Alright, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Alhamdulillahi rabbil ala'alameen wa sallallahu wa sallam. Wa barak ala sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala'ali wa sahbihi wa sallam. Hopefully this works this time, inshallah the audio is working. Thank you all so much. Alhamdulillah for your patience. So we are going to be doing a conversation here about repenting in the blessed month of Ramadan. And really the focus here is going to be just talking at first about what the focus of this blessed month is. And then we're going to be talking about what are the ways that we can actually start to achieve Allah's repentance in this month. So today we're just going to be talking a little bit in detail about what exactly is repentance and why is it imported in the blessed month of Ramadan. And what makes Ramadan stand out as a month to repent, as a month to turn back to Allah. So many of us know that Ramadan is a month of forgiveness. It is a month of achieving Allah's mercy. It is a month of achieving nearness to Allah. And as we start to go throughout this month, we want to try to think about all of the different ways that we want to transform our lives rather than just kind of going about the basics. And that's where repentance comes in. Repentance is a very, very important concept in this blessed month of Ramadan. So there are so many different Hadith that talk about the mercy and the forgiveness that is passed out, literally passed out in this blessed month. There's a Hadith that indicates that the first 10 days are days of mercy. That the next 10 days of the month, the second 10 days are days of forgiveness. And the following 10 days are days of freedom from the Hellfire. All of these have a kind of theme of mercy. They have a theme of achieving Allah's nearness. They have a theme of repentance. And so in this month, Allah is literally calling us to ask for his forgiveness because he's passing out so much forgiveness. But how do we go about achieving that forgiveness? So let's dive into that a little bit, inshallah. There are many, many, many ways to turn back to Allah. But the most important aspect of turning back to Allah is to do so sincerely. It's to think about all the different things that we've done wrong over the course of the last year. And it's to first and foremost feel remorse for those different things that we've done. And what better month than the month of Ramadan to turn back to Allah and to achieve Allah's mercy? A couple of things about fasting. Fasting, as we all already know, it's already just by you fasting, your sins, minor sins are being forgiven.  And whoever stands in the night of the blessed month of Ramadan, their sins will be forgiven. So whoever stands for the tarawih prayer or just in praise at night time, their sins are being forgiven. So there's a general forgiveness that everybody's achieving, alhamdulillah, in this blessed month. A very, very general forgiveness, which is amazing. And then there is a specific, though, forgiveness that you actually have to ask for. There's a very specific type of forgiveness that if somebody asks Allah and you turn to Allah and you ask him to forgive you for something, you will be able to achieve forgiveness for your major wrong actions. So you have minor wrong actions and you have major wrong actions. The major wrong actions require a specific repentance. They require sincerely turning back to Allah and asking him to forgive you for your sins. So what exactly does this mean? What exactly do we mean here by major wrong actions and minor wrong actions? We'll talk about this more in detail, but in a future conversation.  Those types of things would qualify as minor wrong actions. But then you have the major wrong actions. And again, we'll talk about a full list at some point, but you have ones like drinking alcohol, like sleeping with someone, illicit sexual relations, these types of consuming interests, these types of things are considered major wrong actions. And you actually have to literally feel remorse for them and ask Allah to forgive you for those wrong actions, whether it's in Ramadan or outside of Ramadan. Ramadan is this special month because God gives us this chance. He gives us a chance for a special type of mercy. But we just have to ask for it, right? So whoever asks, inshallah, will achieve this mercy. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind. It's first and foremost, it's important to have hope, to have hope in this month. It's very important to have hope. You never want to lose hope in Allah, but especially in this month of Ramadan, you want to believe that, yo, I could have done everything under the sun. I could have literally been a murderer. I could have been a drug dealer. I could have been an addict. I could have done all these wrong things. And many of us, we have done a lot of wrong, right? We've all done some form of sin. But I have to believe when I enter this month that I can change my life completely. Every single part of my life can be transformed in this month of Ramadan. And I'm not just saying that. That's not just exaggeration. That actually happens. There's so many people, so many people who entered this month and before the month of Ramadan. I know many people. They're going to the club, go to bars, drinking, having illicit relationships, doing everything it is that you could imagine. It took one Ramadan, one Ramadan. And they're live, they're live, completely transformed. They were completely changed. So the main theme of this month of Ramadan is to have a belief that you can change your life, that you can transform, that you can up level. And you want to up level in this month. It's important to try to up level because this is a month for you and I. It's kind of like a spiritual boot camp, right? You put yourself through 30 days of fasting, 29 to 30 days of fasting.  And as you're up leveling, see your sins are being forgiven. And part of up leveling is asking Allah to forgive your sins. It's asking Allah to accept your repentance for whatever sin that you might have done. So that having hope is very, very important. Look, God created you and me, literally. One of the things that he created inside of us is the ability to make mistakes. One of the meanings of the word insan, which is the word for human, is the one who is the forgetful one. We forget. We make mistakes. We're going to slip up. Our father, Adam, a mistake was made, which required us, right? Rather than being in heaven, it fell down to earth. So mistakes are going to happen. If God wanted you and me to not make any mistakes, he would have made us into angels. And there are angels. Angels don't make mistakes, right? I don't know about any angel that's ever, there's any mentioning of an angel slipping up or an angel making a mistake or angel sinning. They don't make, they don't sin. You and I, though, we are created with the ability to sin. And there's a Hadith where the Prophet says, I'm indicating that all of the children of Adam are make mistakes. The best of those mistakes, the ones who make mistakes, are those who always turn back to Allah, who repent to Allah. And that's where we're really honing ourselves. Because we can't lose hope in Allah's mercy. You can't lose hope for yourself, and you can't lose hope for other people in your life. We should never be the people who tell other people, there's no turning back for you. Oh, you did this? I don't know about that. And you're never really going to be able to change. No. We should be people who not only focus on repenting ourselves, but encourage everybody in our life to have a perspective of God that is a vast, expansive, perspective and one that we believe that Allah is a merciful Lord, is a Lord who forgives and is a Lord who loves to forgive. So don't worry if you sin. It doesn't matter really what you've done. It doesn't matter whether somebody has what you and I have been doing over the past year. If somebody slipped into the major sins, if someone slipped into drinking, or into smoking, or into illicit relationships, or into lying a lot, or into lying a lot, or into lying a lot, or into lying a lot, or into missing our prayers, or in all of these things. It doesn't matter what we've done. This is a month to turn back to Allah. Once you repent, and we'll be covering over the course of the next couple of weeks, inshaAllah, every Sunday at this time, the different ways that we can achieve an accepted repentance. Once you repent, you don't look back. You hope in Allah's mercy that Allah accepted your repentance.  I'm never going to achieve Allah's mercy. No. You made the intention to repent. You did what was required of you, and inshaAllah, if you were sincere in that. We'll talk about the signs of sincerity and repentance. Allah will forgive your sins. Allah will. Allah forgives sins. That's, that's, he is Al-Ghafura Rahim. So, let's think about the perspective that we want to have of Allah. On one side, you have people who have a perspective of God. That's like, God is this vengeful, this like intense Lord who is out to get us, who wants to throw people into hell, and everything has to be done in a very, very specific way. And for those who don't follow the rules, there's no hope for them. There's a lot of Muslims who have that perspective for themselves and who have that perspective for other people in their life. Right? And that's obviously a problem. Definitely not the way we perceive Allah. And then there's another perspective where if you actually read the Quran, you will notice that Allah begins everything with mercy. He says, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim in the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate. He didn't say the most vengeful, he didn't say there's a lot of names that God has. Why did he sing Allah the names of mercy and compassion? Why does he mention mercy and compassion so often in the Quran? Why did he say that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam sallam to just have the right perspective of God. They're like, I believe that God is merciful. I believe that God is all forgiving. And I accepted these different attributes that he has defined himself with, that he is merciful, and that he is all forgiving, right? So that's very, very important. The next thing, and someone says, please speak further on proper way of repentance correctly to it, we will be discovered getting into the details of repentance, that's part of the focus. So the next thing is that, Allah has other names in the Quran. So in addition to Abrahman al Rahim, he also mentioned the Ghafor al Rahim, the all forgiving, right? One of the du'as we make in this month of Ramadan is Allahumma inna ka afoon increase the affua fafoon, that oh Allah, you love to pardon, so