoritarian systems but it's also happened under some democratic systems as well. Democratic India got it wrong with growth from independence until the early 1990s but then that same Democratic India has done much better with kickstarting growth once they opened up the economy in the early 1990s and at least got some of the basics more right than they used to do. So it's not to say that authoritarian systems are definitely the best at kickstarting this type of growth but it can happen under different political systems. My answer I think becomes somewhat different when you're talking about growth that depends more on productivity and innovation. In other words doing new and creative things as opposed to growth that's about catching up. When you're basically copying what others have done. Paul Krugman distinguishes growth by perspiration which is catch up growth, you're mobilising your resources from growth by inspiration which is about ideas the knowledge economy and so on. Now when it comes to growing through productivity gains there I think liberal democracies have an advantage over others because the kind of institutions that might deliver catch up growth are not necessarily going to be the institutions that deliver ideas based growth and it's not just a question for many states in the Middle East but also for China is China really capable of getting out of this middle income trap and becoming an advanced country with a pretty static Leninist political system. I have my doubts about that. That system was enormously successful at delivering catch up growth but without checks and balances, without openness, without transparency, without a free and open society can they really deliver the kind of sophisticated growth that we have seen in the West or even in places like Hong Kong and Singapore or Japan and South Korea and Taiwan. That lesson applies to cities as well. Okay, well, time is passing and marching on and unfortunately we have to draw an end to this session on the future of cities. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for watching us online and thank you for being panellists. This session is now closed.


Can you guys hear me now? Is that better? All right, sweet. Yeah, so thanks for the introduction. Happy to be here talking about infrastructure and containers. So as most of you already know, containers are really becoming the standard to build, deploy, and manage your infrastructure. They're really easy to get started with, with a few kind of command lines you're unrunning. But as you start scaling up, as you start adding more containers, the complexity kind of quickly arises. So this talk is kind of focusing on where these complexities come from and kind of what are the different ways to start handling containers at scale. And unfortunately, this is not going to be the holy grail or one solution to solve all of your problems. But hopefully, this is a way to kind of give you the questions to ask yourself as you start scaling up. What are the sort of priorities in your use case and kind of the different options that you can kind of choose based on your priorities? So I'll do a quick interview with containers. I think most of you are aware. So I can probably just breeze through that, go through container clusters, go through some of the complexities as you start scaling up, and then go straight into kind of the different options and the different kind of pros and cons to each of those. And then hopefully I'll have some time for questions, maybe not, but come talk to me afterwards and we can go over through there.  And the main point here is the fact that the container engine, most likely Docker, both is sitting on top of the operating system and the infrastructure. So this is great. So now your containers don't have to, they're abstracted away from all the underlying resources. But in some cases, you still have to interact with infrastructure. If your containers need to access specific resources, such as maybe GPUs, you will have to interact. And then as you scale up, you add other pieces of infrastructure. The actual infrastructure will have to communicate with each other to allow the containers to kind of network. So there's extra kind of complexity going there. So yeah, if one container is great, multiple containers are even better. So as you start scaling up, there's different use cases. So simply as you scale up, you want to be able to handle higher concurrency, higher throughput. So you will be having some sort of load balance application. So the load balancer will need to be aware of the other containers, know what port, what IP addresses and such. So there has to be some sort of sharing of information. And then also as you use microservices, you'll have lots of different containers kind of performing different actions, but you want to be able to limit kind of the policies, kind of the privileges that each of them have. So the UI, you want it to be accessible by everyone, whereas the database, you really want to lock down. So now you have multiple containers and different pieces of infrastructure that have different permissions, different routing rules and that sort of such. Yeah, so kind of thinking just locally, you simply want to have a simple load balance application, maybe two flash apps. You will have to kind of specify different ports since you can have multiple applications right in the same port. And then you can have some sort of load balancer such as HA proxy. However, this load balancer will take in a config file to start with and you'll have to be aware of the different IP addresses and addresses of your kind of applications or your containers. However, this is not very dynamic since you will have to kind of put in the port numbers you'll have to know beforehand. So in this case, you can kind of spin up for this case, but you want to be able to dynamically scale up, scale down across infrastructure as well. So in order to do this, you'll have to be able to kind of discover when new containers are joined in the cluster. So you'll have to have some sort of service that's monitoring, looking on specific tags or specific ports, and then some sort of way to register the service, be able to health check the service. And then also update the load balancer, provide it with the new container ports, the new IP addresses, and also various rules such as what you want to be able to route to that