So can you hear me a bit better right welcome everyone to the talk about the lessons learned from the migration to Apache Airflow My name is Radek and I work as a chief architect at skimlings. So at skimlings we do Commercial content monetization. I will explain a bit more about that I also in my free time work as a trainer at Framework training where we do some big data related trainings Used to work as a studio at a couple of companies including k4g data my lab and also involved in many big data projects in the past We've such companies as orange fca counter open X and many many more So agenda for this talk as I will start from telling you a bit more about what is That we do at skimlings like how what kind of data we process? How do we do it with the airflow and why did we choose airflow to process the data? The part one will be focusing on the airflow basic concept So if you don't know anything about the airflow yet, don't worry like I will give you some some basics So we talk about the components features and I will show you some sample code And then in the part to I will focus on some of the best practices that we developed over the last year back at skimlings And we mentioned few things about the deployment and what I like to call it the good the bad and the ugly So skimlings data panel pipeline so The longer version of what we do at skimlings is we monetize the product links in the commerce related content To earn publishers a share of sales So I like to talk I like to call it a better version of advertising because we don't actually show any Display advertising from the websites what we do is we give the publishers Like a snippet of JavaScript code that they drop it They include it in the website and that JavaScript code scans all the links to the external Merchants such as Amazon eBay and and so on and turns them into affiliated links So if the end user clicks on any of those links and then buy the product We give the percentage share of that purchase to the publisher So essentially it's something which is competing invisible from the user point of view From the I'll give you some numbers. So we work with around 60,000 publishers Around the world including Over 50% of top 100 websites publishers in the US in UK We also work with almost 50,000 merchants around the world and we work with them through Networks so we don't do the tracking of the affiliate links ourselves We are just like this extra layer on top of the networks Last year we process over 80 billion page impressions and almost half a billion of clicks and we drew a value of around 800 million of e-commerce transactions to all the publishers around the world Which translates into Hundreds of terabytes of data so pretty pretty massive big data project from that point of view What we do with this data is we process it we aggregate it and we present it as a customer reports to the publishers We also do some data exports. So we aggregate the data and we send it to Publishers and the customers into the we drop we can drop it into Amazon S3 bucket or Google cloud storage, etc. And we also do some machine learning predictions so Why airflow? So around a year ago We decided to do some big changes in skim links. We used to use Hadoop cluster and we decided to Basically replace the Hadoop with big query, which is a managed SQL database and we used to for the scheduling we used to use Uzi Apache Uzi and we settled Instead for the airflow. Why airflow? Well airflow is written Entirely in Python. So what that means is Python coincidentally is a language of choice of a lot of data scientists So if you are a data scientist and you want to implement some of the machine learning, you know You can do it directly inside the airflow You can think about the airflow as a cron on steroids. So it will help you to schedule your things In like your batch processing. So let's say that you want to do some computations every one hour or every day You can very easily do it with the airflow It's been a great productivity enhancer for us. So we Calculated that during that last year when we migrated from Hadoop To big query and the airflow we managed to release roughly twice as many features Thanks to airflow as what we did before with the Uzi This is in large degree thanks to a lot of of the features that airflow gives us namely Modern user interface, which is something that you would never consider as productivity enhancer But it helps you a lot because it basically it scans the Python code in your jobs and it visualizes all the jobs that you implemented In that user interface that you can see on the right side It shows you also which jobs are currently running which jobs were finished You can you have access to real-time logs of every job every task in your job So you can see if anything went wrong You have a so it's not just only static view But you can actually drill in into any job or a task and if something went wrong with two clicks You can retry any task very easily and Then on top of that we have such features like data profiling So let's say that You notice that your jobs are getting slower and slower and you don't really know why you can Just go into on the section of the UI called data profiling and the data profiling is going to show you Which part of the jobs are the slowest so you can immediately see Where you need to spend the effort to speed things up On top of that we have the command line So if you if you are the guy who doesn't really like the user interface You can just run a lot of things directly from the command line and then last but not the least this entire Airflow stack is horizontally scalable. So and skimmings we run it with the Kubernetes Using so-called seller executor I will come back a little bit to the subject later What that means is that we can have multiple workers. You can have pretty much as many workers as you want to Which will in parallel run all your computations and So I already said it's written in Python is also called first Scheduler what that means is that you define everything inside your Python code So things like where that job should start. What is the start date? What is the you know how frequently the job should run? Whoever one hour every one hour or every one day all of that goes into into the code and Last but not the least it has a great open source community So chances are that whatever you are trying to do you will probably find already some existing implementation online Inside the Airflow repository So here is what we arrived at after one year of migration from the Hadoop to to BigQuery So this is roughly the architecture So on the left side in here. We have the input data So that's the the page impressions is the most heavy part where we have the terabytes of data So we basically Push all the page impressions to the Google pops up and then write them into the Google cloud storage and use data flow Apache open source version of that is Apache beam So we use the Apache beam to read the data from the Google cloud storage and import it into the BigQuery And then the clicks are imported in our case in real time So we have a system that reads them in small batches of few hundred clicks from the pops up and Inserts them in real time into into the BigQuery One important thing to note in here is that Airflow is going to help you with the batch processing but not with the real-time processing Airflow by definition is the scheduler that will schedule some job for you to run in Predefined period of time While with the real-time processing you need a process that just keeps running in the background all the time So a part of this real-time processing Beat everything else in here is orchestrated by Airflow. So we also import some data from the MySQL so customers metadata Commission's data things like that All of that ends up in the in the BigQuery, but you can very easily do it in any other SQL database. We just opted for BigQuery because of the size of our data Very important thing is also the monitoring. So you always want to make sure that you have a Like very good checks on the quality of the data So whenever something goes wrong, we get the notifications on this like we track Or the like important time series in the influx DB and visualize them with the Grafana and then on the right side We export the data into three Things so we have the internal Data warehouse which is hosted in the MySQL We also have the reporting for the end customer which is actually done in the elastic search It works surprisingly works pretty well for us And then we as I mentioned earlier we sent some data to Google cloud storage and Amazon S3 So a part of this pipeline that I just talked about we also use the Apache Spark for some heavy machine learning processing and In here Airflow gives you really great flexibility when it comes to running Well really all your processing there are always multiple ways to do the same thing the same is true for Apache Spark So we have three ways in which we can run the Apache Spark Probably the best way would be to do it using the PySpark module Together with the Airflow's Python operator so inside the Airflow Python operator you can run any Python code you want to and then You have the PySpark module where you implement your own like Spark computations that you want to do and this way Airflow will orchestrate the Spark From within the Python code Another tool alternatives is to use the Spark submit So basically you keep all your code inside the Apache Spark and then you just submit the Spark jobs to Spark from Airflow using the Spark submit Which you can do very easily using the well there is a Spark submit operator for that Or if you prefer you can actually implement it yourself using the bash operator plus call the Spark submit from from the bash operator the reality though is that Majority of the machine learning tasks are usually spent on data engineering so Things like cleaning input data ETL extraction transformation and loading Preparing your features running the series of jobs and then eventually Protectionizing the entire data pipeline. That's something that Airflow is really going to help you with So it's not really going to help you much with the machine learning which you implement yourself with Python But the protectionizing all the jobs We'll help a lot with right so before we go into the details on how the Airflow actually works I wanted to ask you that anyone here uses already Airflow Hands up. All right Only one person so it's good that we are covering some basics So when you will be working with Airflow you will hear the terms of DAX all the time So DAX stands for the directed icicle graph and you will Create so your DAX is essentially your your job your workflow DAX is built from the tasks and the dependencies between the tasks. So the task is the bit where you process some data or you for example run the Apache Spark computation and then you also specify the dependencies between the task which Tell Airflow what should be what should happen next once that task will finish. So for example in here on the right side We have a sample pipeline from skimlings where we first We process the clicks You can notice that comes pipeline and pages pipeline, which are all green They don't have any dependencies so they can all run in parallel For example the link activity pipeline has a dependency on the clicks pipeline Which means that it can only start once the clicks pipeline will finish Linker when you pipeline on the left top bottom left I mean those names doesn't really matter what you know, it's just the name of the task