please pardon everything that I've done. And pardoning is literally forgiving and like forgetting, it's an eraser. You erase the sins that somebody has done, and you forgive them. So there's all these themes in Ramadan about forgiveness, about pardoning, and about repentance. It just requires though, you and I take the first step. You have to take an action in order to expect that there is going to be some type of forgiveness granted to you. And that is what the focus of repentance really is. Allah also mentioned in the Quran, and again we're just focusing right now on why repentance is so important. Allah says in the Quran, he has a lot of categories of people he loves. He mentions in the Quran. Among those categories, Allah says, Allah, you hid betawabi. Allah loves those people who are awfully, who are always returning back to him. So when you slip up, if you turn back to Allah, your sin could be a means of you getting closer to God. How does that work? Because you mess up, you feel remorse. So we'll talk about this in detail in the future, but the basic steps of repentance are feeling regret and remorse. You feel bad. Deep down inside, you feel bad. Why did I do that? Man, I shouldn't have done that. You feel bad for the sin that you've done. That is already in it of itself, you've begun the process of repentance. And then you actually ask Allah, Allah, forgive me. And you feel sincerely. You're asking him sincerely. That's step number two. And step number three is you make a commitment to never turn back to that sin again. You make a commitment to not turn back to that sin again. And even if you turn back because you just couldn't follow through, follow through your commitment, you keep turning back to Allah.  That's the towabin. We as human beings, we make mistakes, but the towabin are those who are always turning back to God, always turning back to him. So Allah loves those people. So that could be because of a sin somebody has done, but because of the sincere repentance that they achieved, they achieve a level of nearness to Allah that they might not have been able to achieve if they did not repent sincerely. It's not that the sin was by any means a good thing, but the sin enabled them to repent. And repentance is a door. It's a door that opens in a relationship between you and Allah. The spiritual master has actually mentioned that repentance is the first station on the stations of spirituality, on the stations of nearness. So you achieve a special nearness to Allah when you begin to repent and when you begin to turn sincerely to him. So that is amongst one of the verses about repentance. You also have hadith about repentance where the Prophet ﷺ mentions that the one who is repented from his sin is like the one who's never sinned. So look Ramadan is this month, we're trying to erase our bad deeds. Well, if you repent and you ask Allah to forgive you for your sins and you ask him sincerely, it's like you never sinned. There will be moments. Look, all of us have probably watched movies before, right? Or we're like, right now we're on online platforms and you can, if you ever see a movie, you can also watch a part of a movie called the director's cut, right? So at some point on the day of judgment, you're gonna be shown a movie, like kind of like a movie about your life where God will press, and I'm speaking figuratively here, okay? We'll press play and you will see everything you did from the time you hit puberty, from the time you were accountable until the time that you passed away. But there will be certain moments of in life. There will be certain moments in life. Well, you'll be like, wait, I did that thing when I was like 18 years old. Where did that thing go? And you'll wonder what happened to that? And you'll ask God, like, what was that thing? Okay, I hope something bad we might have done. And God says, well, you repent it. So it's gone. I erased it. He has the director's cut. Because I clipped it out. I took it out. That scene is no longer there because I saw that you repent it. That is the power of repentance that on the day of judgment. So your whole life, Subhanallah, our whole life, we've done a lot of wrong. But if you repent sincerely in this month, you can turn to Allah sincerely in this month. On the day of judgment, you will have moments you sinned. Where you know how bad you felt when you messed up like that. You know how bad you feel when you look at something you shouldn't look at. You know how bad you feel when you do something with somebody you shouldn't. We all know. And we all want to change our life. Well, when you ask Allah sincerely for repentance in this month, those moments will be erased on the day of judgment. You won't even see them because you will have achieved this state of pardon. You will have achieved this state of complete forgiveness. And Allah will have wrapped you, inshallah, in His mercy. So that's why repentance is so important. There's a prophet's time again. He said, the one who was repented from a sin is as though the one who has never sinned in the first place. So that's very, very, very important. And again, if you have any questions, please post the questions. And we will get to the questions in about, you know, just five or so minutes. I see some different questions coming in. Let me just make sure that there are questions coming in. Okay, alhamdulillah. So that's something to keep in mind. There's also a couple other hadith that I just want to mention or a couple of different verses of the Qur'an that Allah says in the Qur'an, he or she who repents after they do wrong and then they do good. Allah will relent towards them. Allah will relent towards them. He will turn towards them. He will, inshallah, their special mercy will be given to them. And Allah says he is forgiving and compassionate.  Nothing about that. God is saying at the end of this verse, he's saying he knows what you and I are doing. But at the beginning, he's saying he accept the repentance and he forgives evil deeds. So it's not that like he doesn't know what we're up to and that the repentance somehow changes that. No, God knows very well.  On April, you know, April 18th, you made this mistake, you did that mistake. But Allah says he accepts the repentance of the one who asks him because only Allah can forgive you. That's the thing to keep in mind. For your sins that you're talking about the sins between you and Allah now, not the sins between you and other people. We'll talk about that in another class but when you sin between somebody, you like punch someone in the face, they have to forgive you as well. You can't just ask Allah for forgiveness. They have to forgive you as well. But the beautiful thing about a religion is that you can't go to like anybody else and ask them to forgive you and to change your ultimate situation on the day of judgment. Only Allah can forgive your sins. Only Allah can forgive the sins. And that's why it's so important to repent in this month. There is a hadith that mentions and this is a very, very inspiring hadith that there was a man who had killed and now we're talking about a murder here. He doesn't really get much worse than murder when it comes to sinning. There was a man who had killed 99 people. He killed 99 people. So he went to somebody, he went to supposedly a righteous person and he asked them, he said, I've killed 99 people. Can I be forgiven? And he said, no, you can't. He said, he killed him too. So he had killed 100 people now, right? He didn't like what he said. He killed him. He killed 100 people. Then he went to a knowledgeable person, a person who had knowledge. He said, I've killed 100 people. Can I be forgiven? And he said, you can be forgiven. You need to change your life though. And he said, go to this town where there are people who do good. Go to this town where there are people who are doing good. And the man set off on this journey. Now, while he was on this journey, death overtook him. Can you believe that? While he is on this journey, death overtook him. And again, this is a man. He's killed 100 people. He's trying to change his life. He's trying to change his life. While he's on this journey, he dies. Okay, so now what happens? The angel of mercy and the angel of wrath come. And they're fighting between him. The angel of mercy says he was on his way to change his life. He's mine. I'm taking him with me. He's forgiven, inshallah, like he's going to have. The angel of wrath says, no, no, no. This man killed 100 people. He didn't reach the destination. He didn't, like he had not achieved forgiveness yet. And he is mine. I'm taking him with me. This man is destined for hell. So they're fighting, right? Now, God tells them, he says, okay, measure the distance. Measure the distance between where he started and where he was going. If he's closer to the distance of where he was going, he gets to go with the angel of mercy. But if he's closer to the distance from where he started, he goes with the angel of wrath. So they measure the distance. They measure the distance. And one narration that I've heard, it mentions that it was slightly closer to where he had begun, and yet a lot moved the earth, such that it tipped in the favor of where he was going and the angel of mercy got to take him. And the other narration that I heard that it was closer already, to slightly closer to the end where he was headed. And so the angel of mercy overtook him. Subhanallah, look at that. That's a mass murderer, guys. Like, again, it doesn't really get much worse than that. If Allah can give a chicken can pass forgiveness and give forgiveness for somebody who's done that level of sin. Subhanallah. We have so many, we have so much hope. All of us, we've done so many things. We've messed up. We've made mistakes. Allah tells us, don't worry if you've made mistakes. Turn back to him. Turn back to Allah. Turn back to him and ask for forgiveness.  So this is a very, very powerful Hadith story that I just wanted to mention. So let's talk now about repentance. What is it meant? The beginning of repentance. The beginning of repentance is that you feel this regret and remorse, as we mentioned, so you gotta feel bad, right? And feeling bad is a good sign. When you feel bad about something, it automatically means that you, there's some guilt associated with it. And so you were already beginning this journey to repenting, excuse me. Sorry, there's clearly getting me there. You're already getting on this journey to repent to Allah. So that's the sign is you feel bad. So what do you now have to repent from and for? We all have different things. All of us have different things we have to repent from.  