container. So you can do it with services such as Registrator from Glider Labs. Console can be your service loader and then some sort of way to reload the load balancer with the new config. You want to be able to do this without interrupting traffic, so you might need to have multiple load balancers as well. And the point I was trying to make is simply just trying to load balance two containers is not quite that simple. There's a lot of extra pieces that you're already incorporating into your system. Now you have to kind of monitor these services, update these services and stuff like that. So the complexity is already kind of increasing simply by just trying to load balance a couple containers. And then that kind of brings me to the next point. What makes scaling so hard? So as you saw before, kind of the networking, being able to dynamically change the load balancers routes, being able to load balance between multiple containers, and then also on the infrastructure side. So you want to be able to utilize more and more resources for your containers. So you need to provision infrastructure on demand. The infrastructure will have to communicate with each other so they have to be aware of each other. And then also you want to be able to balance these clusters. So you have to have some sort of monitoring service to understand how much resources of each pieces of infrastructure is taking. And then so that's another kind of service that you'll have to have access to all the pieces of infrastructure. And then there's other fun things such as updating. How do you update your kind of cluster as often as possible automatically? And then even scaling down. So now you've worked so hard to finally balance your cluster. If you're not utilizing all the resources, you want to scale down. So you have to unbalance it, move containers, make sure you're not interrupting user sessions, not interrupting any kind of privileged jobs before scaling down. So you have to kind of manage the balancing and unbalancing dynamically. So a lot of this stuff you can do manually fairly easily just through like command lines, SHQs, or SSH inting machines and stuff like that. But the hard part is trying to make this automatic as possible and dynamic as possible, reducing the need for ops so you can kind of focus on other things. Since the reason you're using containers and trying to scale up is to focus on your product, your company, not as much on the infrastructure and provisioning side. And then obviously there's like the monitoring that comes into play as well. So now you have a pretty complex distributed system with many containers across many different pieces of infrastructure. This infrastructure can be across regions to increase resiliency, but also makes it a lot more complex if you try doing fail-overs and that sort of stuff. So now you have distributed logs. You want to obviously probably want this in a centralized place to analyze, to be able to figure out where failures are happening, if you're doing some sort of AB testing or rolling updates, you want to be able to figure out exactly which container, which version and kind of what the problems are and figure out how to kind of diagnose the problem as fast as possible. So now kind of going into the various options, focusing mostly on the cloud, but a lot of the concepts will kind of also refer to on-prem or multi-cloud or on-prem cloud solutions. Maybe the provisioning itself will be different and how you manage the actual resources. So first, obviously, is there gonna be like the Docker cloud or Docker, Docker compose more of that naive way of doing it. So simply when you spin up your compute, you can run the same commands that you did locally. So you can install your container engine, Docker, run the same Docker scripts. So this is very simple to start up with. Don't need an orchestra. I don't need any sort of extra software, but obviously it's not gonna be really scalable or anything else like that since all your containers are gonna scale up the same way. It's reliant on the actual compute instances of scale up. You're not scaling up containers. So it's gonna be a lot more expensive, a lot slower. So this will be good for testing, good for kind of seeing how your containers will work on maybe some cloud infrastructure and how you can maybe do some basic scaling, basic networking. But yeah, it's not gonna scale very well. If you have multiple microservices in the same compute, one of them fails. There's no really way to automatically or dynamically kind of fix the problem. You might have to SSH into the instance, reboot the container, or it's termate the whole instance, spin up all new microservices, which is gonna be expensive, add latency and that sort of stuff. So again, this is gonna be the naive version, easiest way to spin up, but not gonna scale very well. Also, don't just put one microservice or one container in each compute. Like to be the main purpose of the containers, to be flexible is what you're trying to avoid anyway, so just don't do that. And this is kind of where container orchestrators come from and these are gonna be the Kubernetes, Docker, Swarm, or actually Nomad. And these kind of address a lot of the problems you saw earlier on. So with service discovery, load balancing, and like all the networking, all that sort of stuff. And they all kind of work the same way. They have pretty similar architectures, maybe the underlying tech underneath is gonna be a little different and maybe they'll abstract some pieces. But essentially the architecture will be the same. So there's gonna be master nodes, worker nodes, and then the application service layer. So the master nodes and worker nodes are gonna be separate pieces of infrastructure and then the container service layer is gonna be your good old Docker containers. So the main takeaways here is gonna be like the master nodes. These are gonna be the heart and brain of the cluster. If those fail, your entire cluster will fail. And this is where a lot of the logic of the routing will take place. This is where all the service discovery will take place and kind of where all the state of your cluster is gonna be held. And then the worker nodes are gonna be where your containers are actually deployed. These will be the ones that will be scaling up, scaling down. And they also need additional software such as being able to connect to the master