Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's this month's non-farm payrolls webinar with me Michael Houston, covering the July payrolls report. Just some general housekeeping, risk warnings and what have you. Obviously, I won't be giving direct trading advice, but certainly in the context of how I view the numbers. Hopefully we will get some idea of the effect of what a good number will have, what a bad number will have, what is going to be perceived to be a bad number. You know, are we in a bit of a Goldilocks scenario when it comes to a deterioration in economic data, slowing inflation, a weak jobs number, what would that do? Certainly what we're seeing at the moment with respect to bomb markets and stock markets, we are getting slightly different interpretations of the price moves. In light of Chairman Powell's, shall we say, slightly ambiguous, if I'm being honest, press conference, because his comments that the Fed neutral rate was in around two and a half percent, which is essentially where the upper bound of the Fed funds rate is right now was taken in such a way by markets as to suggest that the Fed was unlikely to be hiking as aggressively, perhaps, than was originally thought to be the case three or four weeks ago. And that's been really well illustrated in terms of the reaction of bomb markets, particularly, say for example, if we look at, if I can actually find the chart that I'm looking for, here we go, I finally managed to drag it in. I don't know what was going on with my desktop there. Previously, I've been talking about a break of a head and shoulders reversal on the US 10 year yield. So this is your neckline here. Generally, what happens is when this sort of pattern breaks, we get a push to the downside, which would imply a move towards two percent. Now, we've rebounded off two and a half. And Bullard and Mester's comments earlier this week pushed us back above 2.8. But what was quite interesting about that particular move, and that's the move on Wednesday, that's the move on Wednesday, we pushed up when we actually closed lower, which suggests that there wasn't much enthusiasm for that particular move. So what's that telling us? Well, certainly, there is some disciplinary forces going on at the moment in terms of what markets are pricing. We looked at the prices paid data earlier this week from the ISM manufacturing numbers from the ISM services numbers. And we saw sharp falls in those numbers in July. The prices paid for manufacturing fell from 78 to 60, which was a huge fall. So there was certainly evidence on the actual underlying pricing numbers that inflation has peaked or plateaued in the short to medium term. And yet, when you look at US CPI for June, we jumped to 9.1 percent. And certainly, that places much greater emphasis on the CPI numbers that are due out next week for July, because I think there is an expectation that perhaps those numbers that we saw in June were, I think, partially or mainly driven by food and energy, particularly US gasoline prices. And of course, since then, we've seen prices come down. And we've also seen the dollar weaken as well, but only in the context of the uptrend that it's been in since the beginning of the year. So we've seen a pullback in the dollar. We've seen a pullback in yields. And we've seen a pretty strong performance in US and European equity markets, which is a little bit of a Goldilocks scenario. But that really supposes that the Federal Reserve is likely to pull back on hiking rates. And I'm not convinced that they are. And even if they do stop hiking in 2023, it certainly doesn't mean they're going to start cutting. So that is the conundrum that markets are currently wrestling with. And certainly what the 10-year yield is telling us is probably not overly constructive, relative to what the two-year yield is telling us. And certainly, I think, given the dire predictions from the Bank of England yesterday, which made me start to reach for the whiskey bottle, there is an awful lot of concern, I think, that inflation, while it may be topping, it's not going to be coming down sharply. And I think that's through the, that's the prism through which we have to look at what's going on in equity markets. And certainly, I think Bullard's comments this week, and Mester's comments this week, are putting a much greater emphasis on what the unemployment numbers and the jobless numbers are telling us. Because I think the stronger the data is for the jobs market, then the more likely it is that the Fed will continue to hike rates into year end. And I think that's what we need to start thinking about. But unfortunately, I think bond markets are still looking much longer term. They're pricing for recession, which is probably the right thing to be pricing for. Because if the Fed is going to continue to hike rates, that will impact on demand. And certainly, I think some of the numbers that we're seeing coming out of retailers would support that hypothesis. And certainly, I think in terms of looking at whether or not prices of plateaued, I think one, one particular item can really shed some light onto that. And that is the agricultural index that we have for CM, the CMC agricultural index, which peaked all the way back in May. This is this includes wheat prices, core prices, and Oaks prices. And these have fallen back to the levels that were prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to continue to fall. But what it certainly does tell us is that the inflationary pressure that we were seeing in April, May and June has started to diminish. More importantly than that, if we look at Brent crude prices, they've also fallen back quite sharply as well. So on our continuation contract for Brent, we're below $100 a barrel. But what's even more interesting is if we look at the December contract for Brent, that's trading down at around about $91 a barrel, $91 a barrel. So it's quite a bit lower in terms of where markets of pricing crude further out down the line. So again, a disinflation or a disinflation, I'm not going to say deflationary, because we're certainly nowhere near that. But certainly markets of pricing in much weaker oil price two to three months out. And that's that prevailing trend is feeding into bond prices. Now obviously, you've got natural gas prices, which is which are going in completely the opposite direction. They're near multi month highs for US, we can see that here, where there's a decent top at around about 9.5%. So that is what I think central bankers and central banks in general are really concerned about. And UK natural gas prices as well, which topped out in the middle of July, they've been edging up since the beginning of the month. And that's really the problem that central bankers are having to wrestle with right now. So Fed Pivot, no, big question is, what sort of payrolls number is going to elicit a response in terms of either a stronger dollar, a weaker dollar, or a spike in yields? In terms of the yields question, particularly the US 10 year, we can we, I think we can say with a certain degree of confidence that we are in a downtrend still, with respect to that. So the lows are getting lower, the highs are getting lower. Yes, this is a bullish reversal here on the daily chart, which could take us all the way back to 287. But what it doesn't do is invalidate the head and shoulders reversal. So you've got to remember that currently where we are at the moment, we're around about 269, 270. So there is certainly potential for us to go at least another five or 10 basis points up without reversing the move lower that we've seen from 3.5% back in June. And maybe next week's CPI numbers are probably the catalyst that could determine whether or not this trend down continues. And it's probably less about today's payrolls numbers in the context of that overall story. In terms of Euro dollar, a weaker dollar could actually see Euro dollar push back up to this level here, 102.75, 102.80. As you can see, there's a big top here at Euro dollar in terms of where we could go next. And ultimately, given what we're seeing with the dollar index, given what we're seeing with Euro dollar, I'm still of