This task can only start once the both comes pipeline and link activity pipeline will finish You can you can define much more complex Dependencies in the task so you can have some branching operators. You can have joins You know like once both tasks finish then the next one should finish it should start Branching where you can skip some tasks. So for example, you can have certain tasks that run over weekdays But you want to skip them during the weekend and so on so It's a very simple, but very powerful concept Examples of the dykes and jobs You can for example create the report Running by running some SQL query and then storing the results in the output file or the output table You can extract the features for the machine learning pipeline or you can trigger the purchase park job then what is very exciting about this is that Airflow is going to parse your tasks and the dependencies between them which you implemented in Python and we'll do this visualization Automatically for you and this visualization is interactive So you can click on any of those tasks you can drill into them And you can see the logs for this specific task where you can rerun the this task together with the any dependencies So let's say that if for whatever reason the page pipe pipeline failed We just on the right side and we want to rerun it if we select that we want to also rerun the dependencies We are not Airflow is going to automatically rerun for us the pages pipeline the page activity pipeline and all the dependencies below that as well It's very useful because you know the problems in the I mean There are always problems that do happen from time to time in the production system and you might want to fix such things so operator is You can think about the operator as a Class that defines what is going to be done inside your task So we have a choice of operators that there are some building operators There are country operators or you can write your own custom operators Example of the operator would be for example postgres operator which allows you to Execute ns equal query of your choice against the postgres database or a bash operator where you can run any custom bash command Inside the bash Then the task is an instance of the operator. So you can think or it's an instance of your operator or Anyway, I would come back to it or a sensor So from that point of view you can think about the task as an instance of the of the class or an object A task is a node in your doc and then so when you instant When you create the instance of you of the operator you also have to provide the parameters for this operator so for example with the Postgres operator your parameter will be SQL query that you want to run against the postgres plus the connection details That you want to execute Against in the database We can also use very powerful Gingya templating system inside the airflow so It allows you for example with the bash operator. You can you can put some parameters inside the Gingya template and then just parameterize them by passing variables inside inside your task on the right side we have the Example of the big query operator. So we create the merge Merge task, which is the instance of the big query operator We specify the name of this task the SQL query that we want to run against the big query Database the connection ID so like, you know, you might have a production database staging database and so on As well as some additional parameters the interesting parameter in here I wanted to point out is the number of retries that you want airflow to perform before Succeeding the task. So for example If airflow we be running this task for the first time and the task will fail for whatever reason Maybe because there was some problem with the connecting to the database then airflow is Automatically going to retry that task again You can you can define how many retries you want? This is a very powerful feature because it allows Airflow to see heal itself So like very often what we find out is that we you know go to the office on the morning see some emails that there was some problem With one of the pipeline, but actually everything went fine in the end because of the retries So there are quite a lot of problems that just happen Randomly from time to time Some advanced features that I'm not going to be covering in details in here, but you can you can use with the airflow hooks Gives you the interface to external databases and platforms So for example, there will be a muscular hook postgres hook BigQuery hook and and so on then the connections are stored in airflow inside the airflow meta base and You can modify them using the airflow user interface So that's a very Useful feature because if you have two environments, let's say production and the staging environment You don't have to bake your connection inside your code You can you can just store it inside the airflow UI, which will be done stored in inside the airflow database Then we also have variables So you you can also define variables inside the airflow meta base, which you can control through the airflow user interface Same story in here You don't have to bake and hard cut some some of the variables inside your code such as let's say You might want to use a different Amazon S3 path in production and different Amazon S3 path in your staging Environment, you don't have to put it into your code. You can just modify it directly from the airflow user interface Xcoms allows you to pass some parameters from one task to another task So it's a mean of communication between the tasks. So let's say that one task One task can push some some information to the next one such as I Processed the data for the last three days and the net next next task needs to be aware of how many days needs to process the data for sensors allow you to Schedule the tasks when certain criteria are true. So As I mentioned earlier, you can airflow allows you to Schedule your batches so you can you can tell airflow to run some kind of processing once a day every day at 9 a.m But you might add some extra criteria for it such as okay run this at 9 a.m But only if that specific file already exists in the in this specific folder So for example in HDFS you might you might want to wait for some external Dependency to finish that airflow doesn't have any control over with the sensor You can you can basically check whether this is this criteria is already true or not and then You know start execution of your task once once it would be the case and Then there is a lot more in the plug-ins. So hooks connections Web views template macros and and so on that could be packaged into the plug-in and Anything that should not be a part of the airflow core Usually it goes into into the plug-ins. There's a great repository in the github airflow plug-ins where you can find some very interesting Implementations of such things like Google analytics for example It's something that you know you wouldn't want to have in the airflow core But a lot of people use it and they might want to download the data from the Google analytics Or some integrations with the payment platform such as stripe and so on so here is the sample code that Shows how you would create a doc inside your airflow So on the right side we basically create a new doc We give it our name called tutorial and we create three tasks So we create the tasks t1 t2 and t3 all of them are instances of the bash operator And then in this case We just give it some IDs and then provide the commands that we want to run inside each of those bash operators So the first task we just run the command date the second one will sleep for five seconds And the third one will use the ginga template that I mentioned earlier that this parameterized with the with our Params in here so in the params we can we pass a Parameter called where it's a dictionary with the key Called my param and that my param is going to be injected in here So you can access it from your ginga template as params dot and the name of the of the parameter Which is defined in that dictionary There are some additional macros that are available out of the box inside the Airflow so for example in here we have the macro called DS add where we add seven day to execution date You can also create your own macros, which you can refer to inside the ginga template on the left side in here. We have some Parameters such as start date which defines from which date this air flow Dark should start running And we also define the schedule interval. So how frequently that should run so in this case We have a schedule interval of one day Okay, so as you can see everything is inside everything is implemented inside python and then air flow is Intelligent enough to to basically parse this code extract all the tasks from it and do the visualization Showing what kind of tasks we have inside and also showing the dependencies between these tasks. So in this case, we have tasks t2 and t3 that are Dependent on t1 so t1 is upstream from t2 and t3 Which means that only once the t1 task will finish then the both t2 and t3 Start and they can run in parallel So let's talk about some of the air flow best practices that we use in in skimlings So very very important one that saved our life few times I the pontent DAX so it's gives you So if you implement your tasks in such a way that there are I the pontent You gain the possibility to rerun those tasks in the repeatable way To do it you just need to make sure that the task is always cleaning after itself Doesn't leave any side effects and you can basically rerun it safely twice and have the same result So if you don't do that then you might have a problem because for example, you know life happens and there will be some issues in your production System from time to time and then if you will try to rerun a task in a production system suddenly you will find that there were some Side effects that you didn't you didn't account for so for example You might have twice as much data or maybe you have three times more data because you run the same task three times And the task didn't clean after itself So it's very very important because it allows you to rerun the tasks in the repeatable way Tests so we did struggle a little bit with the Creating good tests for our DAX and the tasks So the good news is that airflow gives you like a quite easy way to test your tasks There is a command line called airflow test where you specify the name of your dog The idea of your task and the date and airflow is going to execute that specific task however That wasn't enough really for us because we have some complex DAX with you know Many tasks inside them and then running Manually and testing manually every single task wasn't just wasn't cutting it because There's a lot of dependencies between those tasks. You want to make sure that you you run them all in a correct order so what we ended up doing is basically creating a test DAX for every single DAX that Runs exactly the same code as the DAX itself and then Runs it on the input data creates the Output data and compares that output against the expected output. It's a pretty much a standard What you would expect from the standard integration test We Execute the integration test during key to build. So basically if anything breaks you will Be notified by Jenkins or whichever building process you are using Also, it's a very good idea to use separate environments for production staging and the test or local environment So in our case for the local environment We have a fully dockerized local solution. It's very easy to do with the