Everybody knows their own sins and then you have minor sins as well. But at a basic level, once somebody hits puberty from that time, they have to repent if they weren't a Muslim, right? They are, inshallah, they convert to Islam and that repentance has already begun for their time of disbelief.  Ramadan is the best time to do that. Now you start to repent from, okay, I'm gonna make a repentance from all the things I did when I wouldn't really take this religion seriously, when I didn't really care to practice and to implement this religion, right? So that is what we began with repenting from. And then the next thing is you repent from actual external sins you're doing. So you list the sins that you've done, okay? So the sins of the eyes, okay? Like not lowering our gaze, looking at pornography, looking at haram, we all know the sins of the eyes that we do looking down on people, these types of things. The sins of the hands, right? The sins of the tongue of which include backbiting and lying and cursing, cussing, cheating, all these types of things fall under the sins of the tongue, ridiculing people, making people feel bad, right? The sins of the ears, listening to backbiting, listening to impermissible things. There's a lot of different ones, right? The financial sins, taking out interest loans, these types of things. We know the different ones, the sins of consumption. Again, as I mentioned, consuming drugs, consuming alcohol. If somebody ever got into selling something, if someone owns a liquor store, right? Sin of selling the alcohol or if someone has ever dealt drugs or something, right? The sin of doing that. All of these different sins we categorize. And then we begin the process of repenting. That's at the one of the levels and you keep going down. So then eventually you've already repented for all of the external sins you've done and now you repent for the internal sins. These include the sins of jealousy, being jealous of people, oh, she has this. Oh, he has a nice car. Oh, she looks so good. And you feel jealous. That's a sin. But you didn't, you might not realize, we might not realize the sin, but it is, right? So you repent from that.  I want, they have this, I want this. I want, I want, I don't have enough money. I don't have enough. And you feel greed. This is kind of intense, obsessive greed. You repent from that, right? You repent from, you do something with the wrong intention. Somebody might pray with the intention of having people praise them. Somebody might try to, you know, go out there and by any means necessary gain a lot of money and they might do so by impermissible means. You repent from all these things. So as the person gets more refined, as the spiritual level starts to increase, the repentance starts to get more detailed. And it comes in the hadith, the prophet said he, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, even though he was innocent, he didn't do anything wrong. He said he would repent 70 times a day. How could the prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam repent 70 times a day? What is he even repenting from? Well, the scholars say one is he's teaching us that that's how often you should be repenting. Repenting here means literally turning back to Allah, saying, yeah, Allah forgive me and begging Allah to forgive you. But the prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam says, he's repenting because he's progressing in every single moment he's progressing. Every moment he's progressing, who is always climbing spiritually, that he's repenting for his repentance is literally repenting from the past moments where maybe his spiritual station wasn't, maybe what he was experiencing wasn't the same as what he was experiencing in that moment. So he's a refined, but he's teaching us if he is the prophet of God, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he's repenting 100 times a day, how many times should be, or 70 times a day and some hundred times and others, how many times a day should we be repenting? In Ramadan, let's try to do it at least five times, at least a couple times, at least after every prayer, right? So this is the importance of repentance. And look, after somebody repents, life, your life completely can transform. I really mean that, completely transform. You, one of the signs of an accepted repentance, and we'll get into this in like the third or fourth class, the final one, is that somebody goes from living one type of life to their life completely changing. It's also a sign of an accepted hodge and a sign of so many other accepted things that your life completely changes. You are not the same person and don't let anybody ever tell you that you can't change.  You can change, I can change, we can change. We can change for the better and God forbid Allah protect us, we can change for the worse but we can certainly change. The first step though begins with taking that step to Allah, that when you just move towards Allah a little bit, Allah moves towards you a lot, right? And again, figuratively speaking here, we don't believe that Allah is contained by any time or space according to our creed, but this is Allah teaching us, right? So you move to Allah handstand, Allah moves to you an arm stand. You walk to Allah, Allah runs to you. We just have to take the first step. So this Arama thought, I would encourage all of myself and all of you, take the first step to God or whatever step you are ready to take. Take that step, turn to Allah, think about the main takeaway here is know that Allah loves the people of repentance, know that you were created to make mistakes but the best of those who make mistakes are the ones who turn back and know that when you may do a bad deed, if you repent from it, there are even hadith that indicate that all of the bad deeds you've done if you do a sincere repentance, they turn into good deeds. And a sincere repentance, and we'll get into this, inshallah, is a repentance where the tears are flowing, the heart is feeling it, the, you are begging Allah, you are in a state of abject begging. You are literally turning to him saying, Allah forgive me, Allah please forgive me, only you can forgive me. That is the type of repentance we want to achieve. Not just the general, astaghfirullah, and then we just move on with our day. That's fine, this is just to check the box but it's not a sincere repentance. So this Ramadan, as you go through this week, think about the things you've done and then feel remorse from them. Just have a moment with you and Allah, where you sit, right? Right now, at least where I am, it's about we have about an hour until iftar. This time from now until iftar is a very, very good time because you sit and ask Allah for forgiveness and just a portion of this time and sit and think about all the things you've done wrong and don't let this month go by and the only thing you get is hunger and thirst. That's not the point of the month. Hunger and thirst is there so that all of the appetites can be calmed down so that you can focus on your relationship with your Lord. That is the goal, focus on your relationship with Allah. You focus on that in this month and use these moments, especially the moment before iftar, especially the time between usur and maghrib, salat, though that these are holy special times. Use these times to connect to Allah. Use these times to turn back to Him. Use these times to ask Him for forgiveness. Use these times to reflect on your life. We know we got to change. We know we got mistakes we've made. We all know we have things we have to work on. This is the month to make that plan. Don't wait until the last 10 nights. You don't even know if you're gonna be alive. Don't wait until the first couple of days passed on. This is the time. The time is now. One of the forgotten sunnahs of the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is that he would live as though death was approaching him. Like any moment he could die. That's how the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam would live. You and I should live like that. Always repent as soon as you mess up. Make us sincere forgiveness. And say I'm never gonna go back to this.  It's okay. God created you weak. We created mankind weak. If you're created weak, it's mentioned in the Quran. But weakness, you have weakness but Allah has strength. You have need but Allah is rich. You and I are poor but Allah is all giving. You and I have no ability but Allah has all ability. You and I have no power but Allah has all power. You and I can't forgive and we can't forgive ourselves. From a sin's point of view, we can obviously forgive ourselves for the mistakes we've made but Allah can forgive everything. You and I realize that we are weak but we turn to the strong one, the capable one, the one that we trust, the one that we're supposed to love, the one who can forgive all sins and the one who if we ask, he forgives. This is the month in which when you ask Allah, except inshallah, so just start asking. Just start asking and ask without limit. Don't contain your Lord. Your Lord has unlimited bounties to give. There's just people need to be asking for the gifts. Allah distributes gifts in this month. He's distributing lights in this month. He's distributing sweet breezes in this month. He's distributing all sorts of mercy in this month.  The one who requests will receive inshallah. The one who turns to him will be forgiven inshallah. Now it's just a matter of will we take the first step so that Allah can then start to forgive us and Allah can then begin the process of helping us. He can help us change our life in this month. If he helps us, there's nobody who can prevent him from helping us and if he doesn't help us, there's nobody who can prevent us from being left to ourselves. We ask that Allah never leave us to our own selves. We ask that Allah never leave us to our abject needs. We ask that Allah always allow us to turn to him. We ask that Allah always assist us and all of you and all of the Muslims in this time that we are in, we ask that Allah, Ya Allah, Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim, Alhamdulillah, Allahumma Sayyidi Muhammad, we ask that Allah that you forgive us and that you pardon us and that you allow us to achieve an accepted repentance in this month, that you change our life in this month of Ramadan, that you pour your sweet breezes upon us, that you pour your repentance upon us, that you pour light upon our hearts, Ya Allah, we ask that you allow us to get closer and closer to you in every moment of this month. Don't allow any moment of this month to pass by except that we are ascending in some level of nearness towards you, Ya Rabbil Alamin, Ya Allah, we ask, Ya Allah, that you open up the doors of your mercy, that you open up your doors of your blessings, that you open up the doors of your bounty and that you allow us to turn to you with the complete sincere repentance and please, Ya Allah, turn to us and please completely forgive us and forgive all of us and all of our loved ones and all of the Muslims in this ummah, Ya Allah, for all of our sins and please allow us to die upon La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah. Please give us a khusna khatima. Please allow us to be resurrected on the Day of Judgment with the Prophet, Salam. Please allow us to enter into jannah with the Prophet, Salam, in the best of states as a community with all of our families, with all of our loved ones, remove all the rancor in our hearts that we have against Muslims or against anybody and allow us to be pure souls and allow us to achieve a state of purity in this blessed month. Wa salallahu wa salamu barak'ala Sayyidina Muhammad wa la alihi wa sahbihi wa salam. Alhamdulillah, Ya Rabbil Alamin. Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. If anybody has any questions, insha'Allah. Take them now, insha'Allah. And Jazakum Allah khair. Continue this. We will be doing this every week, 6 p.m. PST in Ramadan, 6 p.m. on Sunday, Pacific Standard Time in the month of Ramadan, insha'Allah. So if anybody has any questions, check in, if not, Jazakum Allah khair. Thank you all so much. Alhamdulillah, I'm seeing if any questions have come in. Someone asks, what is the best approach to show someone who is Christian the truth of Islam? So the question is about how to show someone who might be of different faith, the truth of Islam. So if they're interested in it, you can have a dialogue with them. I wouldn't try to like proselytize and try to force it on anybody. Laikraha fiddin, Allah says in the Quran that there is no compulsion in religion. So only discuss, start to discuss things with those people who are open to it. If they are open to it, I think the best thing to discuss, let's say with somebody who believes in another faith and they wanna discuss Islam and they're open to that. First and foremost, you make the offer them. If you are making the offer, if you are not making the offer to somebody in the nighttime at the very least, that means that the sincerity of the da'wah might not be there. So your sincerity of your calling to them comes in how much da'wah that you make for them, whether it's a family member or a loved one or anybody else, especially right before five year time, it's a very good time to make da'wah. That's the first thing. The second thing is have a discussion with them but not a debate.  What is it about Christianity that you believe? And then you have that dialogue and that discussion. So that's the second thing. And the third is you begin to just talk about the beauty of toki, then the beauty of we just turn to Allah for everything. And we don't have to have all of these other aspects of our religion. Generally speaking, Christianity has its confusing components because of the trinity. And then you also ask them to look into the Bible and you've studied a little bit of detail. I would recommend watching the courses of the talks of Dr. Ali Atai. And he has done a lot of research into Christianity as well. And there's so many verses in the Old Testament and the New Testament that indicate the coming of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam that if the Christians were just really deeply look and read, they would have nothing to say except to accept the truth of Islam. So yeah, alhamdulillah. Does that come out here? Any other questions? Let's see. Any questions? Sorry, I keep turning my head. I'm just on a couple of platforms right now. Okay, any questions? If you pray the Ur-Far is before Sunnah, can you pray the for Sunnah after or no? So pray the, you pray the farth and then in the Hanafi school, there are two Sunnah after Doher. So the four Sunnah are before Doher. There are two Sunnah after Salat al Doher. I don't believe that you can make up your Sunnah if you have missed it, but I could be wrong. I would check with a scholar on that one. Yeah, sorry about that. But you can pray the Sunnah of Doher are for Sunnah before Doher, then the for farth, then you have the two Sunnah after Doher. So just do the two Sunnah after Doher, inshallah. If you miss it and then in the future, just try to catch it in a time that you can. Someone said, what time next Sunday? We will begin at inshallah. Sorry for the technical difficulties today, but we will begin at 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Times, 6 p.m. Pacific Standard is the time in the California and the West Coast, wherever anybody is, watch or check it out accordingly. So we'll be doing that every week for four weeks. We're gonna get through basically all the different aspects of repentance in this month. When is the best time to pray at the Hajj? Somebody asks. The best time to pray at the Hajj is the time, call it the last one hour before Fajr is a very good time. So for these days, we're all up anyways. We're up at Suhur. So wake up for Suhur, try to wake up 10 minutes earlier and pray the Hajj before you start eating or stop eating about 10, 15 minutes before Fajr. And if you're able to already have Wudu and whatnot, that would be good. And then right before Fajr is a very good time. Right before Fajr is a very good time to pray the Hajj right before Fajr enters. So where I'm at, Fajr is entering, I think, like on five, 10 or something like that. So praying the Hajj anywhere from like 3.30 up until five, 10, that's a great time. If you are not able to pray the Hajj, just while you're making your Suhur and stuff, just make the up, just make the up, just make the up, ask forgiveness, right? Just try to use that time wisely. I know we're all slowly waiting or sorry, we're all slowly, we're really tired at that time, but we're slowly waking up and whatnot. But it's a good time to ask forgiveness and to turn to Allah, have your deep conversations with Allah if you can in those moments. Someone asked, when you keep on sinning and there is no change, how is there true transformation in their lives? So if somebody is struggling with sin and there's no change, how do you, I think the question might be, how do you bring deep transformation into your life? So the first step is that the sin that you're regularly doing, you have to make a deep commitment to leave that sin, right? That's the first step. And you have to sincerely beg Allah. So at least have one moment, let's say you do a certain sin every day, at least have one moment in the day or in that week where you just really sincerely turn to Allah and you'll feel bad about it. And you ask him and you let the tears flow and you ask him to forgive you. And then the next thing you do is you ask him to change your life and to transform your life. That is the step if for a certain sin that somebody is regularly doing. Now, it doesn't mean the transformation comes right away. Remember, God doesn't work on our time. So when somebody asks for a dua or makes a dua or when someone makes repentance, the change in the life might come a bit later. The transformation might start to happen over a gradual period of time. Even if you look at the way the Quran was revealed, Allah didn't prohibit everything at once. In the early days of Islam, even alcohol was allowed. Just was not, then it was slowly that you can't drink it during the prayer. And then eventually it was prohibited. So you gradually change your life and know that if you're turning to Allah sincerely, inshaAllah that gradual change will happen. Now, the risk is if you keep sinning and you don't ask, it means that you're missing something of sincerity and you're kind of like not really doing the requisite components of repentance because if someone sincerely repents, that transformation will follow, inshaAllah, inshaAllah it will follow. So I would try to kind of introspectively think, hey, what can I be doing to reduce this sin? Even if I can't eliminate it, reduce it and then eliminate and then turn to Allah. Okay, great. Any other questions? Let's see if you have questions, just post them in comments or in the chat. So again, any questions in relation to repentance or something else Ramadhan related or anything on your mind, inshaAllah we'll go, we'll take two more questions of Allah and then we'll wrap up. I know people have to get to Iftar and pray and whatnot. I'm gonna let hope everybody's Ramadhan is going well. Please keep us in your prayers in this month. Someone says brother is tarawih compulsory. No, tarawih is not compulsory. Tarawih is, so in the Hanafi madhab, tarawih is a sunnah moakada, meaning it is an emphasized sunnah. In the other schools, it is not a sunnah moakada, it is a sunnah, the prophecy of Salaam, from my understanding, in those schools. So tarawih is not something you have to do, but you should do it in Ramadhan, right? Because the prophecy of Salaam said that whoever stands in the nights of Ramadhan with sincerity and iman and with, sorry, with iman and hoping for reward, they will emerge from the month completely forgiven. So it's a very good way to achieve the forgiveness of Allah, inshaAllah. What I would recommend doing though for those of us who might have makeup prayers to do, if you have a lot of prayers in your life or that you missed, is do the makeup prayers in that time of tarawih. Do the makeup prayers. So that's a good thing to do. Of course, you pray a lot of Isha. Ideally, you can pray in Jama'at at the masjid and then do your makeup prayers if you can. But if you don't have any makeup prayers for sure go to tarawih, as many as you are able to go to. You can do 20 is the sunnah, by the way. There's no other sunnah except 20. 