the opinion that we sell the rally in Euro dollar, given the fact that natural gas prices in Europe are likely to have a much more significantly negative effect on the European economy than they are anywhere else. I mean, the UK economy will be effect will be affected by and certainly the dire outlook that was painted by the Bank of England yesterday would appear to suggest that, you know, things are really, really bad. But however bad they are here in the UK, they're going to be degrees of magnitude worse in Europe, particularly in Germany and Northern Europe, probably not so much in Southern Europe, where they get their natural gas from Northern Africa. It's really the economies in Europe that are reliant much more on Russian natural gas. And for that, you're going to have to blame Germany because they still get around about half of their power down by Nord Stream One. So the question I was asked earlier was, what a strong number, what a strong payrolls number push equities down, I think it's probably going to act as a little bit of a top on equities. And certainly, I think the the levels to watch for are as follows, we're going to start with the S&P. Because if we can look at the S&P here, we can see that we've got a decent area of resistance around about 4,200. So let's just get rid of that and pop in a nice horizontal support and resistance resistance line through there. So around about 4,200, there or there about is probably likely to give us a decent indication of where a decent support and a decent resistance level is likely to be. Even though we've broken that minor downtrend line there, we still got those highs there. More importantly, I think, than that is the fact that the NASDAQ 100 is pushing right up against a fairly decent resistance line from the highs here. So I think a fairly decent number expecting 250,000. Bearing in mind, we expected 250,000 last month and got 372,000. Anything north of 250,300 is likely to be potentially negative for equity markets. I struggle to make the case for a strong rebound given the outlook that's currently being painted. Now, that's not to say that outlook is likely to pan out. And one of the things that the Bank of England said yesterday, and was very honest about, was the impact that higher natural gas prices were likely to have on growth going forward. But I think that scenario is unlikely to play out because it assumes no response whatsoever from governments, notably the UK government. And yes, you know, basically people are distracted by the Conservative Party leadership contest. But we should know by 5th of September, who the new Prime Minister is going to be, if not necessarily before that. And ultimately, there will need to be an emergency budget. Because you know, energy bills of 3,800 pounds a year are going to push around about half the UK population into energy poverty. And it's hard to see how any, any economy can ride that particular fiscal shock out. So there will be something that they will have to come up with. Certainly more tax rises are not the way to go. So around about this sort of area here, 13, which is basically akin to the highs that we've got at the moment, 13,000, I'm gonna say 13,400 as a fairly decent resistance level. If we get a strong move here, then there's certainly potential to go back to the 200 day moving average, which as we can see from here, has acted as a fairly decent barrier going forward. The important thing to note here is we're still in the downtrend. You know, we have not necessarily seen the start of a new uptrend here. Certainly there's nothing in the price action that's made that makes me think in those terms. Before we get to the numbers, please feel free to ask any questions. Again, we've got the DAX here, we're still in the downtrend here. So again, this particular doji here would appear to suggest that the upside again is starting to get a little bit stretched on the upside. We are running into some key resistance levels on all the major indices. We can see that on the FTSE 100 as well, very long upper shadows. So again, here, any spike higher, they're finding much more and more difficult to sustain in the short to medium term. And as we head into the weekend, I think it's unlikely, even though we've had a fairly positive week stock wise, it's unlikely that we'll make new highs unless we get a really horrible number. And I think that's the only thing that would potentially push stocks quite a bit higher if we get a really rubbish number on the payrolls. As I said, 372 on the previous number, which was and which was up till today, the worst number this year for US payrolls. We haven't had any ADP payrolls numbers for the last two months, we will start to get them next month because they're changing the methodology on that. But ultimately, I think anything in line with expectations, 250,000 would appear to suggest that the labor market is robust, there's still job openings just below 11 million. So there's no lack of tightness in the labor market is it is still relatively tight in absolute terms. Wage growth, again, that's expected to weaken from 5.1 to 4.9, which is extraordinarily counterintuitive when you think about it. Because if there's all these vacancies, why aren't wages higher? Why isn't the participation rate higher? It should be. And yet it's not. But there is some evidence that more people are coming back into the labor market. As a consequence of the fact that prices are rising and ultimately they need to pay their bills. So I think when we look at the dollar reaction in terms of today's payrolls numbers, I think a strong number will be dollar positive and equities negative and a weak number, conversely, will be equities positive and dollar negative. But again, it will be very, very short term. One number does not make a monetary policy decision make. And I still think that we will find that in September, the Fed will hike by 50 basis points at the very least. And let's not forget, we also have the Jackson Hole annual symposium at the end of this month. So we could get further clues as to what the Fed is likely to do in September in any case. But to my way of thinking, I still think we'll probably get 50 basis points in September. The Bank of England probably is going to have to go the same way, unless we get any significant indication of weakness. But certainly I think, even though we're starting to see inflation level off and start to roll over, any thought that we're going to drop from nine or 10% down to three or 4% in the next 12 months, I think you really got to be very optimistic. And perhaps maybe been on the grog, because I can't see the Ukraine situation changing anytime soon. And that for me means that natural gas prices are likely to remain fairly elevated. So let's wait for the numbers, and I will now be quiet and wait for the market reaction. Unemployment down to three and a half percent. Canada payrolls was downs 528. I mean, that's a huge number 528 non farm payrolls. I mean, that is an absolutely huge number. So that suggests to me that there's more people coming back into the workforce by virtue and wage growth strong as well. I mean, that's strong dollar and very negative for equity markets. So it does appear that that's played out exactly as I suspected it would. And essentially, it means that 50 basis points is the is the very least that we can see. I mean, it's double consensus, double consensus. So I mean, we might as well throw our models completely out of the window. I mean, not only did non farm payrolls beat consensus in June, 250 were expected 372. We've even gone higher than that in the revision, as we can see there 398 from 372. But we've we've double consensus here and the unemployment rate has dropped to three and a half percent. Now, let's have a look at the participation rate, because I think the participation rate could be also be very instructive when it comes to the payrolls numbers, because if the unemployment rate has fallen and the participation rate has gone up, that is very much a positive factor. So that we were expecting 62.2 on the participation rate. And that's fallen. I mean, that's just incredible. So so the participation