airflow and Once you do it You essentially can run the local dockerized airflow with a single line of code So let's say that you have a new developer who wants to start and join your team They can do it in three minutes because all they have to do is just download their Kit repo and then start the local version of the airflow with the docker compose up in Production we are reusing the same docker images and inside the Kubernetes cluster so we have a horizontally scalable Workers with the seller executor Very important thing is to make sure that you store your logs from your production cluster somewhere in the Persistent storage so Amazon s3 hdfs or Google cloud storage because you workers will die from time to time and When the worker dies and all the logs were on the worker, you are not going to know what happened like what caused that problem Ideally if you can run a fully managed cluster that That's the best solution because then you don't have to worry about maintaining the cluster Upgrading the airflow and so on there are some commercial solutions that allow you to do it When it comes to deployment you have few strategies, so there is a pool method So you can run the gitsink on every single of your workers Ui and the scheduler and then pull the latest code from the master branch or production or the developer branch If that's a staging cluster Or you have a push model where you can push the code using something like our sync to every single of your workers Alternatively, you can use the Persistent volume so you can have all the workers in the read-only mode that read the data read the latest Python code from from a specific if big volume and then you have a Rightable volume where you push all the latest code or you can just bake in your code inside the docker containers The deed does that disadvantage in here is that?  You cannot really just push easily The new code if that code is baked into the docker containers Whichever way we whichever solution you choose airflow gives you very good support for scanning the changes In the latest files, so there is a setting in the airflow That will scan that allows that defines basically how frequently airflow should scan all the files for the latest changes I believe by default it's every few seconds, but you can you can increase it to Every few minutes and then air flow will automatically pick up latest some changes and Will around the latest version of your airflow? dogs So to summarize some of the good the bad and the ugly that we found In airflow during the last year There's some issues as well with the airflow. I mean it's a relatively new open source project So, you know, it's expected One problem that we've seen is displaying the dynamically generated dogs So because you create a dark in the python code you can you know, you can dynamically create the tasks So you can for example create 10 tasks today, but five tasks tomorrow If your number of tasks dynamically changes that could be a bit tricky for the user interface to visualize So just keep that in mind dogs dependencies In here you have a choice to either put all your logic inside some big and complex dogs or Speed them into some smaller dogs Usually smaller dogs is better, but then you will have to somehow Make sure that you connect You connect them within the airflow So you need to let the airflow know that once this dark finishes the second I can start you do it with the With the sensors the problem the sensors is that they're going to take your resources because the sensor is essentially a process That is waiting and checking some condition all the time So like it can wait and check every few seconds whether this file already exists in the HDFS or not So, you know, it's extra resource One problem that we are seeing in our current version of the airflow is that the scheduler just stops scheduling things after a few days So essentially we there is a setting in the airflow that allows you to restart the scheduler We restarted every few hours It's not the case apparently in the latest version of the airflow So if you use the latest one point ten point three that should not be the case anymore And then we also see some zombies problems from time to time So basically the processes Just die. There is no heartbeat coming out of them and then airflow marks the processes a zombie Even though the process continues and works just fine Fortunately, it's not an issue because we talked earlier about the retries So airflow will automatically try to retry that process and and usually if you implemented it in the I-deponent way meaning, you know, there is no side effects of rerunning it. It's going to work fine then The last thing is the samba tags. So there are some developers that Embrace them. We like to use them quite a lot, but there are some developers that really try to avoid them We like them because they allow us to encapsulate the complex code So if you have a huge doc with lots of tasks, you can group a lot of of the tasks into separate doc and you can include that separate doc as a sub task in your existing in your existing workflow So to summarize We managed to finish the migration from Hadoop to to BigQuery Everything works great airflow has been a huge productivity and answer for us Like we believe that we are at least twice as productive using BigQuery and airflow than we were with the Hadoop and Uzi So, yeah, we are very happy as you can see at skimlings and How you recommend it? Thanks very much so I don't know if we have any time for questions, but If if anyone has any question, just let me know I'll go on but the sub docs So some duck so essentially you remember when we talked about the operators different type of operators You have a basically doc operator where you use another doc as your task So so basically It just becomes Similar to one of your tasks you can really in into such a such a task and you can see Expansion of all the tasks that are within that other dug Well, we were reading a lot that there Scheduler is struggling with some of them because basically, you know, there will be scheduled on the same level They'll be executed as a single task We didn't really see any problems with that, but I was reading a lot about some issues Yeah, no problem Well, it depends how you schedule it how you set it up, but there shouldn't be any single point of failure I think probably using that user interface might be a single point of failure, but a part of this You you can very easily do like multiple threads for the scheduler. You have a multiple workers So it shouldn't be the case right sorry for taking extra time Right, thank you very much


Good morning everybody I'm Tommy O'Brien coming to you live from TFNN 9 a.m. Eastern time Friday morning 30 minutes to go until that opening bell right now we got markets slightly in the red S&P is negative by 11 points trading at 3059 you're looking at Dow futures negative 189 points trading 25,407 NQ's negative by 16 10,072 oil contract negative 54 cents oil down more than a dollar from where we were just at 5 a.m. oil trading at 3821 you get the gold contract basically flat at 17 69 silver up four pennies just above 18 at 1809 and no Tim bonds we got a little bit of higher price and lower yield seems to be the trend recently the 10 year up four ticks the 30 year bond up 8 ticks and we'll start it off with the VIX as quite a volatile week Wednesday 37 12 we've backed off a bit quite a strong finish to the market yesterday you saw the VIX go from 34 to under 32 trading at 32 53 right now times a one-on-watch in for Friday trading coming into the end of the week you had US consumer spending up 8.2% in May partly erasing the record plunge so US consumer spending rebounded sharply in May but the gains are not likely to be sustainable is the quote from CNBC personal income falling 4.2% in the month and is expected to decline further as millions lose their unemployment checks starting in July folks factor in this one okay I just talked about it the end of my program the morning market kickoff this one here with the mortgage bailout swelling 80,000 people in the past week just started in the mortgage for parents programs okay where you have anywhere from three months to a year delay payments those payments are going to come back though you still got to pay for those payments you either got to make up for them you got to add them into your mortgage you got to refinance you got to sell your home you're talking about 8.8% of all active mortgages up from 8.7 4.7 million homeowners right now okay and this number is going up what happens in the year when we're still dealing with millions of homeowners they can't pay their mortgage folks and the and the year is over this the this one's the starkest story of them all folks because that number is not going anywhere down follow that with the numbers from yesterday we're getting almost the new normal is every week we're dealing with 1.5 million weekly jobless claims how that plays into thing folks just watch out okay couple stories out there how about gap Kanye West he's going to be collaborating with gap and guess what investors no matter what you think a Kanye he's got a following and how about jumping almost ah what's that 17% right now for gap up to 1175 and Nike with their earnings last night open and lower stay tuned folks Larry Pezzavento coming up live at 9 o'clock I'll be back at 10 we'll be right back


Amen. Keep your place there in Ezekiel 28. We're taking a break from the Roman series tonight. And I'll try to preach a little bit shorter sermon tonight, but we're taking a break tonight because, you know, it's October 31 on a Thursday night and you're sitting in church and it's Halloween is what the world is celebrating. And I feel like, you know, I would do you a disservice. We're not participating in Halloween in any way, but I'd do you a disservice if I didn't tell you, you know, what the Bible says about what's happening in our world and this is happening today. And so we're going to talk a little bit about what I feel is becoming an obsession in our country with the occult. I feel like it's getting worse and worse as we go on and this country is absolutely obsessed with the occult. And I want to talk to you tonight about the dangers of this. And I want to talk to you about what the Bible says and I want to talk to you about why this is something that should not be taken lightly. Because it says the world is going to tell you that it should be taken lightly. But I'm going to show you that the Bible says otherwise. Ezekiel 28 is the quintessential chapter in the Bible about Satan and the fall of Satan. There's a parallel meaning with the king of Tyrus here and it's talking about, you know, Satan's fall from heaven. Who Satan is and who he was and what, you know, some characteristics about Satan. So if you're there in Ezekiel 28, take a look down at verse number 13. And we see a clue to this in verse number 13. The Bible says, Thou hast been an Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was Thy covering. The sardias, topaz, and the diamond, the barrel, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold. The workmanship of Thy Tabaret. So we see that Satan was someone who was very vain and covering himself with very vain ornaments and gems and things like that. He was apparently very concerned about the outward appearance of himself. And then we see in the second half of the verse where it says, The workmanship of Thy Tabaret and of Thy pipes was prepared in the day that Thou was created. You know, this is the verse where