nodes, being able to do service discovery to understand what containers are running on those instances, what ports those containers on, the health checks of those containers and let the masters know. So the masters can kind of keep this up to date. And okay, problem solved, maybe. The problem is this is a lot harder to actually do than it sounds. And a lot of the reason is because this Kubernetes or these orchestrator layer is abstracted from the infrastructure. So as you saw from earlier, the container engine sits above the operating system and infrastructure, which is on purpose. But that means it's on you to provision the infrastructure, install the software, manage all the updates, managing the scaling up, scaling down and all the networking. So you can actually install Kubernetes on a cluster of Raspberry Pis. It works perfectly fine as like any cloud or on-prem solution. But there's a lot of pieces involved. So the hardest part is gonna be probably the master nodes. So as I mentioned before, this is really the heart and brain of the cluster. So generally you want to have at least three of these nodes, five, any odd number since they work on a consensus basis. So as a distributed cluster, essentially the master or the majority kind of overrules the minority. So if one master node is disconnected from the other two and rejoins, it has outdated data, the majority will fix whatever is kind of not in sync. And the whole cluster will be in sync.  You can lose track of where your containers are. You can lose track of the different IP addresses of all your other cluster, which requires a lot of manual fixes. You'll have to manually update these masters. So the failover is one of the more difficult parts to manage as well as updates and those types of problems. So the reason, well, at the minimum of three, if you have one, obviously if that goes down then you lose the entire state of your cluster. So three is generally a good number. The higher up you go, be a little harder to manage, but it'll be a lot more expensive, but you get more resiliency. So it kind of depends on how resilient you want and just managing costs there. And then I guess the hardest part is gonna be trying to update. So you can't just obviously spin them down and spin them up with the newest updates. You have to manage it kind of slowly. So you have to probably spin up a master, have it sync with the rest of the cluster before terminating an outdated one and then kind of redo that process. So if you make any sort of mistake, it'll be out of sync and then you'll have to manually go in, kind of reconfigure, figure out the state of the cluster and update the masters with the correct state. So again, there's lots of ways and lots of papers on how to do this. The hardest parts can be able to do this dynamically, be able to do this, I guess quickly as possible with as little intervention as possible without having to have a whole team kind of manage it, being always able to monitor and kind of keep the status of it. And this is kind of where the managed Kubernetes services come from. So these are gonna be from a lot of your major cloud providers. So such as Amazon's EKS, Google's Kubernetes service and Microsoft's Kubernetes service. And there's kind of subtle differences between them. So the Amazon will manage only the masters for you. So you'll still be managing all of the worker nodes, installation and connecting to the masters. And then there's an extra fee, I think, for using that. So obviously they'll take away the hardest part for you, but there's still a lot of scaling. You still have to install all the software as be able to update the worker nodes. But they'll handle the balancing, they'll handle all the master part. So Google and Microsoft's versions of this software, they actually manage all the infrastructure for you. You manage the scaling. So they'll manage all the masters for you so you don't have to worry about ever updating those, updating or any of that sort of stuff. You just kind of tell it how many worker nodes you want, that's different sizes. Essentially you tell it what compute you want and they'll provision it for you. They'll give you, and they'll connect it with the master. They'll update the software and all those sorts of pieces. And the nice thing about those is there's no extra costs. You're still paying from the underlying infrastructure as you would normally do if you were using just like the basic resources underneath. So it takes away a lot of kind of the problems of provisioning and installing all the software, a lot of the connections and that sort of thing, which is nice. But obviously like there are gonna be some drawbacks. So some of the drawbacks are gonna be, you're locked into one of those vendors, you might not be as flexible, you might also still need to be on-prem on the cloud. So it makes it a little harder to navigate that. And also if you need sort of third-party add-ons or other or custom solutions, they're not gonna be as flexible. So you might still need, if you have extra security needs or extra sort of monitoring, are there those types of things that might be a little harder to integrate with those? And yeah, so for quickly with like the Google, Google's kind of managed Kubernetes service, with the click of a button, you'll create the cluster and the cluster behind the scenes as they'll manage all the master nodes. As they dynamically spin up, they'll share their IP addresses with each other and join themselves in a cluster. And once those are available, however many worker nodes you wanna add, they'll be added directly to the cluster behind the scenes without you having to worry about that. And then deploying your containers and creating the service is gonna be pretty similar to the Docker compose or whatever the Docker kind of, or whatever container framework you use to deploy your containers. Generally gonna be a YAML file, you just kind of describe how you want it to run, how many you need, and then all the routing and all the scaling will be done by the masters, which in this case is gonna be actually managed by Google or managed by the cloud provider. And then there's also the semi-managed container services. So this is more of a little bit more of like the legacy stuff from Amazon. So this is Amazon's elastic container service. I think Microsoft might also have one. And so what you get from here is they manage a