rate has come in at 62.1, which let me just pull my Bloomberg out of the way. So yeah, that's that's fallen back ever so slightly. So that's got me scratching my head. I've got absolutely no idea why a participation rate would fall back. And the headline rate headline non farm payrolls rate will go up. But I mean, to be quite honest, it doesn't really matter. It's what basically the market thinks. And the market strong dollar, euro dollar back down, cable back down dollar yen, slightly lower, sorry, slightly higher rather, what am I talking about, slightly higher. So the next higher for dollar yen is going to be that 13480 level that we broke below on the way back down to the cloud support back here, and a retest of the 50 day moving average, which I talked about in my morning comment on the chart forum on the spread back, the spread back platform. So running into resistance at the 13480 area, and 50 day standard moving average, and move above 138 13480 retargets 136 136 area. And these these highs is these these lows back there. So as I might my approach to technical analysis is fairly simple. It's really trading the levels and levels trading is probably the most efficient way. For me, I'm not saying it's going to be the most efficient way for you but the most efficient way for me in terms of how I look at the markets more broadly. Now, before I move on to looking at the Canadian dollar, does anyone have any questions as to any markets that they'd like me to cover? Certainly the the Canada payrolls is going to be slightly just overshadowed by the fact that the the non farms was so positive. But certainly I think in the context of this particular trend, the Canadian dollar has also been weakened by the fact that we've got lower oil prices. It's a petro currency. It is very much driven by how oil prices trade. So certainly in the context of this particular move, we're likely to see a retest of 129 and a half. I mean, we're pretty much already there. And a potential retest back towards 130 on the basis of those payrolls payrolls numbers there. So does anyone have any questions on anything that I haven't covered already? Because that's what I'm here to do. Let's look at let's do a quick preview perhaps of US CPI next week, perhaps. Actually, let's do gold. That's always a nice, it's always a nice one when you get a strong dollar number like that. And the gold prices actually respected this downtrend line from the peaks back in March, as well as the 50 day moving average, we test we pretty much hit it on the money. And as I say, I mean, it's not something that I set up before, I'd almost forgotten that I drawn that particular chart. But again, here, we've got another classic example of support and resistance lines being respected quite nicely. So not only was this trend line from from the peaks here respected in the gold price. Obviously, if we now look back at US yield charts, unsurprisingly, given what we were talking about earlier, yields are now higher. So the tune of 279. So again, what I was saying earlier, we can see a retest of at the very minimum and move back to 285 on that number. And it's quite likely that we will probably get that. And obviously, the dollar has rebounded off this level here. And actually, if we zoom in a little bit on this particular chart, and make it a, you can see that there's potential for a little bit of a bullish reversal on this daily candle back earlier this week. So certainly, this bullish reversal here suggests that we're going to see a rebound in the dollar, perhaps back to around about 107.40, which obviously then means we get a lower euro dollar, given the fact that the dollar index makes up around about 57% of euro dollar. You're all very quiet, ladies and gents, which essentially leaves me to believe that perhaps you haven't got any questions, or you can't hear me go. Here we go. Now we're getting him now. Okay, right. So that could not equities shrug stronger interest rates and push the S&P to super job report. So hang on, you're asking me whether or not, because we've seen a stronger report, it could actually be positive. Have I understood you correctly, Alan? I want to make sure that I'm answering the question. Right. No, the answer to that is because the US Federal Reserve is likely to tighten faster. And if the Federal Reserve tightens faster, that will impact on demand, it will pay back consumer spending, and therefore, sales and revenues of US companies will diminish. If the US central bank was inclined to tighten a lucid monetary policy, then yeah, absolutely, that would, that would certainly be the case. But because the economy is improving, it means that the Fed is more likely to tighten than Lucent. So therefore, it's not as good for equities. So hopefully, that makes sense. Usually over the last 10 or 15 years, whenever you've had slightly improving economic data, there's been never any prospect that the central banks would tighten monetary policy. That dynamic has changed in the current environment. Better economic data is not necessarily good for risk assets, given the fact that we've already rallied 20% from the July lows. And that's the prism from with which you need to look at this particular piece of good news. Good news is no longer bad news. So sorry, good news is no longer good news. It's now potentially bad news. So the big question is absolutely you've asked the right question. Where are the next key levels for S&P for support? Well, let's drill down into slightly shorter term. So what we can see here is a four hour chart. Well, initially, the first support level is obviously the trend line support of the lows. So we're looking at that level there, but that's no good. We don't want that because it's just too far away. So let's now put in another trend line support of the lows from here. And then we've got that. Now let's look at previous lows. So this previous low here is likely to be the next key support for the S&P 500. Where is that? It's 4075, as well as obviously this trend line from here. So the next area of support for the S&P is going to be the trend line on this four hour chart from here, as well as these lows through here. So that's essentially the way I deconstruct a particular move. We failed just below 4200. We've taken out these lows at 4135. Now when US markets open in around about 40 minutes time, you could well get an initial short squeeze perhaps. But ultimately, given how good those wages numbers are given how good those payrolls numbers are. Any thought of a Fed pivot gone? Forget about it for at least the next four to five weeks, simply on the basis of the fact that these numbers will potentially be will be remembered until such times as we get another payrolls report. Next payrolls report will obviously be the first week in September. We've also got two more CPI reports between now and then the first one of which is next week. So ultimately, the narrative for now is better data equals more aggressive Fed. And that's the message that you need to take away. So ultimately, the next move lower on the S&P is likely to run into support in and around these areas here. Obviously, what also that means for the NASDAQ is a slightly more different story. It's going to be much more aggressive this move lower for the NASDAQ. And I talked about that because of this trend line here. It's respected it perfectly, which I was a little bit apprehensive about. You're always a bit apprehensive about being short so close into a number or being looking to sell so close into a number. So the next key support on the NASDAQ is obviously this low here around about 31 13 160, which we're currently right at at the moment. You've obviously got these twin peaks through here. And I'm looking at an hourly chart here. But if we do a similar sort of analysis on this, we can also draw an interim trend line through these lows through here. But also look at these series of lows through here and those series of peaks there, which is around about 13,050. They're up there about 13,070, 1380. So again, it's not trying to be overly complex when you're doing analysis, you know, you can have as many MACDs as many RSIs, slow stochastics as