you will get people saying that, you know, Satan was the angel of music in heaven. You know, and the Bible doesn't say that, but it definitely says here that he had, you know, musical instruments built into his body. We don't know how that worked, but he was something, he was a musical being is what the Bible was telling us here, okay? Now, you know, we see a number of other things, but in verse number 17, we see some more characteristics of Satan that kind of back up verse 13 where the Bible says, So, I want to talk to you today about, you know, Satan, the Bible says, walks among us. The Bible says that Satan is on this earth. The Bible says it right here. Satan is a very vain creature. You know, the Bible says here that he was made for music. It talks about how he was into beauty. He thought he himself was very beautiful. You know, these are, you know, if you want perfect examples, very easy examples for me to see about Satan's influence in this world is the worlds of art and music. If you look at those two worlds. Now, the art world is something, art is very interesting to me because people that have a gift for being an artist or a painter or a sculptor or anything like that, they've definitely been given a gift from God. I mean, there's a, there's a gal up at Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento and she can paint the most beautiful pictures you've ever seen and she can just see a picture and she can just put that onto a portrait. Now, that is something that you could never teach me to do. She just has something in her mind that she was gifted with that allowed her to be able to do that. Okay? Now, if you've ever walked around any large city in the U.S. in the downtown area where there's many sculptures and by the way, Fresno's no different. Where there's many sculptures and artistic things are put out for people to see. What you will see is Satan's influence over the art world. You will see people that have been given this gift to be able to sculpt things or paint things and you will see these dark images and these dark figures that they use their gift for. Because Satan has influenced that world. You can see that is part of Satan's personality. It's, you know, it's his, it's his trade, so to speak. Music is very easy to see. But the sculptures, I mean just two blocks this way when you're driving to church on Sunday morning just look up in the corners of those buildings on those apartment buildings and you will have some twisted demon with wings holding some baby out with wings. I haven't gone and looked up close enough to see if the baby's a demon too or whatever. But it's a twisted mind that obviously has been born with a gift. Somebody was born with a gift to be able to sculpt and create something and has been twisted by Satan to be able to use it in that sort of manner. It's no different any other, you know, many other sculptures. I mean I remember we would walk around downtown Sacramento or in downtown whatever city and you would see these images and these sculptures and you're just like what in the world? You know, I mean somebody obviously created this or painted this or whatever but somebody has a twisted mind to be able to make something like that or even imagine something like some of these sculptures. So you can see Satan's influence very clearly in these areas. Music, we're not even going to get into music but music, I mean just look at music there's hardly any good music out there. Music is very similar, you know, you have a talent, I mean you can't teach me to be a singer that people would want to listen to. You couldn't teach that to me. People are given a gift and this gift is Satan's trade. It's Satan's, you know, he's involved in everything but the bottom line is you can see the influence of Satan in art and music today. Okay? Satan has totally corrupted these fields. Turn to Revelation chapter 12. So we see that Satan's influence that Satan is on earth and we can clearly see it. That's the point that I'm trying to get across to you with art and music. We can clearly see in our country today and in the world today the influence of Satan which shows us that he's real. Okay? In Revelation chapter 12, look down at verse number 4. The last book in the Bible, Revelation chapter 12, look down at verse number, let's start at verse number 3. And the Bible reads, and there appeared another wonder in heaven and beheld a great red dragon that's Satan having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his heads and his tail drew a third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered for to devour her child as soon as it was born. Now, there's a lot in those two verses, but what I want to get you to understand is that this verse is teaching us that a third of the angels of the stars followed Satan when he was cast from heaven. Okay? That's a third of the, now turn to Revelation chapter 5. Revelation chapter 5. So you say, how many angels are there? Or, you know, how many are there? And the Bible gives us an estimate. I think that this is probably just a rough estimate, but the Bible kind of mentions it. And if you look at Revelation chapter 5 and look at verse number 11. And the Bible says, and I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders. And the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands. So if you take 10,000 times 10,000, you get 100 million. And then there's thousands of thousands. So this is just an estimate. There's probably many more angels than this. But if you take a third of 100 million, you end up with about 33 million. So if 33 million angels that we would call demons today followed Satan and were cast to the earth and are dwelling amongst us now, we basically have, you know, at least tens of millions of demons on this earth along with Satan. There, you know, that's a lot of people working, a lot of beings working for Satan. This is what drives the occult today. Is this influence of Satan and his demons, which are real? It is not fake. I'm going to read for you 1 Peter chapter 5 and verse number 8. The Bible says, because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Satan is here on earth with these 33 demons, 33 million demons. The danger is real. So I want to talk to you today. That was all just a matter of introduction. I want to talk to you today about this occult nation that we live in. This is just another thing that I have looked into in preparation for a sermon that I just couldn't believe how bad it's gotten since I remember looking at it last. When you look at the occult, our obsession with the occult and the religion of occultism today, it's shocking. Witchcraft. Witchcraft today. Did you know that witchcraft is the fastest growing spiritual identification or religion in the United States? I didn't know that four days ago. In 1990, there was 8,000 people who identified as practicing the Wicca or the Wiccan religion. Today, there is 1.5 million. That is 0.5% of the United States population. That means that literally one out of 200 people out there is a witch. That's where it's at today, folks. So you think that Halloween and these harmless things are a joke? They're not a joke. It's very serious.  New Testament. Find those T books. First and second, Thessalonians 2. I mean, that is shocking today to hear that one in 200 people, that is not that few. That's a lot of people. That means in a city like Fresno, there are, you know, thousands of witches is what it means in Metroplexes across the United States. Look at 2 Thessalonians 2 and 3. But no man deceive you by any means. For that day shall not come except there come.  That day shall not come except there come a falling away first. In a society where the fastest growing religion or spiritual identification in the nation is witchcraft and one in 200 people at this point, imagine in 10 years that would be much worse. I mean, if that's not a falling away, I don't know what is, folks.  It's a promise of power. You know, it promises power, especially young girls. By the way, when I was reading into this, young girls are really getting drawn into Wicca, the Wiccan religion and different religions that are tied into it, or I don't even want to call them religions, but occultism. You know, they're made light of. You know, the Bible says in 2 Corinthians chapter 11 verse 14, and no marvel for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. That's why all these things will be made light of. If you don't celebrate Halloween, oh, it's just fun.  You know, just think of the TV shows and the movie industry in pop culture today. You know, back in the 60s and 70s, I dream of Genie, Bewitched, all these funny shows.  You're taking it so serious. But that's how it starts, because Satan is transformed into an angel of light. And all these things target kids, by the way, the Harry Potter books. Witchcraft, it's fun. It's a joke.  It's made light of. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I had to look some of this stuff up. But then you get a little bit more serious with things like the Twilight series, where it's a little bit more serious. It's not quite the joke, but it's glorifying, you know, occultism like vampires and werewolves and things like this. Horror films, we already talked about horror films. You know, horror films today would not be allowed in movie theaters 15 years ago. They're so gruesome and disgusting. They wouldn't have been allowed in the America of 15 or 20 years ago what's being watched by teenagers today. And these people that make these movies and all these TV shows and write these books, they're ashamed at saying they are targeting kids. They are targeting kids. Look, folks, they're gateway drugs. It's a gateway drug to the dark side of the occult is what it is. Turn to Romans chapter one. Another place it leads is, you know, Earth worship. Earth worship. We read about, you know, we learned about this in Romans chapter one. All this wicked religion, all these different druidism and these occult things, they all come down to worshiping the sun, the moon, the trees, the earth, whatever. And they have roots tied into rabid environmentalism as well. Look at Romans one verse 25. What the Bible says, who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator who has blessed forever, amen. We are to worship God, not His creation. Period. That doesn't say we should throw trash everywhere, but when you're starting to worship the earth and the moon and the stars and the sun, this is where it leads. It's based in the occult. There's actually an earth religion now. Let me just read you a definition. The earth religion is a term used mostly in the context of neopaganism. Earth-centered religion or nature worship is a system of religion based on veneration of natural phenomenon. It covers any religions that worships the earth, nature, fertility deity which is a female deity and it's tied directly to wiccanism and druidism. It's all tied together. It's all the occult. So, here's the thing. Turn to Leviticus 19. What is the attraction? What is the attraction? Turn to Leviticus 19. I'll tell you what the attraction is for young kids. It's real. That's the attraction. It's real and there's power there and it's real. It's not fake. Satan's goal is to conquer as much of God's creation as he can because the Bible says his time is short. So, he is going to make light of it and he's going to draw people in closer and draw people in closer. Look, you can read testimonials of people that have gone down these roads. I don't recommend it. I don't even recommend looking into this stuff, by the way. For kids, the occult is like playing with a loaded gun. And where does it end? Look at Leviticus 19, verse 31. Look what God says where it should end. Regardless of them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards nor by them, I am the Lord your God. In Exodus 22 and verse 18, the Bible says, God put the death penalty on it. That's how serious God takes it. He put the death penalty on witchcraft. Turn to 2 Kings 21. 