lot of the container scaling, a lot of the load balancing, but you're still managing your compute. If you need to do anything more advanced, you need to share information between containers. You need some maybe special configurations. You'll have to do all that manually and kind of manage that yourself. So this is gonna be useful if you have maybe a simple API or a couple containers that you just want to not worry about the scale, not worry about a lot of the basics. You just want to kind of have hands off and you can have some sort of auto-scaling infrastructure that installs the basic software and then just point to whatever load balancer that Amazon will provide and then it will kind of scale out from there. Yeah, so yeah, in conclusion, I kind of wanna go over as briefly the different things we talked about. So I guess the talker composed, this is gonna be more the naive way of going about it. So this is great for basic testing if you're switching from different environments before you even deploy to maybe to your dev environment. You kind of just can set this up, it's a quick and easy way. Next are gonna be the container orchestrators.  You'll be managing everything from the infrastructure to the kind of container deployment layer. And the hardest thing about the infrastructure is gonna be making it dynamic, making it as least amount of ops as possible. So there's tons of like tutorials out there of how to set up your Kubernetes or whatever kind of cluster you're doing. But to be able to kind of update dynamically, scale up and down dynamically is actually where a lot of the difficulties will rise. And especially trying to do failovers and other types of kind of disaster recovery is very difficult with these since as soon as you're out of sync, as soon as these elastic, and also depends on whatever provisioning or provisioner tools you're using. So there are things like Terraform, Ansible and those types of things. They're not great to dynamically discover each other. So you'll have to add additional software, additional tools to kind of, and other use such things as like tags, metadata for them to actually join in clusters and that sort of stuff. That's kind of where the managed container orchestrator services have come from. And these are pretty recent. A lot of them, a lot of the bigger announcements have to spend this year. And this is they're managing all the kind of difficult parts of the container orchestrator layer for you and a lot of the infrastructure provisioning and scaling, letting you kind of focus on just deploying your containers, specifying how many containers you want. And it's much easier to automate. You can have some sort of simple monitoring system to monitor the usage of your clusters. And after a certain threshold, you can call some sort of API and start scaling up your cluster and then behind the scenes, whatever cloud provider you're using will kind of manage that for you. But then again, you're gonna be tied down a little bit to a specific cloud provider. They do allow for you to kind of extend the cluster so those masters can actually connect outside of that cloud provider. So if you wanna have some sort of on-prem cloud provisioning, you can do that. It will be a lot more work than just simply sticking with the cloud. But there are ways to do that. So you'll have to have your team kind of figure that out. And then there are more that semi-managed container orchestrators. So you'll have a lot more limited options. Some of the times you will have to still manage the compute, the provisioning, install some software to actually connect to the cloud provider service.  And I guess like the main thing to think about is how much control do you want to have over your clusters, especially with your infrastructure provisionings. Depends on kind of what your experience are, how big of a team you have, and kind of how much you actually need to configure, how much you want to kind of work on maintaining and building these systems. And especially the more you scale up, the more kind of moving pieces there are. And the more work it will be when there is some sort of failover, some sort of thing that requires manual intervention. I think there was a talk earlier yesterday that said that things in the cloud always fail. So you can't just expect it to always run and be like, oh, look at perfect, I can spin it up. They all add, they all work, it all works. As soon as you hit your first sort of failure for sort of update, a lot of the automation, a lot of the dynamic stuff you kind of provision can fail and it requires a lot of work to get back into sync. So it kind of, yeah, again, it just depends on how much, engineering resources, specifically, you want to time dedicate versus how much kind of unique software or how much you want. And then I guess the final takeaway is this field is changing so fast. A lot of this stuff has been pretty new in the last one or two years. So a lot of the stuff I might be talking about may be obsolete next year. So always just kind of be aware what's out there. There's a lot of extra tooling, a lot of people working on a lot of these problems that make it so difficult. Yeah, so always kind of be aware what's out there and make sure you keep reading up to date. And with that, I will open up to questions. I'm not sure how much time there is. Yeah, you're good, yeah. Right. Yeah, if there's any questions, my email's here, a few of any questions afterwards. You can send me email, send me feedback on the talk or anything else. And yeah, thanks for coming. Thank you. Yeah, okay. I was just wondering if you had any experience using K-Opps or any of the other open source like Kubernetes or other cluster management tools versus like the Amazon or Google? Yeah, so I've used a little bit of K-Opps and stuff. And I find generally those are a great place to get started. Again, with a lot of the dynamic nature, so a lot of times when the failovers happen or when you need, when some sort of things fails, maybe like the DNS or some sort of outage in a certain region or something like that, that's generally where those kind of tools are lacking, it's harder to recover. But I think generally for starting off for actually getting everything provisioned, it's a lot faster to get started. So if you're trying to kind of evaluate a POC, like is kind of a container orchestration layer, something I need, it's