you like. The most important component when it comes to analyzing markets, it's price, price, price. In terms of fibs, yeah, fibbing actually, fibbing actually levels are just as relevant. So let's say, for example, you want to draw some fib levels on this chart, that's fairly easy to do. You take the low there, you take the high there, but they only work if you're absolutely certain that we've seen the absolute high of this of this move higher. At the moment, I would be reluctant to use fibs quite yet until such times as we retrace at least 20% of this move higher. So fib measures only work when you can be absolutely certain that you've seen a top or bottom of a particular move. This is just one set of price data, a really good payrolls report, a good really wages report. That could be all unwound the next week with the CPI numbers. So we're not there yet. We haven't taken out this low here on the NASDAQ. So I would be cautious about calling a top on the NASDAQ quite yet. Those numbers would suggest that we potentially have, but we still need to see confirmation of that particular move. So I hope that sort of makes sense to you. I'm hesitant to call a top on the NASDAQ quite yet. I'm encouraged by this data. Doesn't necessarily mean that we won't see it because in terms of the FTSE 100, we have seen a fairly decent bounce back. What happens if CPI is very low? Then what? Well, then we go back to the entire, is the Fed going to pivot? Is the Fed not going to pivot? The moment there's more emphasis on the equity, there's more emphasis on the labor market. And this is why it's very important that you move from data point to data point. And when you have a position and you've got a decent profit, you take that profit. It's all very well having a stop loss. You also need to have a take profit. And you need to make sure that you take your profit, pocket the profit and then move on to the next trade. You should never ever be wedded to one particular stop loss when you're looking at a nice, juicy profit. So I think that's one thing that really doesn't get looked at an awful lot. There's so much emphasis on stop losses and there's not enough emphasis on take profits. These numbers are good, but it doesn't mean the S&P is going to fall off a cliff. It doesn't mean the NASDAQ is going to fall off a cliff because as you say, you could get a very weak CPI number next week and then suddenly everyone's goalie locks again. So this is the nature of what markets are like at the moment. And I think that's something that we really do need to be aware of. Trade the market as it is. Trade the price action as it is. The data hopefully will support the move, but look at the price action first and foremost. Right. OK, I also got asked about Aussie Dollar and I will cover that. I hadn't forgotten my stuff. So I will do that now. OK, so this is my long term look at the Aussie Dollar. As we can see, we've got this entire up move here. We've moved back down. We've traded back to 7050 and now we're trading lower again. So the next key support on the Aussie Dollar is the lows that we saw earlier this week at 6880. And obviously what we also saw here was a bearish reversal on the move here. So obviously further Aussie weakness goes slightly counter to what we've seen over the course of the last week or so. The RBA, in my opinion, will continue to hike rates. The RBA is still continue to be behind the curve, but it will be outweighed by weaker commodity prices. So if commodity prices remain weak and the Fed continues to remain hawkish, then it's quite likely that the Aussie will continue to trade towards the downside. I don't see the Aussie falling off a cliff, but I certainly see that the potential for weakness back to around about 6870 in the short to medium term is this support here. If we break this key support here, then we could well head back towards the lows. But at the moment, we can see from the daily chart, if we drill down into the four hour chart, we can see that there's a decent area of support all the way through here. So you need to be a little bit careful about being aggressively short of it. But what I would do is if I was looking to trade the Aussie, I'd be selling weakness back to around about 6980, 6990 for a move lower. And it's really about where you look to get in when you're trading Aussie dollar. It's not about what you're going to do now. These payrolls numbers will push the Aussie towards these lows. The big question for me is whether or not we're able to take out these lows. OK, so OK, any other questions, ladies and gents, otherwise, I'm going to wrap this up and wish you all a fairly do you so do I see more weakness in commodity prices? You're going to have to be slightly more specific because it depends which commodity prices you're talking about. We're talking about copper. Let's have a look at the copper chart. I still think we're going to see fairly decent demand for copper because ultimately the energy transition will require an awful lot more copper. But if you look at the way things are at the moment, there's fairly decent resistance in copper around about 360. So I think the big question is is whether or not we've seen the lows and I think an awful lot of that will depend on demand out of China. We've got China trade numbers over the weekend. If we look at this particular trend line here, we're very much in a reactive uptrend. If we take out 360, then we can potentially go higher. But again, it really depends about short term demand and the Chinese economy. Zero Covid Chinese economy is unlikely to grow by anywhere close to five and a half percent this year, let alone three and a half. So I'll be very much dependent on demand over the back end of this year. And I'm not confident about that. If you're asking me longer term, do I think that copper will go higher? Absolutely. Yes. But we're talking over the course of the next two or three years. In the short term, it's much harder to call. Where will I will ask to finish this season? Yeah, thanks, Phil. Higher than Spurs, hopefully. That's all I'm going to say. Do I see silver recovering soon? Someone's got a sense of humor. That's funny. I like that. Ask me after the palace game tonight. Silver, again, we're probably going to see some short term weakness in silver. I'm still laughing at that. Again, on the back of a on the back of a stronger dollar, we can probably come back to these sorts of levels here. So that's going to be around about the highs of July, 19 dollars, 19 dollars an ounce. We can see it drift back to there. And again, we're in a downtrend for silver in the same way that we're in a downtrend for gold. So if we look at it through the prism of gold, if you're looking at potentially high yields and gold prices, then until such times as we break higher in gold, because gold is a fairly decent proxy for silver, then I think silver prices are probably going to drift back down as well. Oil prices have already covered. Again, I think we'll probably continue to remain slightly soft, simply on the basis of weaker demand in the back end of this year. I don't think the Chinese economy is going to pick up significantly, strongly enough to drive oil prices back towards the levels that we saw in the early part of this year. So I can certainly see the scope for that. If you look at forward contracts for oil, then that would appear to suggest to me we are going to continue to see slightly weaker oil prices, but they're not the things that I'm worried about. It's natural gas prices that I'm worried about. OK. Anything else, ladies and gents? Any sensible questions not like where we'll ask and I'll finish this season because I'm not taking bets on that because I usually get that wrong. OK. Well, in that case, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your questions, both serious and tongue in cheek. And I'll see you all the same time, same place next month when we cover the August payrolls report and see whether or not we're any further advanced in terms of when is the Fed likely to pivot anyway. Have a great weekend, ladies and gentlemen, and I'll speak to you all. I'll see you all same time, same place next month.