2 Kings 21. 1 2 Samuel. 1 2 Kings. 2 Chronicles. 2 Kings 21. A king of Judah. And we learned a little bit about him a few weeks ago, but let's read verse number 6. Where the Bible says, And he made his son pass through the fire and observed times and used enchantments. So I want to first point out that first part of the verse where it says he made his son pass through the fire. So the answer to where the occultism ends is always murder. That's where it ends. It ultimately ends in hell. But it ends on this earth in murder. We see Manasseh was sacrificing his children. He sacrificed his son. And he made his son pass through the fire. What else was he doing? And observed times and used enchantments and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards. And he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. And the occult leads to murder. Look, you look into serial killers, a lot of them were tied up in the occult. They will tell you that they were possessed by demons, that things took over their bodies.  That's where these stories came from. From real events of people that were influenced or possessed by demons that did all these horrible things. And this is what's glorified today. It's disgusting. Even in small-town America, I grew up in small-town, Nowhereville, North Dakota. And I'll tell you this, Satanism is real there too. There was not a rancher or a cattleman that did not know somebody who found a mutilated, who didn't have a mutilated cow, who had lost a cow or a bull at one point in their career. And they found that it was mutilated and certain organs were taken from it in a satanic ritual. Small-town North Dakota. There was a town like 20 miles from where I grew up where there was some hills and things and it was just kind of known that there was like Satanist activity in that area. It's real. That's the Midwest. What do you think is going on here? My wife and I were walking in Sacramento in our neighborhood like two years ago and we took a walk at night. We lived in a nice neighborhood and we walked down this cul-de-sac and there was a pentagram spray-painted on the street that said the witches are here. I mean, it's everywhere. I mean, it's everywhere. It's real. And it's growing in America today. I mean, if it's in rural North Dakota, it's everywhere. Everybody's heard of it. So what's the application? The application is, you know, first of all, this is another reason you need to get your kids out of public school. And I was talking to somebody the other day about, you know, that this is a homeschooling church and that we're always going to promote homeschooling here and we're always going to say that you need to get your kids out of the home, the public school and we're going to promote homeschooling and we're going to build homeschooling families here and you're going to get sick of hearing about homeschooling for me. Because it's a real serious danger. There's just too many dangers to even list in public school. Look, when I was in school, I remember kids experimenting with this stuff. And if you've been in public school, you remember it too. And I'm glad that I was a church kid and I was like, whoa, and I kind of lived out in the country away from all this stuff where I couldn't like hang out with the kids in town. But I remember that there was kids and they were going out and they were going to the wherever they were going to experiment with the occult stuff and Ouija boards and all this stuff. And you know what? You know why it was such a big deal to them? Because it worked. Because the stuff moves. Because they're playing with demons. And it's not fake. I remember one girl that was involved in this. She was terrified. She wouldn't even talk about it. Whatever she saw happened. And she was messed up the whole the whole I mean, this was like junior high. And she was never normal. It's real. And these people these kids are playing with fire. And these are not saved people. I mean, they could be possessed, they could be killed. All this stuff. Look, it's not fake. That's the problem with Harry Potter.  You don't let your kids read Harry Potter or whatever. No, it's it's real. And it's not to be made light of. Let's talk about Halloween. Halloween, I remember 10, 15 years ago there was nothing in their yard for Halloween. It's getting way worse. I've been going to Home Depot. We just moved into our house. I've been going to Home Depot. I mean, the stuff is it's crazy. These big werewolves, skeletons and all this kind of stuff.    That will be normal. Soon. It already is.  Okay? Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Turn to Ephesians 1. Ephesians chapter 1. If you're saved, you're sealed. Well, I just want to let's look at that. Ephesians chapter 1 in verse number 13 the Bible says, After that you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation in whom also that after that you believed you were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession unto the praise of His glory. Look, you can't be demon possessed. I believe that if you're saved. But don't, you can do damage to your family. You can enter into the chastisement of God for siding with Satan instead of God in things that you think are harmless. God doesn't think it's harmless.  All these Christians engaging in all this stuff. You know, turn to look at Jesus, I'll just read it for you. Jesus said in Matthew 20 30 Jesus was black and white on this stuff. Jesus hated the lukewarm. There was no grey zone with Jesus. You know, this isn't sheep Jesus. This is the Jesus that says He that is not with me is against me and He that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad. Jesus says you're with me or you're against me, period. And by the way if you don't go soul winning you're scattering abroad. That's what he just said. Jesus is very clear on this. Now turn to Exodus 32. Exodus 32. So it really comes down to whose side are you on? Because there's a war going on and if you're looking at the numbers folks it's not going well for our side. And as far as who gets the most souls, it's not looking good that we're going to get more than Satan. Look at Exodus 32. This is a story when Moses goes up to the mountain to get the law from God and the people don't know that they think he's not coming back so they have a party. So they basically they convince Aaron to build a golden calf this satanic idol which represents Baal, Beelzebub, Satan. They make a satanic idol.  Sounds a lot like a Halloween party actually. Let's see how God you know what God thought of it. They're just having fun. They just want to have some fun. Look at verse number 26. Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me and all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him and thousands of people were killed. Thousands of people. That's how funny God thought it was.  Funny. Turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 6. That's how harmless God thinks it is.  It's the same thing. This is why God takes it so seriously. 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse number 20. Right here. The Bible says therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are God's.  Amen.  The blood of God's son. Just think of the betrayal that God thinks that that is. If you're saved and you there was a Halloween lunch party thing at work today. You think I'm going to be anywhere near that? It's just pumpkin pie and somebody was wearing like a Jack in the Box costume and you know I don't know what other costumes there was a whole floor above us where they all dressed up. I didn't even go anywhere near that floor. I'm dead serious. Because you think I'm going to first of all I'm not scared of anybody in this room but I'm scared to death of God. When I took this this opportunity to come here I'm afraid of God. You think I'm going to go up and participate even a little bit in something like that even if I don't dress up, don't do anything to try to just network with people? No, I'm afraid of God.  That's not the kind of man that I am. What kind of man are you? It's not funny. And I take it seriously. So I went home. I took like an hour and a half lunch today just to be out of that thing but I came in early to make up for it. It's serious. It's not something to take lightly and once again your kids if they see you in this type of stuff taking it lightly what you do matters a lot more than what you say. You're sending a very clear message there. Turn to 2 Kings chapter 6 and I just want to leave you here. 2 Kings chapter 6 but the occult is a serious and growing problem in this country today and it always begins with harmless fun. Always. So many sins by the way begin with harmless fun but it's not harmless.  They want to ruin your family they want to destroy your kids that's the goal. The spiritual world is very real. Look down at 2 Kings in chapter 6 Here we see the Assyrian army is looking for Elisha because he keeps telling the king of Israel where they're camped so they're trying to find him and they're trying to kill him. And the Bible says in 2 Kings chapter 6 and verse 15 and when the servant of the man of God was risen early and gone forth behold and host compassed the city with both horses and chariots and his servant said unto him Alas my master how shall we do? He's saying what are we going to do? They found us! And he answered fear not for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And the servant's like what in the world? And Elisha prayed and said Lord I pray the open his eyes that he may see because Elisha already saw this in the eyes of the young man and he beheld the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. So the good news is this the good news is this I don't want to just depress you tonight the good news is this they that be with us are more than they that be with them. So whose side are you on? And I know you're all in church tonight I'm really preaching to the choir here but the bottom line is that we need to take these things seriously we need to be just like Jesus in seeing that this is very clear there's no gray here we need to be solidly behind the Lord and we need to stay far away from all of these things that Satan is trying to make light of because they're against our Lord Jesus Christ and he paid for us he paid our way so let's be loyal and let's protect our families from these things that people will tell you are no big deal today but it is a big deal folks let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer Dear Heavenly Father we thank you for today we thank you for all these people Lord that would come to church on a Thursday night Lord and hear your word preached Lord we ask that you just strengthen us in a wicked world Lord we ask that you just bless this church and protect all the families in these church Lord because we know that you are much more powerful than any of the dark forces that Satan has in this world Lord we thank you for your word we thank you for our salvation we love you in the name of Jesus Christ we pray Amen