definitely a great place to start versus going through like the 50 steps to set up like your Kubernetes cluster by scratch. It's everything from installing the binaries to working on the networking to creating the certs, to passing the certs, so a lot of the security. So yeah, I think that's a good point. I probably should mention that, but that's a good middle ground between cloud provider doing it from hand, I think. But yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Hi, I use Kops to orchestrate my Kubernetes clusters. What would be a good way to do like set up DR if you have multiple Kubernetes clusters and you wanna back up like all of your configs and Kops configs? Yeah, so the hardest thing about DR, so you're thinking like cross region here is when there's a disaster, it's most likely your master nodes kind of getting out of sync or completely down. So you need some sort of way to either back up or have maybe even a whole another cluster of at least like the master nodes are ready to spin up that has some way to kind of share the data to share the kind of state of the cluster. If you, yeah, so I think a lot of places simply just have two kind of complete clusters or at least like two full sets of master nodes that are kind of running in parallel and then be able to kind of switch from one region to another. But yeah, that's gonna be like one of the hardest things to manage. So I think a lot of the cloud providers just actually have like multiple kind of clusters up and running just behind the scenes if you select some sort of DR node. But yeah, you're gonna have to do at least some a lot of things in parallel. So can you use like SCD for bringing back your cluster if say your master goes down or everything gets corrupted? Yeah, so I think behind the scenes I think actually Kubernetes does use that. So yeah, you'll have to, if you wanna try to automate it you can write some scripts that you have to utilize SCD and stuff behind the scenes to kind of figure out the current state. So a lot of the times it requires manual work, but yeah, if you do some things behind the scenes you can write some scripts and automate that as well. That's another good option. That's probably the place to start if you wanna try to automate like a disaster recovery. I'm just wondering what your, did you have any experience or thoughts on OpenShift? Like specifically how OpenShift took a secure by default stance, which is in pretty stark contrast to the Kubernetes defaults? Yeah, so yeah, unfortunately, I actually don't have much experience with that. But yeah, I know Kubernetes, that's kind of one of the problems with it is, yeah, a lot of the security, a lot of the policies and stuff is pretty open. So it requires a lot of third party applications, a lot of additional kind of configurations. So that's why a lot of people will try to configure it from scratch and then have to kind of patch on a lot of the stuff. I think they know that's a problem. So there's probably gonna be some sort of, they will probably address that pretty shortly. So, I mean, that's the problem, everything moves so fast. So it depends on kind of how long you can wait, kind of specifically what your needs are. Cause a lot of the times, everyone's just kind of playing catch up. They realize there's something out there that everyone's kind of going to that tool, specifically for that reason. So as soon as they bring that over, then it kind of changes. But yeah, sorry, I don't know too much about OpenShift yet. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you.


So the ways that rural health collaboratives have addressed or tried to overcome data collection challenges has been more of a reliance on self-reported data, which has its own limitations, but it's certainly better than no data at all. And these data are usually collected by phone, through email, video conferencing, and they even mentioned the old school method of snail mail. So sending out information for patients to complete and send back to them by mail. Others have engaged convenience in grocery stores and they are using those sites as an opportunity to meet people where they are and where they are likely to go in order to collect data and information. Peer support specialists are people with lived experience, people who have experienced trauma, people who struggle with mental health, people who are in recovery from substance abuse, who are received training and in certain states are actually certified as a peer support specialist. Peer support programs and that one-on-one kind of coaching and trusting relationship is driven mainly by in-person contact.  So we heard from folks that one strategy was just connecting by phone. You know, having some of the peer groups move to online and virtual helps mitigate some of those transportation barriers and also some of the stigma for having, you know, having your car parked maybe outside of the mental health clinic for all to see in your small community. So there's been some some positives to this as well. World communities have had challenges of connectivity and technology. What we heard from World Collaboratives is that there are often times when the connection to their patients, to partners, even when they're just trying to get together with staff, has been stymied by spotty or unreliable access to broadband. Others have shared the challenge of engaging patients who do not have access to technology equipment. So not everyone has a cell phone. And so the way that World Health Collaboratives have responded to these challenges have been, again, through innovation and creativity. And a couple of the ways that they've done that is some World Providers are offering what they're calling curbside visits or they are loaning iPads to patients who are in their vehicles and who are there for virtual visits at their clinic. And then another one that I think is especially creative is that there are schools and libraries and hospitals and even a local McDonald's who offered their parking lot so that community members can use their Wi-Fi as a hotspot. We first started hearing from the World Collaboratives and everyone was just in sprint mode and just figuring stuff out on the fly and learning as they go. And so we're starting to see folks move from like the sprint mentality into the marathon mentality to say that this is, you know, the pandemic is here to stay for a while.