20 is the way we do tarawih. But if you can do even two, four, six, any number, and then that would be good, yeah. Someone says, I am not able to fast this year. What is the best thing I can do outside of the prayer? The best thing you can do outside of the prayer. First is in this month is to recite the Quran. Second is to learn the meanings of the Quran. So to learn knowledge and to read their tafsir of the Quran or a translation of the Quran. And then third is to do abundant vicar and ask for abundant forgiveness and do abundance al-awak upon the Quran. Those would be generally speaking, some of the best actions you can do. If you have don't know certain knowledges, like basic knowledges that many of us, we might not have learned them growing up, myself included, like there's a lot of stuff I'm still learning that might be considered more basic knowledge. All the details of how to pray, the details of who do all these types of things. That is the absolute best thing you can do outside of the prayer in the month of Ramadan is learn the essential knowledges, what are called the farthayn. Prayer, zakat, hajj, fasting, and the laws and the details. And then the diseases of the heart, what are the diseases of the heart and how do you purify them? So that's what I would do, recite the Quran, learn knowledge, read meanings of the Quran, and translation or tafsir, listen to beneficial talks and do abundant vicar, do abundant salawat upon the Prophet, salallahu alayhi salam, which is done by saying Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina Muhammad. What is the best zikr to say? There's a hadith that says the aftal ad-dhikr, that the best zikr is la ilaha illallah. In Ramadan, there is hadith that indicates some of the best zikr we can do is saying Allahumma inna ka aafoon, tuhibbal aafoo aafoo anna, there is a dua. I would just look that up. You can look up the dua for Allah's pardon in Ramadan. It's a hadith of Sayyid-e-Aisha, radiallahu anha, that she mentioned that dua. And then just saying a stalk for Allah really in Ramadan is really good. There's a hadith that indicates that you should say, you should ask in abundance for Jannah in Ramadan. You should ask for forgiveness from hell, or you should ask for freedom from hell in Ramadan. And you should affirm, you should ask for general forgiveness. And you should say, aasha ad-dhu'a la ilaha illallah, aasha ad-dhu'a anna Muhammad, aasha ad-dhu'a la ilaha illallah, affirming Allah's oneness and affirming the messengership of the aftal as-salam. So those are some of the best zikr to do in the month of Ramadan. Alhamdulillah. Okay, cool. We have time for one more question. If anybody has any questions, please post them or comments. Somebody had asked earlier to achieve forgiveness. Do you do it directly? Like, can you just ask, yeah, so can you ask directly or do you have to make specific, no, forgiveness just as directly? Like there are specific du'a as you can do, but generally speaking, your sincere forgiveness is gonna come, sit and start crying. That's really the sincere. Like sit and just start crying and say, yeah, Allah forgive me in your language and begging him. That's really one of the best ways to achieve forgiveness. You don't have to do any long, elaborate, specific du'a for forgiveness, yeah. And yeah, being in the moment is really important when it comes to this religion. Like, du'a is there to help teach us how to be in the moment with Allah. That's really a good part of du'a. And there are certain du'as we do to help us follow the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. Of course, those du'as are the best du'as that we can do. We need to have moments where we also do du'a in our own language where we're just sincerely talking to God. It's really important. We don't talk to God enough, many of us. We talk to each other. We text other people. We were on Facebook and TikTok and all these other platforms with each other. But how many times do you just talk to God? Just take a break from everything and just sit and talk to God and sincerely open it up and have a sincere conversation. And then the tears begin to flow and the heart begins to open. Insha'Allah. Alhamdulillah. I think somebody says, what time will the next class be on the East Coast? The next class on the East Coast, it'll be next Sunday and 9 p.m. It'll be on the East Coast. So 9 p.m. in the East Coast. Insha'Allah. But all the classes at least for those who are watching on YouTube or Facebook, they will be recorded on YouTube. So if it's like a thar time or not, don't worry, you can just check the, if those are on YouTube or Facebook, it'll be on the MCC YouTube page or the Lighthouse Facebook page. Somebody asks, do you have to pray the sunnah in each prayer? So you don't have to pray the sunnah. You pray the sunnah. So here's what I would do. The only thing absolutely obligatory upon you is to follow the prayer. But there are ways to get closer and closer to Allah. So I would never ever miss the two sunnah before Fajr because there's a hadith where the Prophet ﷺ said that the two rakat before Fajr are better than this world and everything in it. So imagine all the money and the cars and the everything you could imagine in this world. All the food and of course, I'm thinking about food, it's almost a thar. All the stuff in this world, right? The sunnah before Fajr is better than that, everything in it. So for sure pray those two sunnah. And then there are what are called the emphasized sunnah. So the emphasized sunnah are the two sunnah, the two sunnah before Fajr, the four sunnah before Doher and two after Doher. I would at least try to pray one of those two sets, at least the two after Doher, the two after Mughrib and the two after Salat al-Isha. Try to just, but slowly work your way up. But just find what works. Try to bring sunnah though into your life. It's very, very important, inshallah, yeah. What if you have missed multiple prayers in the past? You work, how do you make up past prayers? So the way you do it is you calculate the prayers you've missed. So you know, roughly, okay, I always missed Doher. For five years, I missed Doher, let's say. Or for five years, I missed all my prayers. I don't know, everybody's on a different scope or 10 years or 20 years.  And then you start to make them up. So what I would do is, and I have prayers, I'm trying to make up inshallah, that I just have a general list and I try to pray one makeup prayer with a prayer. So if I pray a Doher, I'll try to pray a makeup Doher with that Doher. So I pray my normal Doher and then I'll say, I'm gonna make it up. That takes priority over your sunnah prayers. So keep that in mind. In most of the schools, it takes priority to do makeups over your sunnah prayers. If you have, so whatever prayers you have, have a list and start making them up and then you just write it down, okay? Every time I do it, you do one tally, one tally or you keep a sheet on Excel or Google Sheets or something and you work your way through how many every years. The most important thing is to be in. You have a lot of fudgers, for example. It's very easy to Rekha, to Rekha, to Rekha. You can do like a ton of fudgers every day. You can instead of going to Tarawee, if somebody did 20 Rekha, a fudger, that's 10 fudgers a day, get through 300 fudgers that they might have missed almost a whole year of fudgers in the month of Ramadan. Somebody asked, do you have to do wither? In the Hanifi school, so generally speaking, yeah, wither would be considered right below Fard. It would be a good thing to do in the other schools, but there's sunnah, so you don't have to do it. If you miss it, you wouldn't have to do it. The Fard are the only things you absolutely have to do. But the other things, as you want to get closer, it's like you want to get the A grade, you want to get the A plus or do you want to just kind of get by with the basics. That's the thing I would always keep in mind. Someone said, husband went to Hajj without telling me and it made me sad, how do I get over it? That's a good question. I would just think that, remember, you will have your time to go, inshallah. Allah will open up that time for you. So when Allah's invitation comes for you, don't worry. It's not on any one person if they go or they don't go. When Allah's invitation comes, you can only go to Allah's house when the invitation comes. You take the steps. I know a lot of people who last year, they had an intention to go to Hajj and of course the coronavirus happened and they couldn't go. But it's because actually in reality, that invitation for most people wasn't there. So the invitation to Allah's house will come. I would just turn to Allah and ask him sincerely, regularly, please invite me to your house. Please let me go to Hajj. Please create the ways for me to come to your house and to do Hajj. And I would start with that. And forgive your husband if you were upset at him for going on Hajj without you. It's a month of forgiveness, especially for our loved ones and our family members. We don't want to hold on to anything. Maybe they made a mistake and it would be ideal if they had told you and taken them with you, let's say. But it's okay, just forgive them and let it go and ask them like, hey, what was it that made it that you went and you didn't even tell me? I would do that now. Someone said, isn't it impossible to make up prayers if you missed a lifetime of prayers? No, nothing is impossible. Look, you just have to start. I'll tell you right now. If you start, God will give you the energy. Don't limit God. He'll give you the energy.   Two things. First, if you begin and you are doing it sincerely and you die, you get the reward for having done it because you were working on it every day. You were doing five, 10, 20 prayers a day. But the second is, if you begin, Allah says, those who strive in my way, surely I will guide them. He says in the Quran. So you just begin, take the first step and watch what happens. You will have doors open, Allah will facilitate it for you, inshallah, and He will make it easy. Just don't let the number psych you out. You don't limit God. Again, you said that in part of this. God, don't limit God. Just don't limit Him because He can do anything and it's very easy for Him to make it easy for you. Just start. The hardest part of this, and I'm telling you this from personal, it's the hardest part is just starting. Once you start, it becomes easy and you feel so relieved because it's a debt you have to do to God. Remember, it's a debt you have to do to God. And the day of judgment in our religion is called Yom Adin. The day the debts fall due.  So you want Him to accept all of your prayers, inshallah, and you just have to start by going on that journey, inshallah. Alhamdulillah. Well, thank you all so much for the sake of time. We will go ahead and end here. We'll see you all soon. We'll be doing this again one week at 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Thank you all so much. JazakAllah Khair. Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wa sallallahu wa sallam. Barak al-Azim al-Muhammadin Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim. Alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen.


It's the most wonderful time of the year. With the kids jingle-belling and everyone telling you be of good cheer, of good cheer. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Happy holiday shipmates. We thank you and your families for your service and for your sacrifice. And for those of you who stand on the watch tonight, remember what you do is incredibly important. You're in our thoughts and prayers. Enjoy the holidays, but please remember, stay safe. Merry Christmas! We wish you a merry Christmas. We wish you a merry Christmas. We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Good tidings to you, wherever you are. We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.