Good morning, I'm Bart Robertson. I'm a software engineering manager at Microsoft, and we're here today to talk about the log changes between using the Docker Shum and using container D or cryo as your communities runtime. And I'm Joseph Fultz. I'm one of the engineering leads at Microsoft. And I'm going to open with talking a little bit about our repo. You'll see it posted up there. You can find it with a short link of aka.ms slash fb dash cri. In that repo, you can find some examples and a walkthrough of what we've done. The problem is that when we switched from container, from Docker runtime to container D, the log formats didn't match up. And so we had to do a little work there. And you'll see all that in this repo as well as some additional mappings where we lift values out of Kubernetes and Kubernetes labels. So with that being said, let's take a look at our setup here. On the left, we've got a Docker runtime running. You can see in the terminal window there, there's a describe and you can see it's the Docker runtime version. And in the top window, you see that we've got the parser step as Docker as a configuration for it's pretty bland. There's nothing special there, no rex or anything like that. So let's take a look at how that log output looks as it did initially prior to us changing to container D as a runtime. So if you look at our app, this is the log output from the app. You can see there's a few fields there, dates, task codes, and so forth. And we want to see how that maps out without any other special mappings from the Docker runtime with the Docker parser. So when that gets picked up by Fluentbit, you can see there at the top line, there's the container log. And in fact, there's a log field there to which our information is mapped. You can see it as a string with the different fields differentiated there. And followed by that, you see the stream output type, which is standard out. And then you see the Kubernetes log information, pod name, so on and so forth mapped to there as well. With that being said, I'm gonna hand it over to Bart to walk through what we've done on the cry parser side to get everything matched up and looking good before we add additional lifts and such. Bart? Awesome, thanks Joseph. So the first thing you'll see is that we're running container D as our container runtime. And let's just go ahead and take a look at our logs real quick. And I actually have two instances of Fluentbit running. One that just runs the standard out of the box, exact same configuration that we have on the left side. And the other one that runs, that fixes it. And so the first thing that you'll see is that our log format is a little bit different. And so here we have a log field, but you'll notice that unlike over here where our log field just contains our JSON that was written by our app, we actually have additional fields in here. And so we have the daytime stamp, we have the standard out. This is a full log, which is, this is the log tag field, which is new in the CRI format. And then we have our content. And obviously this doesn't parse. And so our back end parsing system broke because it wasn't getting what it was expecting. And so let me show you how we fix that. It's a really easy fix. But just realize it does break your logs. And so here's our new version that we have a little bit of change to. And you'll notice that now it looks more like this one. So we have the stream just like we do over here. We have this new feature called log tag. And the F just tells you this is a full log. So it's not a multi-line. If it's a multi-line log, this will actually have a different value. And then the logs will be written out on multiple different lines. One of the reasons we chose to log with JSON is to avoid the multi-line logs because it makes parsing so much easier. And then here we're back to our log format and you can see it looks exactly like it does over here. And then here's our Kubernetes map. And so it was really pretty easy to fix this. And so let me just walk you through the two changes that we had to make. So the first thing is you will see these files are pretty much identical with two exceptions. So this input section is where we made our first change. And over here you can see we're using our parser, which is the Docker parser. And this is probably how you have yours configured today if you're using the Docker shim or you're using Docker D as the runtime. The change that we made is we actually use this CRI parser. And this is a new parser that we added. It's available on the FlintBit website. And if you go down to the bottom, you'll see this parser is defined down here. And all it is is a regex that pulls out that time, the stream, the log tag and the log value. And so those are the only two changes that we had to do to make this work. The other thing you'll see is that we have our merge logs turned off right now. If you turn these on, it will lift the individual log item to top level. And you can also lift the Kubernetes to the top level as well. So it's a really simple change, but if you don't make this change, your log processing is most likely going to break because the CRI log format is different than the Docker format. And so with that, that concludes today's Lightning Talk. And thanks for joining us. Thanks everyone.


In the context of network management, we know that simple network management protocol is used to oversee the performance of a network. And if there is a requirement for changing the behavior, then some variants of it can be incorporated that also implement certain policies as laid out by the system administration. There is a term known as self-organizing network. It is a proper noun because it was coined by Duis Telekom that is an operator in Germany in the next generation mobile network alliance. We are going to look at various aspects of it and we will see what is unique about SONs and how these can be understood in order to do some research into it because it is forming the basis of self-learning networks which alter or change their behavior as the network progresses with a varying load of users. We know that networks became intelligent over time from being configurable to getting automated and some programming was introduced in software-defined networking for network function virtualization and this led to an automatic execution of certain policies that the system administration or the network operators would like to. This has taken us to a completely different level known as autonomic computing or autonomic networking where the system becomes independent. This independence is enough for a network to do fault performance accounting and security management at its own. The goal however is to take it to a level where the network becomes self-aware but we know that consciousness is not a virtue of computing systems so that dream or that goal largely remains theoretical. There are some self-organizing features which are available to networks for quite some time especially in the context of telecom networks, telcos, which have a typical architecture of a base station, base transceiver, mobile switching center, network operation center, administration and management center so in there the mobile station and the base transceiver have a power control feature which is pretty much an automatic if not automated system. Then the handover soft or hard takes place through a certain rationale or an algorithm which is prescribed by the network operator. Similarly a customer is recognized by subscriber identification module known as SIM which contains the wallet and the payment details of a certain user and the service package to which the customer has subscribed. So we are aware that this kind of self-organization or self-management was already there in telecom networks however as the networks grew the applications grew the number of users became very large their interaction with the networks became very complex so some drivers or some motivations led to the evolution of self-organizing networks. The most obvious one is since manned networks are difficult to have no error because the likelihood of human error is always there. So in order to avoid the laborious man induced errors some kind of automation would be required that immediately would result into cost reduction and the overall complexity that the humans cannot readily fathom or comprehend holistically can be delivered to the machine. So it means self-organizing networks are value-added network management orchestration mechanisms. This would need even more automation even more programming so we are going to look at some intelligence for the networks to become more enabled to organize themselves without human involvement. This also means that some kind of over the air programming or TAP or remote method invocation mechanisms should also be incorporated. This would require some communication connectivity and computation and their blend so as I said earlier Jewish telecom in the next generation mobile network alliance came up with this son initiative back in 2007 which was adopted. Let's look at a brief history of it. The operators which were known once as the walled gardens were making a lot of money but as the competition grew as their profit margins reduced they came up with an initiative to identify the use cases where human element of error should be reduced. So these were expected to be automated because there was a lot of human effort involved these were error-prone and the nature of such use cases was complex so these were put up to