I'd like to call on stage, Ms. Alina Kokshapati. She will be speaking and giving valuable insights on why should you hire mothers back into the workforce. Talking about her, she is currently product manager at Code Themes, who have been actively working the field of IT, working the field of WordPress for over 12 years. She has been a speaker in WordCamp Nepal 2014, WordCamp Kathmandu 2017, panelist for WordCamp Nepal 2015, and communication wrangler for WordCamp Nepal 2015. She is also a proud mother, who is beautifully balancing her personal and professional career. Without further ado, let's welcome her on stage with a round of applause. Because I'll be presenting this topic in our national language because it's highly focused for our reason. That's right. So I'll be starting my presentation. Hello and welcome to WordCamp Kathmandu 2022. Before my presentation, I wanted to talk about the pros and cons of my work. I wanted to talk about the pros and cons of my work. Before my presentation, I wanted to talk about the pros and cons of my work. My pros and cons of my work are why you should hire mothers back into the workforce. Now, let's talk about the normal topic. We have a subconcept, why they don't hire mothers. Why they don't hire them? I don't know. This is a typical story. I have to hire a mother for 3 months.  I told her what she was going to do in that office. I told her that she was going to the office. She said why she didn't hire her. I told her that she was going to be a baby. She said she would give me my product and that I would apply for a job. The only mom or three percent, three percent both are women, they are mom or two. So, 42 percent back to work, boy or girl, they record. I don't know. In Singapore, 20 seconds in a family resource, you know, 100 percent, 42 percent mom or two.  They are completely, you know, job free and I have seen a lot of boys. You know. And also, you know, before the pandemic boy, boys would say, boy, or from Mumbai or the special technology field. So, in this family resource, we are doing that. It's like, we have 4 people, we are doing that. This is our job completely. This is what we are doing. We are reducing our work hours. So, I have been working for 8 hours and now I have to work. I have around 4 hours of work. You are not going to say that you are going to work. You are not going to say that you are going to work. And you have to do something else. Yes, ma'am. Do know, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. They are masters of prioritization, communication, negotiation, and organization. If they are pregnant, they can't take care of them, they can't take care of their baby, they can't take care of their family, they can't take care of them. If they are working and they are working, what kind of prioritization can we make? I mean what kind of prioritization can we make? How can we communicate with them? How can we organize their work in a way? How can we negotiate their work in this way? We need to develop something. I've been asked, people are more careful than you are, they know how to get more. We are all products of our mom. If we don't have a mom, we can't give her a child. If we don't have a dad, we can't give her a child. If we don't have a mom, we can't give her a child. We are the best product of our mom. I think every mom is a super-evil.  If you don't have a mom, you can't give her a child. If you don't have a mom, you can't give her a child. But it's the benefits of having a mother into your workforce.  Parents don't think back. They even learn how to deal with you.  Everyone would say you need to help them. And there are other things like that. For example, if you focus on diversity for a while, then in the company, you have to keep your diversity alive. If you have an unmarried person or an unmarried person, then you have to keep your mom alive. You have to keep your diversity alive. For example, if you have an unmarried person or an unmarried person, then you won't be able to teach others how to teach you. If you have to look at how you work, then there is one thing to do. First of all, you don't have to teach anyone, and that is the reason you are not able to teach you. The relationship between an unmarried person and not a real person. A unmarried person is not allowed to take any property or even his property. Obviously, the company, the productivity, the output side, is very low. And that is what we have to do. We have to analyze it. We have to test it, and then we have to do the interview. We have to be consistent. We have to do the work that we do. We have to justify it. That is what we have to do. Before that, I have to tell you something. I have a team of three. My best friend, Tostaro, has been working for three months. He is doing office drawings. He is the one who is working for the office. He is the one who has the productivity, the output side, the issue is very high. He has to be consistent. He is in the position to do the job. He is in the position to do the job. He is in the position to do the job. He is the one who is successful. I am the one who is successful. I know many companies who owned their own independent company. Recently, they hired us. We have only been in the stays with them for two years. Then we told them we won't do any work. We want them to be a very confident person. We prepared a rig for that job for them. The way they wish for us to call them is such as a must. But in their stay with us, they are verywheel in their roles. We present themselves to the family. We have never with them about other work before. We saw their chance and said it is applied for you, right? If you spoke to the government, the answer is yes, I have won, right? So, what are the things that influence you? In your word culture, you have to apply for me, right? That's what it is, right? You have to leave your parents, leave your policies. You have to do something completely different and even the government has to leave the pattern, right? So, what's the possibility? Your brother is a baby boy, right? He has to stay in the bank for a while, right? The government has 90 days for the first 60 days and in the 60 days, he has to go back to his wife and stay in the bank for a while for the first 11 months. 6 months of breastfeeding period for the baby to be grown is very important. He has to stay in the bank for 6 months, right? So, I have to go to his place for some time, visit him, tell him not to leave the parents' house, ask him what do you want to do and he has to go to the technical field for freelancing and then he's accepted the job. I will take him to the office and he is a baby, you know.  