I think that is now our queue, yes. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us. I know it's after lunch, and we're going to try and keep you awake as far as possible. Today, we're going to be talking about migrations and workload migration within the OpenStack community. And it hopefully will be a fun topic to get through. We've got a big group with us today, more of a play than a presentation. So I'm Sean O'Mara. I'm a senior systems architect with Mirantis, and the EMEA architecture lead for the services group. I have quite a bit of experience with migrations, both as a customer and from within Mirantis. Ernest De Leon, cloud architect with Mirantis, and senior manager for the services engineering. We've got Veroma Verchikov, software lead engineer. Looks after the product we use for migration. Irat Karetenov. Irat works for one of our partners, CloudOps. And not with us today is Samir, who's the project manager for workload migration. Right. So we're going to cover an introduction to workload migration. When to migrate? Is it a good idea? Why and why not? Assessing workload migration viability? And what happens during a migration? So what is the process behind it? And how long does a migration take? So a little bit of background. Is a migration a good idea? Well, all your apps are both cloud native, aren't they? Show of hands, whose app works with a company that only has apps that are cloud native? Yeah. Kind of the expected answer. Love the participation. In a perfect world? Yes, we don't want to migrate workload. We don't want to have to worry about the pain of moving workloads from legacy systems or even other clouds. It should just be recreated. But we don't live in a perfect world. The short answer? So why migrate? Well, we've always got legacy applications that we have to deal with. Those applications need to be moved onto new infrastructure as quickly as possible. Quite often, we don't know these workloads or understand what's part of these workloads for a huge number of reasons. Everything from 20 years ago to the people who wrote them have left to just sheer complexity. Time to market. We want to move quickly. When we build a cloud service, a big part of that is cost saving. If we can move, reduce the cost of managing that infrastructure, we can move applications onto it. It helps us with our time to market. And the last one, which is the common one that we've seen is upgrades. When you're changing a cloud and you're building new clouds and you want to upgrade OpenStack in place, we all know that that's been a big question for a long time now. Whether or not we can upgrade OpenStack in place. What we've been doing up till now largely is workload migration from other OpenStack clouds across moving all the workload, moving all the data, moving all the information about your cloud. The other reasoning, customer impact. I want to move information. I want to upgrade. I can reduce my customer impact. They don't have to go and recreate applications. And finally, a big one is architectural change. I want to implement a new SDN solution. I can build a new cloud and we've got a guest in the room. Hello. Oh, that's not working. That one's not working. Hand them over. So the Merantys bearers joined us. Now, Merantys has a number of bears. We've got bears and teddy bears. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. This is quite tasty. How's everyone doing? Good, good. I'll come around and maul each of you individually if I don't get a better response. How's everyone doing? All right, I'll take it. It's Tuesday. Yeah, I love you too. More noise and maybe there'll be vodka afterwards. That's more noise than I will chug vodka afterwards. How is everyone doing? You guys are going to see something that Stacks City you've never seen before. The drunk bear wandering around. It'll be great. Drunk bear and a guy in a kilt are wandering around. Get both of us in the same picture and you get a special prize. All right, no, I'm... Thank you. You're very welcome. Enjoy the rest of the presentation. Sorry for the interruption. Thank you, bear. So we had the surprise visit from the Merantys bear. Okay, carrying on. There are a number of reasons why you would not want to migrate your cloud. At the end of the day, you're continuing bad practice from your legacy applications. Traditional design practices are usually not appropriate for moving workload into cloud. And infrastructure availability, which is the traditional world, we make infrastructure more available rather than the applications more available. Cloud design criteria, pretty much the same reason. Cloud native apps work better in cloud. They allow us to take advantage of the capabilities of cloud, workload migration, scaling, all of those things. Infrastructure restrictions, you know, part of the reason clouds can be built cheaper is we can use commodity hardware. But of course, that means failure rates are higher. So it's those sorts of things we have to take into account. Supportability of legacy, legacy applications are a nightmare to support. People leave, you lose the flexibility within our clouds because now, of course, we can't just shut down components and hope the application recovers. And cost. Parallel support costs of maintaining your clouds when you have legacy applications are huge. And finally, lots and lots of extra infrastructure. So now we get a little bit into the meat and potatoes of what happens during a migration. So, Sean covered, you know, should you migrate or should you not? Which is kind of the most important question and why should you or why shouldn't you? I think it's kind of implicit in there that if you have a native app that's designed for cloud migration, it kind of takes care of itself mostly. So the next part is, so we've decided we want to migrate, right? From one cloud to another or from, usually it's from one cloud to another, but it could be from legacy equipment to a cloud. So what do you do, right? So the first thing you do is you have to do a technical deep dive into each application architecture, right? So you identify all the applications and usually, depending on how your tenants have designed these, they can fall into projects or they may be spread across multiple projects. They might be spread across multiple clouds. Either way you want to assess that and understand in deep detail what is the application architecture? What is the functionality of the application, right? What is it delivering at the end of the day and are there any SLA expectations both from the application to end users and from your infrastructure to the application owner? So in that process, you kind of have four major areas that you focus on. The first thing is identifying all the application stakeholders. This is usually a diverse group of people from a business owner who's signing the check for all of this that's being written and migrated. This includes application architect, both software and hardware. This can include lead developers. This can include project managers that oversee this application and it running and then technical account managers. If it's a customer facing application, there's a whole lot of other people. So you have to find out who the key stakeholders are to understand what their requirements are in terms of a migration. The second thing is you set up the technical deep dive call with all of the tenants, right? To understand in detail all of these things. One of the things you request to have at those calls are logical application architecture diagrams so that you can dig into the nuts and bolts again of how the application is distributed, if it is, what are all the components that make it up, what network segments are it on, what type of storage does it use, all those kind of things. And usually in those diagrams, it gives you enough of a view to be able to ask the right questions in terms of what you need to know about that application. Then the last thing you do is review the architecture in detail. So once you get all that data, the next thing that happens is you go through a series of questions for each one of the applications. So the first thing you need to understand, right, is it highly available? Is it fault tolerant and is it distributed? These are just kind of looking at ways that you can take parts of the application offline without affecting the overall functionality of that application. If they're not, right, if these are legacy applications that's scaled up instead of out, you have to take that into consideration, right? And it means that there probably will be downtime. Is the application wholly contained within the open stack environment? So this is one that we've run across quite a few times where someone did a lift and shift of an application and kind of dropped it into the cloud, but let's say a portion of the application couldn't fit in the cloud. For example, the data store was on Oracle database that was far too large to fit inside the cloud. So they put all of the other tiers of the application into the cloud and just put direct pipe back to an Oracle database. That's a problem, right? You need to be able to address that. We've had others where people have connected physical routers via layer two into the side of the cloud for like VoIP applications, right? That's something that has to be taken into consideration. So you wanna understand, is the application wholly contained in open stack and therefore easy to move or do you have hooks into other infrastructure outside of the cloud that make it more difficult? If federal instances are critical in terms of open stack, because unlike AWS where there's an implicit understanding that an ephemeral instance, if it goes away for any reason is gone, and the application designer knows that, open stack doesn't treat ephemeral instances in the same way, right? And the use cases being used in open stack are a little bit different in terms of how they're using them. So usually they're trying to get disk speed advantages and so you could end up with, for example, large distributed databases that have data that is semi-persistent on the nodes themselves and you may have to migrate that, you may not, right? So you need to understand that. The last thing is the application comprised of Pets or Cattle and this goes back to what Sean was saying, right? So legacy applications are probably mostly comprised of Pets and Pets are things that you care about, right? Those are things that you can't just destroy and not worry about because you need that application to run, you need every component of it. Cattle is the exact opposite. It's that thing where you can move them around, you can shift them around and one moving doesn't affect the others, right? And so you don't have to give a specific care to that Cattle VM. So that's kind of the thought of assessing the viability. Now, once you've done that and you've deemed a workload viable for migration, the next thing you do is actually proceed into the planning stages of migrating. Hey everyone, I'm Roman. I'm gonna give a brief overview of how migration actually goes and what do we do and what kind of problems we experience and how do we deal with it. So this is actually where we started and in reality, it never worked. So as you see, this schema is quite complex and not really readable. So we had to simplify everything and what we decided is that we will migrate each town separately with all the load that Tent has and instead of having moving hardware from one cloud to the other, we decided that we need a destination cloud setup and ready before that we do migration. So what happens? So most of the objects in OpenStack are migrated using OpenStack APIs which means that unique identifiers for those objects are not kept in the destinations. So that's for the most part. This is most of the objects are done doing this. So we read objects from source cloud, then we run OpenStack APIs to recreate same objects in destination. This sounds kind of simple, but some objects need magic and well, in Miranda's magic means glass of vodka and then the next morning you wake up and everything's done magically. No, unfortunately not. So what you really need to, so in reality, life is more complex. So there are several objects which require treatment which are floating IPs, quota, usage volumes and ephemeral storage. So I'll go over those in a while. So with floating IPs we have two challenges. First one is if we want to keep floating IPs, then user and APIs unfortunately does not allow us to specify the same floating IP using APIs itself. So for that case, we need to kind of enter God mode and do direct database manipulations and kind of pretend we're being neutron, which obviously means that this solution is difficult to maintain and needs to be tested real carefully before we start doing anything. The other problem is IP conflicts which may occur. So obviously if you keep same floating IPs and source in destination cloud, you may have a situation when you have two floating IPs in different zones and in order to resolve that you would need to move VMs first