What's the word y'all welcome back to call game Kenny for real MLK date addition man You know basically what it is you wake up depending on what the sleep schedule is like and then there's games all Day long so no matter what I knew I could turn on the TV and watch some basketball now I'm gonna say I did pick and choose I did pick and choose whiz games I thought would be worth watching and to keep it a buck I shot like a hundred percent the games that I didn't why I didn't turn out to look like good games Before we get into today Slayton talk about everything of course I want to honor Marlo the king junior follows great work throughout his lifetime it goes without saying that I am super appreciative of his work and the work of other civil rights activists during his time period of course none of this is Possible without the work of Dr. King. So may he rest in peace and and the basketball NBA community Put together a great slate of games on his day Get to the one that everybody's here to hear me talk about the Milwaukee Bucks versus the Brooklyn Nets When you thought the Brooklyn Nets couldn't look any better from their first appearance here They are winning another game, but this game is not against some Orlando Magic team that is losing like four starters This is against one of the best teams in the league and they came out and they performed This felt like a playoff game from the very beginning and especially in that fourth quarter I just wish I wish that there was like fans in the crowd and I think that the TV Cast does a good job of making it feel like an NBA game with with the sound effects and everything But I had to turn all that off because the call was absolutely terrible But I don't want to go there this felt like a playoff game from the very beginning The best part about it for for what the Brooklyn Nets did was that Deandre Jordan had his best game pretty much of the season And people are tweeting at me Kenny I thought he said Deandre Jordan is bad. He has been bad, but that I mean he was always you know I'm saying he had a really good game today And that was one of the reasons they were able to put together a win another reason is because well James Harden The Kevin Arant are two of the best at what they do it goes without saying the one thing that I Saw somebody asked me on Twitter, which I didn't I didn't answer if you're watching this video My apologies because I didn't want to pose a question to the audience here on the call game audience Is Joe Harris the best shooter James Harden has ever played with because I was just off the top of my head I was just thinking you know I guess I could have went through the rosters and I'm more specifically talking about his time in Houston because y'all know They's running that five out offense for a lot of it. He had PJ Tucker. He had Gerald Green Yeah, he had Robert Covington at the last year So he always had good shooters, but has he ever had a shooter of Joe Harris's caliber and off the top of my head I think the only guy I could think of was Ryan Anderson But they weren't even like a championship quality team right Anderson was playing with so I think it's the best shooter all Lesson I think this is the best shooter that James Harden has ever had on this team and Joe Harris again I told y'all people are gonna start realizing that Joe Harris is more than just a catch-and-shoot guy He does so much more on the floor It does help when when Jeff Green is basically not missing I think the only miss he had was late in the shot clock one second He threw a shot up and it was an air ball so he was incredible Of course Kevin Arant doing incredible things and the best thing about this is in the first half James Harden had Six turnovers and I don't think he had a single turnover in that second half So we were talking about his turnovers in that first game against Orlando and it's starting to cut down And he made Deandre Jordan look like a quality NBA player And that was the one thing I was hoping for in that first game and you know team chemistry again They haven't even practiced together yet still they haven't practiced together yet still they just rolled the balls out like go to work And they are going to work. This is a scary team, man They're very scary team now don't if the Milwaukee Bugs did lose this game There's nothing Milwaukee Bugs fans should be worried about Whatever because you watch this game the let's be honest the reason they lost his game because they just didn't shoot the ball Well, it's very very simple. There was no Strategical changes. I mean the last shot attempt. This is a play that coach bud has drawn up endless amount of times When they need a basket the end of the game and it very rarely works Even though the Christmas or shy was was halfway down and Janice was open under the rim Maybe if they would hit that extra three seconds Things would have been different either way either way This is not a game the Bugs fans should hold their heads because they were super competitive in this one without them actually shooting the ball Well, it's it's getting to the point of kind of scary like I'm starting to get the sample size for some players Right, you know when players start off struggling to start the season. There's four or five games I'm like they're in a slump. They'll get it together I'm getting kind of afraid that these are your Augustine may not be the player that they wanted him to be when they signed them It's rough bro over seven tonight specifically, but it's not just about tonight It's about this entire season so far. He hasn't provided the value off the bench So I thought he would have provided when they signed them So that's a little thing But but I do enjoy watching both of these two teams man They have so between these two teams they have so many great isolation players from James Harden to Kevin Durant to Chris Middleton they're all I would say that's three of the top ten Isolation players in a league and they were going at it. Which is a beautiful beautiful thing It was a great game on national TV a game that I watched parts of but not the full thing of it Was the Atlanta Hawks beating the the Timberwolves It's one of the games I opted not to watch the full thing But what I was watching what I could say is the Andre Hunter looks really really good this season and that's that's very good That's very promising because he could be a He's like a long-term person for this team You know like when you have so many louder picks in the role like the Atlanta Hawks have when you're on a Rebuild a team let's be honest all of them are not going to turn out to be on your team by the end of their Ricky Contract and not get that second contract the way the Andre Hunter has played this season He looks like a long-term player that can play well alone. That's where young We got a maybe not so great for a young game again, but he did get to the free throw line more and that's where his game thrives and For the Timberwolves it is very very rough and I know that the Warriors especially they got the win today You know they're in playoff contention and they still got the Minnesota Timberwolves picked us top to protect it And at this point I think that they are tied for the worst team in the league record wise They can't defend a thing and their offense sucks too You got to look back on that trade and be like was it worth giving up two first-round picks to get D'Angelo Rossu Now I know they couldn't predict it that Carthony Towns was gonna break his hand or that he was gonna catch the virus But I guess even with them to the first of all the sample sizing them playing together has been super small over the season That they've been together, so I don't know. I don't know. Hopefully Carthony Towns comes back and eventually You don't end up giving up a pick You know I'm saying it's it is kind of rough The Spurs and the Trailblazers game I watched this entire game But there's not much to say about it the Trailblazers are still missing so many players and the Spurs went by committee I can't say Devin Vaseo looked very very good today And this is like my first time watching one of the Spurs games from start to end with no interruptions So it was a good win from them quality when I think they have four to five players with 20 plus points And a lot of them be in their vets Now another nationally televised game the Grizzlies. Oh my god the Grizzlies now the last time I had an episode Y'all know this is all off the top of the head, so I'll be forgetting some stuff Maybe I should be writing notes throughout when I'm watching these games I wanted to show a lot of love to Xavier Tillman, and I still don't know if it's ex Xavier Tillman or Xavier Tillman somebody in common-sex 11. Do I pronounce the X because I've heard of both ways I literally have heard of both ways when I listen to the Grizzlies call is my way when I listen I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, but what a game what a game Bro, the Grizzlies are must watch TV, bro They was close to much must watch TV when Jamarrent was down And now Jamarrent is back the play he made to find I forget who exactly Was in the corner because again this game happened hours ago the play that he made the hang time is Ridiculous to get that shot off in the corner This team is just so nice and Xavier Tillman to be basically like the oldest rookie in the draft class He's come in got his first career start and he looked really good over the past couple games Dylan Brooks shot one for ten, but I promise you his impact was there because defensively he was all in all In Devon Booker's back Devon Booker couldn't do a damn thing today and a lot that is due to Dylan Brooks now Like I said with DJ Augustine I'm you starting to get a feel for some of these players and whether or not a slumps and whether or not this So that so far this season Devon Booker hasn't been Devon Booker And I'm not just looking at this game where he's 5 for 21 and he was dreadful I just went throughout the entire season that he has not looked like Devon Booker just yet And I know that has a lot to do with with probably Chris Paul coming in here because I mean that Dramatically changes some things about the team Chris Paul and his old age He completely changes the way you run your team of basketball and and maybe I mean for the better because again This team is in the playoff race right now without him. They kind of worry, but not really At his old age He's not running gun up and down the court anymore and the Phoenix Suns last year were top 10 pace and this year They like bottom three So I know there's some adjustments because like Mikel Bridges runs the floor amazing Devon Booker runs the floor amazing DeAndre Aiden is amazing in the the court open court But they haven't really been able to run like that because of Chris Paul is in their point guard So I think that a lot of Devon Booker struggle struggles this season because he's still playing solidly You know I'm saying he just ain't been as good as last year what made him an all-star He'd probably be an all-star still this year because they're a playoff team right now But you give them saying he just hasn't been as good this year as last year And this game particularly was was really really hard for him because there were so many plays down a stretch where Devon Booker was like I gotta do this for us when DeAndre Aiden was having probably one of his best games of the season He had a play. I don't maybe us. Tyus Jones was on his back in the post and Instead of getting the ball to him Devon Booker chucked up a shot like just plays like that Like like DeAndre Aiden is a guy that should be getting a lot