And there is another addition, it's a baby boy. It's a baby pyramid, right? That's why the baby has three parts. The time is three parts, that's why. Now they are all flexible. It's like, you don't have to leave the parts. You don't have to give this month a piece of paper. You don't have to do that. Now they say, let's do one hour of time work. Let's do one hour of work. Let's do one hour of work in the office. They are all flexible. And, Now they say, you cannot do work in the office with more flexibility. Now they say, you cannot do work in the office with more flexibility. Now they are not comfortable. Back to work or at home, and the other person is always with you. When you are away, you are told to go somewhere else to do work. But the other person said, it's like, you have to do all that. You need to do all this, and it depends on your time and flexibility. How long will you be on top of it? Now they say, you need to do it in one hour. One hour of work in a month. I say, you have to give it in one hour. One hour of work in a month. So now we move on to Q&A round and for that because of the time limitation we will be just one question. So if anybody has any question, please. What's the time limit again? I don't know. Okay, so I don't have any questions. Thank you for allowing me to present you some fresh information. I think there are new algorithms, what can I say, new formats of motherhood. But as you have been saying, I have been trying to communicate with the community. So present status and case, like I said in Nepal, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say. Present status and case, whatever you say. Like you said, the motherhood is not the same as the motherhood, it's the same because of the baby. But I have been trying to do handling ramble and feature. So I have been trying to manage it. And it's the same. And it's the same as the other companies, like I have a company. And I don't know how to manage it. I have developed it but I don't know how to manage it. And my manager and I are going to talk about it.  But you have certain requirements. That can be hassle for me. And after that I have to choose which candidate to come and choose. That's why I am going to talk about it. Thank you. What's the question you are going to give us? I have to present all the challenges of the Motherhood. I want to tell something about the company. Please explain to us. Yes. I am going to tell you that I have bad benefits. And I have been trying to manage it since many years. And I am going to tell you that I am not the right person to say it. I am going to do the right thing. So, you can live for a month or two. As a project manager, you have to apply for a job, you have to hire someone, you have to do it. For example, I have to do it because I don't have to go to the interview. I can't do anything. I don't have to do anything. Obviously, it's not possible to have a mom.  If you don't have a baby, you can't live. You can't live in a hospital. You can't have a project.   You need investment, you need to get your driver's license. We are trying to give you those candidates from all abroad, foreign countries and all other countries. What kind ofrée would you like them to come up to? First of all, we need to leave the mother behind. We don't have to do both, If you have any extra questions then you can please proceed to happen as far as possible.


Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Denver, Colorado at the DJI Airworks Conference. It's their second conference about 550, 600 people. Really interesting, all about commercial drones. Everybody knows DJI for the Mavic Pro and the Spark and all their consumer stuff, but there's a whole industrial play and commercial play, enterprise play. We're excited to be here. These are really fun kind of shows because everybody's into it and we're excited. Our first guest, Yareve Guller, he is the CEO of V-Hive. Welcome. Great talking to you. Absolutely, so what is V-Hive all about? So as you mentioned, there are a lot of commercial users, enterprises who want to use drones and while it's really fun flying a drone as a consumer, enterprises don't really care about the fun factor. It's all about making stuff scalable and autonomous. Now we're taking it to the next level, so not just using a single drone once we've computerized the system that can fly a drone autonomously. We're actually looking at a swarm or a fleet of drones that are flying in unison so a user can define a mission and the system will manage multiple drones that are actually collaborating on the same mission, getting work done much faster, any scale, stuff that organizations really look for on an ongoing basis. So you're here, it's a DJI event. It's a really interesting approach that they've taken to break this thing up and to people probably don't think there's a platform, there's the flight platform, there's the payload and then they opened up the SDKs. Not only in the controller in the mobile app but also inside the unit itself. So clearly it's something you're taking advantage of, putting your software energy in, using the SDKs and leveraging that to create kind of a new flight pattern, I would imagine, and a new kind of inter-drone communication system. Right, I think this is a very smart move that DJI is doing. We've seen it before, take Apple for example, company that builds wonderful hardware and they said the best efficient way for us to sell this hardware is to create a platform where people can create amazing applications. So they've created the environment and the ecosystem to support their wonderful hardware. I think DJI is doing the same kind of approach where they say we have cutting edge hardware that nobody else has, we can take this hardware to a certain limit with our focus and then we'd like to develop an ecosystem around our platforms that can actually make use in different industries and take the applications forward. So a lot of industries really being highlighted at this show, construction, energy, residential, we just had the mental park fire department next door to my house at home, talking about using the insecurity. So for your application, it's interesting before we turn on the cameras, you talked about the distinction between a fleet and a hive and a swarm, excuse me, a swarm, which obviously you think of bees, right?  