vendors because the hardware actually comes from the original equipment manufacturers and certain third generation partnership project standardization bodies to look into standardizing self-organizing solutions. This is the basic of background or historical perspective to sons today we see sons already deployed because in 2023 most of the telecom networks already have adopted sons our purpose is to look at the continuous need for self-organizing that eventually leads to self-awareness which is highly cherished or here in goal. Today we see plug-and-play deployment of base stations in telecom operators for that the process is simple the onsite installation is an expectation on the end of the service providers to the vendor has somehow enabled the device to configure itself and do some software management activity in an automated manner when it is turned on. An example is the automatic neighbor relationship configuration where a base transceiver in 2G networks or node B in 3G or E node B in 4G becomes aware of the neighbors which it has to possibly reach out for load balancing for interference control and noise reduction etc. So this results into overall better management and the overall network quality is experienced by a user also increases so son was put up as a formal standardization activity in which essentially there are two parts the first one is it was recognized that the way a typical telecom network provider operates has to be automated because it is only through automation that self-organization can be implemented so the workflow execution system is the first and integral part of self-organizing networks this includes a policy mechanism that is policy storage policy definition policy enforcement points where the policy actually can be configured on the fly on the network elements. The self-organization capability is implemented as a closed management loop compare this to an open management activity where human involvement is something as the last call but for network elements for devices that is the network management and the overall umbrella management this closed loop management loop implies that the devices would not be involving any human intervention are going to do some kind of device to device configuration orchestration communication to come up with an adaptive behavior that is the need of the network at that particular moment let's look at the manual network operation we know that everything starts with planning so once we have the plan this plan is put into operation and the continuous monitoring of the operation is done through performance fault and configuration management because on ground we have hardware like racks where we have telecom infrastructure like node B E node B media gateway with their own set of alarms alerts and error reporting mechanisms kind of sensing and then actuation means scripts which run in response to those predefined set of errors and alarms and failures. Then this is reported to to the network optimization mechanism that keeps learning this and shares this feedback with the human being so this net manual network operation involves human being compare this to closed loop automation where we have a network planning that of course starts with the human being but then it becomes pretty much an automatic closed loop where we have the network plan with its own set of policies however since we have now identified two essential elements the workflow automation and the self organizing network capability through policy enforcement here we can see that the network plan is implemented in true letter in spirit through workflows and the policies the policies are enforced on ground into the into the network elements the domain administrative domain and the overall network as as an autonomous entity so the human effort which was done once at the ebb and issue time or at the starting time is now shifted to to more abstract level of planning but on ground the system is running almost at its own so the experiences which are now being learned in network operations are now being shared into back into the workflows and policies and these workflows and policies are going to be becoming part of the network plan and the network plan is going to be implemented after storing it in some kind of repository so you can see that the network plan along with the policy on how to manage and run the operations on the network is a closed loop activity this lecture and the subsequent lectures to follow have been adopted from a very beautiful book by John Wiley back and it was published back in 2020 2012 and the first author he's he's an accomplished network engineer to my last understanding when I knew of him he was here at Nokia but he started off his initiative at Doesh Telecom so we are going to refer to this book in all the associated modules related to self-organizing network


Okay, so now I'm gonna go into the cog dropdown and just note that our setup process is over here in the company area. So whenever we're dealing with our settings in our accounts, we've got under the company area, account settings, manage users, customize your styles and so on. We're gonna go into the account and setting right now. Most of this stuff, a lot of it has been set up when we started the company file. But let's just first look at the company information up top and then we'll go into some of more of these items in future presentations. So the company name, notice you got the pencil over here. If you click on it, then you can make adjustments to it. You might have a logo that you would add. No, I haven't optimized the size or anything, but I just picked up a logo. So there's, you know, just to show that you can have a picture. You can get into the optimization to make sure that you're picking up the size and shape that will be most appropriate. The logo's gonna possibly appear on the types of forms if you were to customize them that you give to clients, major forms being the invoice form or estimate forms. And then you company name, showing on sales forms and purchase orders. So I'm just gonna type in get great guitars. And so this would be the name that you want to be showing up because that's gonna be important on those types of forms that you're gonna be providing to customers. So it shows on the sales forms, invoices, sales receipts, purchase forms, like a bill. So legal name, if it's the same, it would be here or you can uncheck that if it's not. The EIN number represents your tax identification number. Even if you're a sole proprietorship, then you typically wanna have oftentimes an EIN still, even if you don't have any employees because that's the number that you might have to provide to people if they need your business number. Say if you do contracting for another company, they're gonna need your number and you would rather not give them your social security number, some kind of EIN number. So we'll just say 95-dash is usually kind of like the format of the EIN. So obviously I just kind of made that up but that's the idea. So I'm gonna save that. And then we've got the company type. So it's gonna be a sole proprietorship. This is something that we set up when we set up the company file. Notice that you can change it here, sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, not-for-profit and so on. You would think this would have that an impact on the chart of accounts but you could see that it didn't really have a big impact on the chart of accounts as we changed it when QuickBooks made the chart of accounts. So we'll take a look at that later. And then we've got the industry. So we pick the industry when we set up the company file and then down here we've got the contact information which includes the email address. Same as the company email. You might have the phone number that you would want to add here. So I'm gonna just say 555-5555 and that could show up on some forms. So we'll do that. And then the website again which is showing on the sales forms. So if you want your website, you know www.getgreatguitars.com or something like that that will show up on your sales forms that will be external users, you can populate that. So I'm gonna say save it. Then we've got the company address. Notice I just picked up an address I searched for on House and Beverly Hills that sells for like multiple million dollars or something if you're in the market. And I'm just gonna use that as my location. So you can use that if you want. 7-1, Beverly Hills, California, 902-10. Address where your company is based. This address is used to calculate applicable taxes for your QBO subscriptions and is your default company address. Meaning it's important because if you have shipping information it'll be important there. But also if you have sales tax that you have to deal with then the sales tax in the United States is not a federal tax but based on state and local information. And then it's gonna be necessary to have an address for QuickBooks to populate that. And then you've got your address. You've got your customer facing address. I'm gonna say that's the same. You might have a different address for example. You could have a different address if you need to there. And then the address, the legal address typically I'm gonna say the same. I'm gonna say the same here again. You could change it if you had a different address which you wanted to be populated there. And then communicate with Intuit.  So that's the general overview for these settings. We'll go into more of these items in a future presentation. I'm gonna close this back out for now.