more touches than what he did in this game Specifically especially with him having as good of a game He did especially with the way the Memphis Grizzlies were defending him He had a lot of situations where the smaller defender was on his back And I know he ain't a body bruiser like some of the other bigs in the league But if it's Tyus Jones on a seven-footer, but that's an easy easy basket, but this is gonna come a chemistry This is what it's gonna come with them learning how to play together. I'm still very high on this team a Close game just a very close game, bro The Memphis Grizzlies are running out a team full of players that are kind of like young castaways and it's working And it's absolutely working The Raptors get another win slowly chipping away, but the best thing about this game is not just a win But they clamped Luca and when I say they I'm talking about oh gee I'm talking about stand the stamina stand the man is what I'm just gonna always call them They clamped up Luca and Luca was playing it back to back where he's put up 30-point triple double against the Bulls last night So maybe he was just tired, but they played amazing defense on Luca and obviously if you can stop Luca You can stop the Dallas Mavericks. Um when it comes to the Miami he game May I might have by your head one of his better games of the season, which is great Um Kendrick Nunn had a good game when I was watching and it was one more player. Moe Harkless had a good game And what what's sad about this game particularly Is Blake Griffin? He just I don't want to say he's going out man. I just not that I just don't want to believe it I don't want to believe it bro. Blake Griffin has just been one of my favorite players over the past decade or so So he's been drafted and to see where he is right now is is kind of concerning It is he hasn't put together a game so far this year And I think I was talking about it in one of the very first episodes that like so far this season. He's been A spot-up shooter. Basically. He's not doing Blake Griffin type things He the last time he was really good when they had that playoff run when it was like all on his back Think about like two years ago I think it was when he led them to the playoffs and he couldn't really plan a playoffs because he was injured when they went against the Bucks He did everything for that team. He was the point power forward passing rebounding defending scoring And he has just lost all of that. So I hope I hope I hope this ain't what we got Again, he has talked about how later in his career He wanted to compete for a championship and obviously on this team. He's not really doing that So maybe that's in a psyche But bro, I do not want to see him go out like this and right now it is it is Rough it is rough Is that the last game? Oh, no, no, no the Bulls got to win It was it was weird to see Victor on his new jerseys, but he played very very well The Bulls are gonna have to defend They can't outscore all the good team They they won't be able to outscore the good teams and that's kind of what we saw when they went on la trip They can compete they can compete with them, but they're not going to be able to outscore them They're gonna have to defend something eventually this season if Bubble playoff team is on the horizon for Bulls fans. They got to learn how to defend They give them 120 points tonight and I think they're bottom three defense right now So they need to shot exactly for scoring a bunch of points. And lastly the warriors get their win on the Lakers I think there was a five to six seven minute stretch five to six seven minute stretch where the Lakers couldn't get a field go They got to the free throw line a few times But they just couldn't get a field go and that shot by Stephen Curry was so beautiful I got to give a lot of love to Kelly Ubrey This is one of his better games of the season But one thing that people fail to realize is that even when Kelly Ubrey was struggling to shoot When he was shooting four percent from three, what is he shooting now? He is shooting Better than four percent, but when you shoot a four percent from three People had to realize that he was still getting in people's he's shooting Okay, he's not 19 percent is the exact number. Ouch He plays just with this intensity, right? He's not a great defender He's not necessarily a smart defender either But he plays with this intensity that could get under people's skins He get the technical foul for blowing a kiss he gets the the inbound steal We he's pointing it like he plays with this intensity and today they needed that intensity And then the Steph Curry shot was so magnificent Draymond Green if somehow you're watching this video, I would love to talk again That was not highlight related just me and you on a call game show because I can listen to Draymond Green Talk basketball for hours and hours on there There are not many people in the NBA that I feel like I can just learn Everything about basketball from Draymond Green is that guy so every time he is mic'd up. I'm listening So I just can't imagine how many gyms he can drop for not just me but for the audience out there So Draymond hit hit a brother up It could be remotely like the first time we met each other and the last possessive for the Lakers is very weird They get it with like 20 something seconds on the clock They I'm thinking that they've got to go no time out and then they they run a play that just doesn't really work LeBron gives it to dinner shooter then like runs away from the ball completely They get a time out with a second to go and LeBron does get a good look out of the time out They end up losing this game. Um, but similar to what I said with with the Bucks loss It's nothing to be concerned about Lakers fans. Obviously y'all have been playing great all season One loss is not Not going to change any of that but for the Warriors, this is a very very big win after a couple game losing streak All right, that's it man. I need to get back. I need to get my chris paul poster up or thing back up, man It feels so bury in here. You know what I'm saying? If you enjoyed the video, leave it a like I'll see y'all. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see called game


Hello, beautiful humans, and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, where we are combating the dry air of the desert and all giggling about the rasp of our voice at this stage. We're theCUBE, and we are live from AWS Reinvent. I am Savannah Peterson, joined by the fabulous Paul Gillen. Paul, how are you holding up? How are your feet doing? My feet are, I can't feel them anymore. We can't feel much after these weeks. Two miles just to get to the keynote this morning. Did you do your cross training to prepare for? Apparently not well enough, not well enough. Well, it's great to have you here, and I'm very excited for our next conversation. We've got Ramesh from Prasimo. Thank you. Welcome to the show. How's the show going for you? How's your voice? Oh my God, I woke up this morning and I could not hear my own voice. I'm like, this is not me. I think it's the dry air here. So if I cough, I apologize in advance, but no, the show has been great. It's been nonstop at the booth. It's wonderful to see all the customers in one place. So you don't have to schedule lots of meetings spread across three, four weeks. So you get like, yeah. So yesterday was like eight to six, nonstop. And it was awesome, right? Because you get to meet all these guys. The other important thing is the focus on the right layer. Like I loved the keynote from Adam. It was about applications, services, data. Nowhere in there was there like infrastructure. Like we are infrastructure, right? I actually love that because that's where the focus should be and that's what customers are caring about, right? So it's been great so far. Yeah, I'm so happy to hear your booth's packed. I know exactly what you mean. I mean, we're going to be talking about optimization. It's a theme, but we also optimize our time here on the show floor by getting to engage with our community. Brassimo has been around for three years just in case folks aren't familiar. Give us the pitch. Sure, we're in the cloud networking space solving for two problems. What happens within the cloud? As you bring up VPCs, VNets and workloads, how are they able to talk to each other, secure each other and how to use as access workloads? Those are the two problems that we solve for. It stemmed from really us seeing a complete diversion in what cloud wants versus what network really focuses on. Cloud has been always focused on applications and speed of operations. And network has always been about reliability, scalability and robust architecture. And we didn't really see these things come together. So that's when Brassimo was born. So what are some of the surprises newcomers to the cloud may encounter with cloud networking that was not a factor when they were fully on-prem? So the first thing is in the cloud, you can't deal with a workload the same way you did with in the data center. In the data center, you usually had pools of servers. They were all allocated some level of addressing. And it was not about the workload, it was more about the identity, IP addresses and so forth. In the cloud, those things have completely gotten demolished. You have to refer to S3 service as an S3 service. It's not an IP endpoint. IP endpoint comes and goes. And so you have to completely shift around that. Now this actually challenges almost 10 years, 20 years maybe of networking that we knew about. So that's why cloud networking is almost night and day difference compared to regular networking. And we're seeing that and that's what we're really helping customers with. What are some of the trends that you're seeing? Well, actually, let me ask you this question. Do you, is there an industry or vertical you work with specifically? I would imagine most people across the- Yeah, across. Yeah. Anybody that has workloads in the cloud. Yeah, right. That's- I mean, I can't imagine any companies that would have that. Exactly. What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I know we talk about time to value. We talk about cost optimization. Is that the top priority for your customers? Yeah, up until end of last year, a lot of the focus was about speed of operations. And so people would look at what are the type of workloads? How do I enable things? How do I empower my development team? So if I'm the cloud platform team responsible for connecting, securing, and making sure my applications can get deployed smooth and fast, that was the primary focus. Fast forward to this year, we started to see this a little bit at the beginning of the year. Now it's in full force. It's about cost control, right? It's about egress charges coming out of the cloud. Suddenly the cloud bill and every single line item on the cloud bill is in focus, right? And so that has a direct impact on what does this mean for networking. Cloud networking for many might not be familiar. It's about 14% of the cloud bill. And so anything that materially moves the needle on the cloud networking cost can actually have a big impact, right? And so we have seen the focus on the speed of operations is still there, but cloud cost control has become... So where are the excesses? I mean, it's a big part of the bill. Where do companies typically waste money in networking costs? So if you bring a person who understands networking and networking architecture really, really well, they'll come build a solid architecture, but they'll not focus on operations and automation.  