So what are the type of applications that your customers are using your solution for? Right, so what we help customers do on a typical application is to digitize the field, is to bring the field into the organization. So if I'm a company that has large scale field operations and it costs me a lot to send out people to the field and actually understand what's going on and bring piece by piece information inwards, this new domain of drones enables us to capture the field and to bring the information so the entire organization can view it very effectively. Now, one of the limitations that the industry is seeing is there's this paradigm of a single person, a single drone, which is kind of limited in scale. So typically people will complain, drone only has 20 minutes worth of battery, I can cover only so much, it takes me some time to do larger scale work. We're looking at this next phase of how do organizations actually cover more and less time and more effectively? So we work well with companies in infrastructure, which include civil engineering companies, so not just construction where I focus on a building or a small area, but I want to look at an entire neighborhood or a 15 mile stretch of road that's being constructed. We work with utility companies. So we've done a lot of work with water utilities where they want to look at pipelines and infrastructure that they need to gauge over time and they want to understand if there is an issue or a problem that they need to pay attention to. We work on infrastructure like cell towers and so on where instead of sending a person to climb up of a 200 feet tower with all the risk and safety issues associated in insurance costs, you can send a few drones to cover your infrastructure much more effectively. So we're excelling in areas where scale is of importance, time is of importance and costs, which is everywhere pretty much. And I think one of the basic things that we say is very simple math. Throw a second drone into your mission, you cut time by half, cut cost by half of being in the field. So this scales up for organizations to do any kind of mission, any scale, any size at half the time or less. Right, except you got to have the good software, right? Or else you start adding communication overhead and management overhead. So it doesn't always equal one plus one makes two. Sometimes right, you have diminishing returns, but just an opportunity for you. It's fascinating to me this concept too came up in the keynote earlier of taking physical data via the sensors on the drones, whether that be photography or IR or Lord knows what other kind of sensors you put on this and really converting it into digital data that you can now almost treat as log data to feed into digital systems that we've been very familiar with in IT and manufacturing and other businesses. But now the drone becomes this interface between the physical world and the digital world in a space that's not necessarily wired because it's new construction or it's a water pipeline. It's a really fascinating way to attack the problem and be able to apply analytics software, data-driven analytics to what was never, you couldn't do that before, right? Absolutely, and I think you're touching on a few points here that are important. First of all, in the end of the day, the drone is not the goal. The drones are the means, right? In the end of the day, what companies are interested in is in acquiring data, processing data and managing data so that they can make smarter decisions in the end of the day, manage projects and save costs and so on. So drones are really enabling that. Another point that you touch upon is drones generate a lot of data. So every time we fly a mission for a customer, we're generating gigabytes and terabytes of information and there needs to be a way to manage that effectively. Some of the organization felt the pain originally by sending out drones and then piling up tons of information and software solutions like ours generate the IT environment to manage all this data so that you're both able to drill down through it, link between it and collaborate within your organization outside on that data. So we're seeing, for example, companies in civil engineering who both use the data internally for planning purposes. They use it to manage contractors in the field so that they can monitor what's going on from a bird's eye view and manage to compare between actual and planned activities and they're also using it to manage upwards where they need to share information with whoever's investing in the project. They can show them actual progress, visual progress, instead of sending them a written report, we're on track, check mark, and actually view progress over time. Right, right. So as you look ahead to 2018, right, we're almost done with 2017. What are, is there any significant challenges that need to be overcome? Is it just people are afraid of them? Is it privacy issues? Is it the software still not up to snuff? Is it flight times and batteries? I mean, what are some of the, not giant challenges, but short-term challenges that the industry as a whole will be able to really address in 2018? So first of all, the part of the industry that's our customers, they're on this accelerating ramp up of adopting this new technology. So we're seeing companies who have already identified drones as an excellent solution for them to acquire information from the field. We're seeing them starting to test out how they can use drones and making decisions that this is a good technology for them. And now they're experiencing some of the pains of how do you scale up? And I think again, this is a theme that we've heard today a lot and this is probably the most immediate challenges moving from adoption to scaling up operations. So I think we're going to see a lot of solutions that help organizations take drones to the next step. It's not just, yes, we want a drone, yes, we have a person or a group in our organization that's going to handle these. It's creating then the workflows and the infrastructure that lets them do this on a daily basis in a repeated way, in a way that actually makes commercial sense in terms of scale. And I think that's one of the key interesting challenges that we're going to see as the industry grows from nascent to actual adoption. Well, Yerif, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your time, look forward to watching what happens at V-Hive and a really exciting industry to be a part of. Thanks a lot, my pleasure. All right, Yerif Geller, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Airworks in Denver, Colorado. Thanks for watching.