So coming in at number 10 is Victoria Bitter and Cycling. You can get it right. That's right, that green VB can is the choice for all Melburnians and Victorians. It doesn't matter that it actually tastes like bitter horse urine. The fact that it is Victorian and VB has one of the greatest advertising jingles of all time. There's a bullet coming on about four. A hard-earned thirst needs a big cold beer. And the best cold beer is Vic. Vic Bitter. That's all that matters. To prove the prevalence of VB in the Melbourne Victorian Cycling scene, let's watch this footage at the famous Wallunga Hill stage at the UCI Tour Down Under held in Adelaide, South Australia every year. There you can see Nick White. He's from Greater Victoria, a place called Ballarat and has lived in Melbourne for a number of years now, from the UniSA team and during a race. This can't help himself. He's necking a can of VB. It appears that the lady in front of me is also a Victorian and if we rewind here a little, you can spot the Victorian cyclists in the crowd by the can that they hold. You can also spot a bloke from Invercargill, New Zealand, whom appears to be filming Nick's Rare End. That's where that footage will end up later on. Coming in at number nine is a good quality local Melbourne bike shop. I don't know about your local area, but where I lived in Melbourne, it was surrounded by good quality local bike shops. Hampton Cycles, Omara Cycles, Urban Peddler, Total Rush, the Bicycle Centres, the Giant Stores and I can't forget about my good mate Troy out at Cycle House too. There are simply so many good quality local bike shops in Melbourne and the thing about a good quality local bike shop is if you can find one, it will have a major impact on your cycling journey. You'll get on the right bike, you'll find appropriate rides and groups, you'll have the right advice for additional needs and you'll always be pointed in the right direction. So local bike shops of Melbourne keep up the magnificent work, which is a great segue to number eight on the list which is local cycling clubs. The reason being, I found my local cycling club through my local bike shop and Melbourne has so many great cycling clubs and great people that volunteer their time to put cycling on for the community. Personally, I've been fortunate enough to be a member of two excellent cycling clubs. The St Kilda Cycling Club and also Carnegie Corefield Cycling Club but I know that there are many other great clubs out there such as Hawthorne, Brunswick, Coburg to name a few but they all really fostered the growth and development of not only the sport but also the activity of bike riding in Melbourne and greater Victoria. So thank you to all those people out there working for zero dollars to help put on events, group rides and of course this is the one that's going to be coming in at number seven and that is Criterium Racing. Since moving away from Melbourne, I've come to the realisation that I took Criterium Racing in Melbourne for granted. There's so many options. You've got racing on the Sand Down Raceway on Tuesday evenings hosted by the great Carnegie Corefield Cycling Club. This is an unbelievable place to race but strangely and unfortunately numbers have been down a little bit in recent times. I have no idea why because I am personally throughing at the daydream of having a sand down in my local area. I'm not sure whether Zwift Racing has gotten in the way or people think they have immediate credibility to a 15 grand road bike with a $600 map kit and posted a pic on Instagram. Who knows but let me just say that if you've been thinking about racing and you live in Melbourne please get down to Sand Down on Tuesdays when it's back on. For all the skinny whippets you've got the Hawthorne Donut on Wednesday evenings which is a great crit course and an awesome atmosphere perched along the great city of Melbourne. For the old blokes myself included you've got the Masters Crit Racing back at the Sand Down Raceway on Thursday evenings hosted by the Southern Masters Cycling Club and then on the weekend it's a crit bonanza with Coburg on Saturday and Sinkilda who were once at the epic White Street and now looking for a more permanent racing fixture on Sundays and taking off at the same time on Sundays is the almighty Glenvale where I've come close to having my legs completely ripped off in an A-grade Criterium many times and where you can watch. Legendary crit races such as Tomy Nann Curvis rip out a win while getting advice on the sidelines from club legends and ex-Australian Olympians such as Mick Hollingsworth. Now I know I have left out a lot here so please give them a shout out below but the side effect of having so many Criteriums is where number six leads us to and that is Melbourne is the home of the crit pig. Now there is a proper internet definition of the crit pig on the Urban Dictionary and this was developed from a collaboration between many local Criterium pigs in Melbourne including one of the great crit pigs, Cow Douglas but this is how it goes.  They're always desperate to race their bikes rolling around in a pigsty. They call a Criterium track. When push comes to shove with little white envelopes awaiting they get ready to drop a shoulder and open their snouts while putting their curly tails in the air to go for the win. So just be aware if you ever travel to Melbourne town be prepared to be confronted with many Criterium pigs eager and throughing to race their bikes. Speaking of bikes this leads me to number five and that is custom bike makers and cycling headquarters. There are many custom bike makers in Melbourne town and also in the greater area and it really adds to the artistry and culture that Melbourne produces. We have brands such as Borm, Curve, Bastion, Prova and I'm sure many others you might like to add to the list below. Also many of the big cycling and bike manufacturers are headquartered out of Melbourne such as Specialized, Giant and Sram Australia who are actually situated out on the foothills of the Dandenong which takes us to number four and that is riding in the Dandenongs. The Dandenongs are roughly 50 kilometres from the heart of the Melbourne city and they're not to be confused with the suburb of Dandenong. Unless of course you've had a gut full of cycling and you're eager to improve your chances of getting your bike stolen then Dandenong could be a goer but the Dandenong Rangers or Mount Dandenong or whatever you want to call it that's the place to go. As you can see here we have some pretty impressive footage of a Melbourne lad called Trent who is actually completing a wheelie all the way up the most famous Dandenongs climb the one in 20. It took Trent just over 24 minutes to complete a wheelie up what is a 6.7 kilometre or 4.2 mile climb with an average gradient of 4-5%. I'll link to the video I made on this epic wheelie below if you want to check it out which was actually back in the bikechaser days but if you can try and look behind this epic wheelie you should be able to see tons of magnificent nature and scenery that surrounds. There's roughly half a dozen climbs