then detach floating IPs from source cloud and associate them in the destination and after that shut down VM and source cloud. So the other thing is quota usage. So NOVA supports keeping track of usage of resources, but the problem is that when we do the migration it's usually being done with some super user admin account. So all the objects in destination are kind of recreated with from one user and thus, well, database and destination will be different from what we have in source cloud. Thus, again, we need to enter God mode and modify database directly. And again, the same problems. It's dangerous and difficult to maintain but yeah, that's the only way so far. The other one is volume migration. So obviously simply recreating volumes in destination doesn't make much sense. You need to transfer data as well. And for that, you would need to figure out what is the sender backend to move data from one cloud to the other. And you know that sender currently supports like more than 50 different backends like NFS, iSCSI, fiber channel, all of that, different vendors. And this means that data needs to be transferred in different manner. So for NFS, for example, it's just a copy of simple file for iSCSI. It means that we need to copy from block device to block device. So and also all those different combinations. So you need to design your migration tool to do that. The other problem is networking bandwidth problem which occur all the time. So like we had, sometimes we had data transfer speed like under 500 kilobytes per second, which is quite slow. So you may want to expect this kind of problems. And also again, networking problems and data transfer problems. So in order to resolve those, what you would do is you would split huge volumes into smaller chunks and transfer each small chunk separately and you would repeat an error. Now, yes. So the solution, it is a solution, yes. Yeah, God mode. It is a solution. Where to the Q and I afterwards, we can give you a bit more detail. Yeah, so with the FMRL, we have similar problems. So again, different types of backends, NFSF, just local storage, networking problems. So again, you would want to know how the files are stored in storage destination in order to copy those. And then you would want to repeat on networking problems and split huge files into smaller chunks. Now, with that, I give my word to Irak. So now the final step, I want to know how long does migration take. Usually once people know how long it takes, they don't want to do migration. But before getting to that, we want to know why we want to do the, why we want to know how long the migration takes. So first is risk planning. So basically every migration brings potential risk of downtime, so you want to be prepared for that and know when the tenant will be migrated. Once you know how long it takes, you can also come up with a proper cost, come up with a proper schedule for the tenants and basically everybody wants to know when this migration is going to end. So before also finding out how long it takes, we want to know what we're actually migrating. And the first approach is basically to do the migration in one shot, the kind of a Bing bang approach. So as we already discussed, those migrations are, usually doesn't make sense. One thing comes in mind, if you have a public cloud, you cannot really select, you have to migrate everything and you have to meet SLAs with your tenants. But in a normal case, it's even hard to do this because if you want to do migration in one bank, you need to have destination cloud to be the same size as the source cloud. And it's pretty much very expensive, right? So in order to tackle that, you want to do the migration in a progressive way. So you would be migrating tenants per tenants. So the first way of doing it is basically identify business critical projects that you want to basically move. And that way you would avoid to have enough to fill up your cloud on the destination site and also you're basically focusing exactly what you need to migrate. Another case it could be you just want to migrate some VMs between tenants or on a different cloud. So now we know how to do this. I would just quickly explain the way we are automated, the time estimation discovery, sort of. So first we collect data from source and destination clouds, create test volume images and the FMRL VMs with FMRLs and do the test migration and basically get the speed speeds. And finally, once you know the data that you want to migrate and the speeds you pretty much can do the time estimation. And then you can plan your migration, set the schedules for the migration and you can see that you might have very slow speeds so you might need to address your links. You might go through the one more iteration of collecting data and estimating your speeds and then pretty much you make a final schedule and you start your migration. So now I'll just go quickly on each of these points and we can ramp up. So as I said, when we do collection of migration data we basically discover both clouds and store it in a database and then we just basically present size views per tenant. So the most important things to consider is images volumes and VMFMRLs because this is actually the data that needs to be migrated. And we also can provide a list of unused resources. So for example, there are volumes that are not attached. There are images that are not used for building VMs so we can provide it and basically just you can do the cleanup on them. The open stack resource migration is pretty much fast because it's automated and it's only metadata to migrate so usually it's not considerable. And pretty much we can also provide total sizes per cloud. So this is just example from the last project. This is just numbers fresh in mind. So you can see here the glance transfer we performed for the APIs. So we get speeds around 40 megabits per second and for VMRLs and Cinder volumes with NFS. You can use R-Sync and SCP, very slow transfer speeds. So we found there is like other transport protocols, one of them BBCP. So we got pretty much good speeds based on our link. And finally, for the ISCSI, there is no other invention than just do the block by block copy and the speeds are very slow. So we have everything. We have data sizes and we have speeds. So pretty much this is just example of one tenant where they had images of one terabyte, a firmware of three terabytes and volume of 20 terabytes. So the migration of the volume was done by transferring from NFS to NFS back end. So this is the speed. So the final, and we also have to consider the OpenStack resource migration, which involves migration of identity, computer resources and networking. So the total time for this tenant was 35 hours. And as we said, we pretty much, the migration of the OpenStack resources is negligible. Takes couple of hours, I would say for the whole thing, but also migration duration increases. Basically, if you have more data to migrate, it's basically linearly increasing the time. So there's no pretty much magic there. So yeah, and finally, once we have all of this data, we can ramp up with the planning, provide information for cloud owners, if possible, address link speeds issues and assess which tenants are good candidates for migration. Basically, we'll just guys cover and basically go for the migration. We also tried to use best practices where possible. So for Cinder volumes and FMRs, we tried to use better transport protocols. We tried to do the parallel migration. If you do automation, you can always automate to the way that you can do this in parallel. And finally, yesterday we had a talk where we discussed everything about data migration. So you can find the link in the YouTube, but basically you have other ways, basically not migrating data at all where you can reattach your storage or you can replicate your data. So you can also look into those. So I'm transferred to our KELT. Thanks, Eric. So all of this is being done through a set of tools that Miranda's built, which we use through our services team, the sheer complexity of clouds and the fact that we're manipulating everything in the background. And this requires hacking a little bit at your clouds to make everything work. We do this as a services product. So that was the question you were asking. So we have a set of tools. So if you wanna go and have a look at them, they are fairly complex and they can be found on Git. Just look from the Rantis Git. But I would suggest that you speak to your Miranda services rip around that to find out because of the sheer complexity of doing this. So any questions? And thank you for listening to us. This is two questions, maybe. So you provided that number of hours for the migration. Was that all downtime? Was everything off during that whole thing? Effectively, yes. Sorry, it can be done in smaller chunks. You could do it at an instance at a time. So the software does allow us to do that. But you also have to take into account dependencies. So one of the levels of complexity that we handle is the linkage of the two clouds and the two environments to handle that. But that is very dependent on the architecture. Yeah, and I'll add to that. For these particular customers, the vast majority of the tenants we moved had multiple zones active at any given time. So this was indicative of one zone being down. So the other zone was still up. So the application was not down, but a zone was offline during this time. So that might help you. And I also noticed on the chart that we're showing the various copy protocols for ephemeral data. Under API, you just have a little X as not an option. There's a block migration option in API, right? It's almost impractically slow. And it tends to fail randomly. It fails for me all the time, and I was wondering if it fails for everyone or if I'm doing something wrong. No. I think everybody has experienced it failing. Has anybody attempted to fix it or addressed it, or is it just a thing that nobody cares about and has been fully sidelined? I'm fairly sure that there are reviews for it. I haven't looked at it recently. I don't think anybody here has. No. No, I'm finished. Thank you. In your example, were these two clouds actually on talking to each other? Yes, they were. And you've got the same networks with the same external connectivity. How can you have the IPs be present at the same time? Yeah, so I'll let Iret handle it, or Roman, or I can explain it. So what happens is you're exactly right. They're two disparate clouds, right? And even to the extent that these are totally different versions of OpenStack as well. So what happens is they extend the network between the two clouds when they set up the destination cloud, and they plumb everything the same on the destination. In other words, all the IPs are available, but they're not in use. And I think it was Roman that pointed out in his presentation. Well, you were talking about floating IPs, but in lots of cases, we are actually extending our tenant networks onto our bigger backbones, which are public addresses. They're not private addresses that are not. So floating IPs are the challenge because of the way OpenStack handles floating IPs. You can, through OpenStack, assign a specific IP. What we typically have done in the past is we turn off the DHCP in one of the clouds. So the destination cloud will turn off the ability to assign until the migration is completed for that segment. And were you actually taking the database from one cloud and just populating in the other now?  So hence we lose the UUIDs. I'm still curious about the IPs when we are connecting both clouds to an external network and they both have to be routed for the same IPs. I wasn't talking about floating IPs. Shared gateways. It can be handled fairly easily at an L3 layer. There is the challenge of preventing both clouds using the same IP blocks. So quite often you'll end up doing things if you're forced to have both clouds active at the same time, you have to cut the blocks in half or restrict the number of addresses available. But you managed to move this entire cloud within that 20 hour period? So this is one, the example is one portion of a far larger cloud. We, this was almost two years ago now with the same tool set. We moved a cloud that had just on 400 terabytes of data in small chunks over a period of about eight weeks. Moving approximately, and somewhere around 500 gigs a day. During those eight weeks you had both networks. Both clouds running, both clouds available. Customers being able to work in both clouds. And what were you doing with the subnets that were shared between the two? So every day we rerun the API transfer, the transform so that check of the old cloud, compare it to the new cloud and move the changes across. We'll look at the tools then. Thanks. Probably more detail than you need. If you'd like to come up afterwards we can have a quick chat about it and I can tell you a bit more. Thanks. We did say we wanted to do it quicker. Right, you guys all got time for a 10 minute post-prandial nap before your next session. Thank you very much.