like this around the Dandenongs that ranges roughly between the 5-20 minute mark which makes this place a place that is so close to a city of 5 million people one of the great cycling playgrounds in Melbourne if not Australia and if it wasn't for all the angry hillbilly drivers I just might have had the Dandenongs as number one. Let's hear what Trent had to say about the experience of doing a wheelie up the entire climb before we get to number three. Just note that Trent did fail the first attempt but obviously nailed attempt number two. Second time around it's like the boon is twice as hard, everything's twice as heavy and you just have to keep that concentration I didn't want to do it a third time. He started down at the coffee shop and I saw him come past and I thought there goes a knob at riding on a wheel at a coffee shop but he was holding it and I was on two wheels and chased him a lot of the way and to see him finish that's seriously impressive well done mate. Coming in at number three is the way I personally used to get out to the Dandenongs and that is on the Melbourne Bike Pass. Many road cyclists don't realise that Melbourne has a world class network of bike pass all around the city. Yes Melbourne doesn't have the separation lanes that you see in cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen but I am more so referencing the network of bike pass in the greater Melbourne region. You can see here I'm riding with the great David Sturt aka Stegels a cycling coach that taught me how to ride a bike properly and finally make the step up to A grade. Stegels loves the bike pass and showed me a ton before I left Melbourne at the back end of 2018. While you can't do bunch rides or complete all the training you'll want on a bike path they're absolutely awesome with base mobs and also social rides with friends. Cities including Melbourne big time are becoming more and more jammed with people and traffic and congestion and unfortunately the chances of cyclists getting in an incident is simply more prevalent. So heading out on the bike pass is safe and it actually teaches cyclists better skills often an aspect lacking in the person that took up road cycling in later life. Slowing the bike down turning sharp corners are all examples of some skills you will develop on the Melbourne Bike Pass making them a fantastic opportunity to hone those skills and stay safe while you ride. Now to flip that coin completely coming in at number two is the bunch rides. Melbourne has this incredible stretch of road from Port Melbourne down to a town called Portsea which is predominantly on the beach. You'll see many many cyclists if you ever travel along this route which is roughly a 200km return leg so a great opportunity for a big day in the saddle on a Saturday or Sunday I think they call it sorento trucking but where you'll find most of the action is between St Kilda and Mount Eliza and embedded in there are many many epic Melbourne bunch rides that are open to all.  What I would recommend doing is join a local cycling club first ask to join one of their organised bunch rides or maybe try a guided e-grade criteria or latte lapse which I eventually did down at St Kilda many years ago and learn the skill of bunch riding first get confident with your skills and knowledge and then go hit up a bunch ride.  The hell ride would easily be the biggest and fastest bunch ride in Australia and it's a divisive topic trust me I tried during my time at running bike chaser for content purposes to get funding to make a documentary about this ride.  The new documentary about the controversial weekly event has again sparked heated debate. Unfortunately the funding was unsuccessful and the way I personally went about getting exposure to this project if I had my time again I would do things differently but everyone that rides a bike in Melbourne seems to have an opinion on the ride and opinions are heavily divided from all the footage that I took and the time I personally spent analysing this ride from different angles riding to the back to the middle to the front to the side while also following it in a car speaking to members of the community and riders all in preparation to start a documentary in my opinion this ride is greatly misunderstood. Yes bad things have happened and will continue to happen on the hell ride but those bad things from all the footage and time spent analysing this ride don't happen as a consequence of those cyclists that are regulars on the hell ride. In fact the regulars in the hell ride are some of the best riders in Australia rolling turns smoothly up the front and getting in a solid hit out before they may head out to the Dandenong's for more training to coincide with their training demands as national road series riders or even continental bike races In fact the pros as you can see Kuhn de Kort here will ride the hell ride when they're back in the off season So the actual true hell riders which is the top third of the hell ride create a very smooth, safe and predictable environment where the mishaps running of red lights and bad reputations come from is the back dirt typically filled with either people doing the hell ride for the first or second time or perhaps somebody that's just jumped on the back of the bunch after the tip of the hell ride has flown past them but the overarching fact is love it or hate it the hell ride is an institution and plays a big part in the Melbourne cycling scene and culture Personally I just love heading down to the black rock clock tower at 6.45am having a quick coffee with good mates having a chin wag with Jay and Anna from Omara Cycles and seeing all the faces and good people before that 7am start which is often escorted by some police motorbikes but the faces, the people this actually leads me to my number one point about the Melbourne cycling scene and that is the people this is definitely the thing I miss the most about the Melbourne cycling scene now that I am a Queenslander and the people of Melbourne make up for Melbourne having the worst weather in the entire country you've obviously got your characters like Lee Hollywood Turner I've been so busy I've been so busy seriously I've been so busy today mate a telecom there's one there another telecom another different type of telecom this is when I was a German champion when I beat Zabeel another telecom another telecom another telecom another telecom another telecom stole this you've got great bike store operators like J.O.Mara Damo Jones Gabe Sullins Troy Jordan Simon Coffin Shannon Johnson the list goes on you've got passionate club people everywhere giving up their time to help juniors and UBs develop their skills and confidence in the sport you've got some of the biggest national road series teams with their management support staff cultivating and driving opportunities for young riders you've got groups of like-minded people getting together advocating and sharing the word about mental health such as the Knights of Suburbia you've simply got outstanding humans everywhere in the Melbourne cycling scene and that is the cherry on top of an epic cable