Ladies, you want to be in a happy relationship? There's only four things you need to do. One, find a man who'll make you laugh. Two, find a man who's cultured and will explore this world with you. Three, find a guy who's intellectual and ambitious and will support your ambitions. Four, of course, find a guy who's honest, trustworthy and respectful. But most importantly, more important than any of that, ladies, is that you make sure that these four guys don't know each other.  So I've seen a lot of financially unstable men talking about coffee dates. Ladies, just save them time by declining all coffee dates. Help them save that 350. That's the only thing in their bank account, okay? My worst date ever was in 2015. I drove an hour to pick her up. I waited outside for 15 minutes in the rain waiting for her to come out. Her younger brother wiped his pecker across the glass door while I waited, which was weird. When she finally came out, she played Angry Birds in the passenger seat of my car all the way to the restaurant and said nothing the entire way. When we got to the restaurant, she ordered the number two family style, which as it turned out was a poopoo platter for eight. When I confronted her about it, she very loudly accused me of fat shaming when I'm pretty sure we both know she was just gonna bring it home and feed her siblings. When we got out of there, it took her four boxes of leftovers to leave and she dumped one of them all over my car. Didn't even bother to clean it up. When we got back to her house, I was getting ready to leave and she asked, are you gonna kiss me good night? To which I said, no, kind of politely and pissed, she sicked her very vicious German shepherd on me, which bit me in the calf. On the way home, I got a flat tire and I'm pretty sure it was from her because there were three roofing nails straight up in a row.  No, not really. All right, whatever. Yes, my car. Really?  You wanna go to a party now? Kind of, yeah. Let's go. I mean, I understand you guys say that dinner is high maintenance, but that's just like what I'm used to, you know? Sort of the offensive. So this boyfriend ordered his girl a necklace that says my person and another one that says Te Amo and that's not even half of it. He got her the set that sticks together, this dragon couple set that represents strength in a relationship, a heart bracelet to represent his love, this butterfly necklace and butterfly promise ring and he just emailed me instead of she cheated. My friend caught her ex-boyfriends cheating on her. Watch her mood change when she realizes she cheated first and didn't get it.  That one time a lady beat on my door looking for her boyfriend, but had the wrong door. Okay, so I was just thinking about this and let me know what y'all think, but there has been times where I will be talking to a man and I won't be feeling it and people will be like, why?  They'll be like, what do you mean he's too nice? Like you want somebody mean? And I figured it out. It's not that I want somebody mean. It's just what I'm looking for in a man is masculine energy that is dominant over my masculine energy so it can bring out my feminine energy. Does that make sense? What do you wish you'd done differently at your wedding? I wish I had picked a different maid of honor. You wanna know why?  And she treats him like sh** anyways. Oh, but it gets better. She got into it with my cousin really bad at my bachelorette party and made me believe her to where me and my cousin fought for weeks and almost never talked again. And then at my wedding, she literally took so long getting ready. I barely had time to get ready and we were running 30 minutes late for the wedding. Then she forgot the rings. They gave them to her three times and she forgot.  We're not friends anymore. Whoever said you can't turn a hoe into a housewife? Run me my money, look at me. Shrimp, some pasta. Laundry being folded. Children being taken care of. Dishes loaded into the dishwasher. I'm beating the statistics. Praise me.  Put a finger down actual hoe addition.      Put a finger down if you made out with three or more people in one night.  Put a finger down if you played with someone for your own enjoyment.       You know what's crazy to me man that if I was to stop paying alimony or child support you know I'd probably be in jail or at least summoned to court immediately right now in my divorce decree it states that I am to be notified of any moves and location address her phone numbers but my son's mother refuses to give me her address so I could send my son some toys. Hey tiktok my kids are coming to visit me for Father's Day they think I'm cooking dinner take a mouth for dinner burgers I forgot I have three kids and they won't speak to me or talk to me my ex-wife made sure of that so this channel is about how I'm gonna reach out to them show them who I really am how much I love them and that my door is always open


Hey, it's Missy. I'm so glad you're here. I got a few requests to share some back-to-school hairstyle, so I wanted to do some that were a little bit on the easier side. I think you could do any of these before school. Of course, you don't have to go to school to try them out or wear them. You could do the low bun for a special event. I think that would be really pretty, but let me know in the comments if you have a favorite style. I love knowing which one you guys end up liking the most. Be sure to like, subscribe, click that notification bell if you're new, as always, and let's get started. For the first hairstyle, I want to put all of my hair into a low ponytail, except for a small section at the nape of my neck. So I'm going to divide my hair from behind my ears, separating off the top section and leaving down the smaller lower section. With the top section, I'm going to tie this off to begin the bun portion of the style, so I'm taking a hair band and I'm going to wrap it over the section a couple of times. On the last wrap of the band, I'm only going to pull the hair partway through to create a loop in the section. Then I'm going to take the ends that are left sticking down, and I'm going to combine them with the lower section of hair that I previously left down. I'm going to divide the hair from the bun into two equal sections as well and cross one section over the other. Then I'm going to split the lower section of hair into equal sections and combine each side with the ends from the bun. I'm going to wrap each of these sections over the top of the bun, so I'm taking the left side and wrapping it over the top of the bun towards the right side. Then I'm taking the hair from the right side and wrapping it over the top of the bun towards the left side. Then I'm going to combine the ends from the two sections back together underneath the bun. Then using a clear elastic band, I'm going to tie the ends together so they stay combined underneath the bun. And now I'm going to create some texture in the hairstyle, so I'm pinching and pulling small sections of hair along the bun throughout the wrapped pieces and along the top of my head to add some volume to the hairstyle. This style is so trendy right now and really easy to do, so I hope you give it a try and let me know what you think down below in the comments.  For the first braid, I'm going to part my hair near the middle. Then I'm going to place my first braid on the left side of my part, so I'm dividing off a small section of hair and splitting it into three smaller pieces. I'm going to create a regular three strand braid and cross the side strands under the middle. So I'm crossing one side under the middle, then I'm crossing the other side under the middle. And I'm going to repeat this pattern working my way down to the bottom of the section. So I'm just alternating between crossing the left and the right side strands underneath the middle strand. And as I'm braiding, I'm not going to detangle the bottom of the braid. I'm going to continue braiding and let the ends kind of wrap and twist up. And by letting the ends get tangled up, I will be able to flip the ends through the braid and create a knot at the bottom. This will secure the end of the braid without needing to tie it off with an elastic band. And then I'm just going to create a gap in the braid and flip the ends through this gap, pulling the ends down tight. And this will not the end of the braid. And once that braid is done, I'm going to repeat the same steps and create another braid on the right side of the part. So again, I'm separating off a section of hair and dividing it into three smaller pieces. I'm going to be crossing the side strands under the middle strand and alternating between the left and right side strands. And as I'm braiding, I'm not going to detangle the ends of the braid like before. I want to make sure to keep the ends twisted and wrapped up so I can create a knot at the bottom. So I'm just going to continue crossing the left side strand under the middle, then the right strand under the middle. And once the braid reaches near the ends, and you can tell that the bottom is getting all tangled up, I'm going to create a gap in the braid and flip the ends through the gap to tie off the bottom of the braid. And now I'm going to create two more braids on each side of my part at the top of my head. I'm using the same technique as before. Then I'm going to place my first braid on the left side of my part. So I'm dividing off a small section of hair and splitting it into three smaller pieces. I'm going to create a regular three-strand braid. So I'm crossing one side under the middle, then I'm crossing the other side under the middle. And I'm going to repeat this pattern working my way down to the bottom of the section. As I braid, I'm going to let the bottom tangle up. And then I'm just going to create a gap in the braid and flip the ends through this gap, pulling the ends down tight. And this will not the end of the braid. And once that braid is done, I'm going to repeat the same steps and create another braid on the right side of the part. So again, I'm separating off a section of hair and dividing it into three smaller pieces. I'm going to be crossing the side strands under the middle strand and alternating between the left and right side strands. And as I'm braiding, I'm not going to detangle the ends of the braid like before. I want to make sure to keep the ends twisted and wrapped up so I can create a knot at the bottom. And as I get closer to the bottom, it will get more difficult to braid. And once the braid reaches near the ends and you can tell that the bottom is getting all tangled up, I'm going to create a gap in the braid and flip the ends through the gap to tie off the bottom of the braid. This style is so trendy right now and really easy to do right before school. For the third style, I'm going to begin by dividing off a section of hair at the top of my head. I'll be using this section for the braid so you can make this as large or as small as you'd like. I traced a part line beginning at the corners of my forehead so not too large of a section. And once this section is clipped up, I'm going to take the remaining hair and combine it together into a ponytail. Then I'm going to let down the hair from my crown and create a braid. I'm dividing the section into three equal pieces and I'm going to cross the side strands over the middle strand alternating between the right and the left side sections. So I'm crossing the left side over the middle, then crossing the right side over the middle. And once the braid reaches my ponytail, I'm going to wrap two sections of the braid around the left side and one section around the right side of the hairband. Then I'm going to combine the three sections of the braid back together underneath the ponytail. And using a clear elastic band, I'm going to tie the hair together so it stays wrapped underneath the ponytail. And then I'm going to go back over the braid and widen it a little bit. So I'm just going to carefully pull on the edges of the loops so the hair slides slightly out of the elastic band and the braid gets wider and flatter. Then I'm going to pinch and pull on small sections around the crown to add some texture and volume to the hairstyle. I think this ponytail is so fun because it looks like the whole thing is braided, but it's really just done in two sections. So I hope you give it a try and let me know what you think down below in the comments. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to let me know in the comments which of the three hairstyles you liked the best. If you're new, click that subscribe button down below and the notification bell so you never miss any future videos. You can follow me on Instagram as well at Missy Sioux blog and on TikTok at Missy Sioux blog underscore and I will see you next time.