They know Python, Dane, and they're out, and so they'll automate the heck out of it, but it will not be with a robust architecture, right? And so on one hand you end up wasting because you do things very suboptimally. It's a solid architecture. It's a really good design, but it's really bad for operations. On the other hand, you push off a button, you can get anything done, but underneath the covers, underneath the hood, if you look at it, it's a mess, right? And so you have more confidence than necessary. And so what customers want is really a best of both. You need solid architecture that has all the right principles, but also you need the automation so that you don't employ four or five people and a whole toolkit in order to make things work, right? And that's where we see most of the efficiencies come. You said you were super busy at your booth. Do customers understand that this is a problem now? So more so now than I would say last year. So last reinvent when we had a session. We had to educate a lot of people on, these are the requirements for cloud networking. Thanks to Gartner, thanks to many of the sessions you guys have been doing as well. The focus and the education for what cloud networking requires has started to come about. Now, this is where the saviness of the customer is important, right? Like there are customers in different stages of their journey. Those that have been operating in the cloud for three years plus know that they've caused that initial phase, right? Like you have basic hygiene. You have certain things. I'm moving from hundreds of VPCs and VNH to maybe about 1,000, right? And so at that time, the set of challenges I need to work with are very, very different, right? So now increasingly we are seeing at the booth the challenges are, hey, I know how to operate in the cloud, right? Like don't talk to me about that, right? But how do I get from 100 to 1,000? Because I have a gun to my head. My CIO has said I need to decommission my data centers in the next couple of years and I need to go all in on cloud. Help me with that, right? And so it's the, I wouldn't call it like massive scale. It's the scale from kind of the trivial to the next stage that's actually causing a lot of these problems to surface. It's that layer of transformation. It's when you've made the commitment and now we've got to catch everything up across the company locations and probably a variety of different silos doing different things. Exactly, yeah. Super complex. So how do folks get started with you? Yeah, so typically we start with like, even if the customer says, here's what my blueprint looks like. We say bring two regions. That's it. Two regions, a few workloads. We'll help you set up the connectivity, set up the secure access required, set up the foundational things on a certain level of automation, right? Let's get to that point because governance is different. The cloud privileges are different. So let's work through all of that, right? Usually this takes about a week or so. The actual proof of concept, proof of value can be done in a day but getting permissions and whatnot takes about a week, right? And once you show two regions, then it's actually game on, right? Then you go from 10 VPCs to 100 to 1000 and it's just like one thing after another. So that's usually how we see customers get started. We have a full stack that covers kind of what does this mean for the network, to application services, to kind of layer seven and so forth. We tell the customer, as much as we want you to focus on the entire stack let's start with one, right? Let's start baby steps, let's start with one because for many cloud itself is, I wouldn't say new, but they are in a region that's not comfortable, right? So you don't want to throw too much at them. So we help them kind of progressively move towards different types of one. Yeah. And you have a multi-cloud story as well. That's correct. So when companies begin to cross clouds with workloads, move them between clouds, what kinds of issues emerge then? Yeah, so there are two parts to this, right? There is the AWS and data center. And then there is the AWS plus other clouds, two different set of problems actually. The AWS plus connectivity back into my data center almost every single enterprise. We deal with kind of the global 2000, every single one of them has that, right? And so we kind of we go through a series of steps, come up with an architecture deploy a solution. After that it's, hey I have BigQuery in Google that needs to talk back to an S3 bucket out here. No networking solution can help you with that. Like you need like cloud native principles in order to come into the picture. So increasingly we are seeing requests for, hey I have a distributed workload. It's not that one single application is spread across multiple clouds, but I have these islands of workloads that all need to talk to each other. And what I don't want to do is actually build highways that actually connect all these things together because that's a waste of time. I actually want to make sure that only these applications that care about the talking to each other are allowed to talk to each other. So that's kind of one foundational thing that we see. A few others are around compliance and governance. So we say, hey if I'm a retailer, I need to have some workloads in Azure, some in the GCP and so forth. So it depends on kind of the industry compliance regulatory requirements and so forth. So many different needs for so many different types of companies, but also creating that efficiency is so great. And especially that time to value tune, cost reduction, doing a lot of great things for your customers. There's a note on my run sheet here that you've seen some success with Topgolf. And I suspect we have some golfers in the audience. John even used to be a caddy. We had a caddy segment with someone who was a pro caddy, Drew, and we were at KubeCon. Tell us about that story. So it was a really wild idea. We said, okay people are going to be walking around 22,000 steps, right? And so, and they're going to be talking to people, listening to sessions. So we said, let's, what do most others do? You set up some time in a restaurant, you come, you have a social time and what not. We said, let's give people something different. So we reserved the Topgolf here and we opened it up. We initially paid for a certain number of things. It's actually gone three X of that right now. So we had in the, hey Topgolf, can you give us like the entire thing? I think people just want to go do something different. And of course, the topic is important, but equally important is like, I just want to have a good time, right? And hit a few, hit a few, and then. It doesn't have to relate back to network. Yeah, exactly, right? And so. Well, it's all about building community. Exactly. And especially right now, we all, we're stronger together. We're entering a unique time. We're coming out of a unique time. Exactly. And no, I think that's great. And we actually do a swag segment here on the Kube. Differentiating on the show floor. I mean, it's clear because of how thoughtful you are. There's a reason that your booth is so busy. That's right. So what's next? What can you give us a little sneak preview? What's going on? Yeah, so I'm sensitive and sympathetic to all the macroeconomic conditions that are happening, but there's been, we have not skipped a beat. So our business is growing really well, thanks to all the things that are happening in the cloud. Increasingly, folks are looking at, how do I move in mass into the cloud? And so a few themes have come about as a result. One, certainly around cost control. How do I make, how do we make sure that we help our customers in that journey, right? So we have a few things around those lines. Modernization, especially after you go through the first few workloads, the next few that come about are invariably modern workloads. And modern workloads is this sensitive thing where I think the ultra savvy developers know what to do, but the infrastructure guys don't know what to do in order to serve, right? And so we have actually developed a set of capabilities to help with that kind of modernization, right? Because it's not enough if your apps are modernized, your infrastructure that serves the apps also need to be modernized.  And certainly getting our customers to less than us, we want to get our customers to talk. And so you'll see quite a bit of that as well. I want to ask you about a statement that was in the notes that we were reading running up to this interview. Zero Trust Network Access is the next solution that will be disrupted. What do you mean by that? So when we started the company about three years ago, Zero Trust Network Access was there. It was about maybe two, three years old at that time. And so we said, it needs to be done differently in the cloud. Why?  You're trying to access an application in the cloud. Do you care what's in the middle? You really don't. You just want to be able to open up your laptop, go to www.something.com and you should be able to access, right? But that's not how the experience is today. There's invariably something that comes, a middle-mile solution that comes in the middle, right? And then the guy needs to operationalize all of that. And that passes on to you. You need to launch an agent on your thing, connect into something. You just brings a lot of complexity, right? So we looked at that problem and we said, cloud has done really, really, a few things really, really well, right? It's literally at your doorstep. Cloud presence is literally at your doorstep. So as you open up your browser, connect from your home, I don't need anything in the middle. I am jumping straight into the cloud. And so when you do that, then you actually have the luxury of bringing a few capabilities to the entry point of the cloud so that security can be done better, posture control can be done better, and so on and so forth, right? So we developed those capabilities almost three years ago. We have quite a few large enterprises that have deployed this and we fundamentally believe on building on top of the hyperscaler. Because billions of, tens of billions of dollars go into the investment here and we want to be building a layer of value on top, right? And so we've been working closely with our AWS buddies here and actually built capabilities so that the infrastructure presence, the massive reach, and also the underlying capabilities for Zero Trust have provided, but what the customer gains in terms of value is through our platform, right? And so we'll see a whole lot more innovation along these lines. Probably bad news for the middle-mile providers who sit in the middle because AWS is literally at your doorstep, so you have to rethink your strategy. It's going to be a lot of agility. Yes, absolutely. In a very different context than we normally use it in Nerdland. No, I think that's great. So we have an exciting time for you as a company. We have a new challenge here at Reinvent on theCUBE.  You have been on theCUBE multiple times with multiple companies, which is very impressive, which says a lot about you, although given how fun this interview's been, I'm not surprised. Give us your 30-second Instagram reel highlight soundbite on the biggest or most important theme or takeaway from this year's show. From this show, yeah. So if you look across the keynotes in all the sessions, the focus is on data, services, and the applications. So the biggest takeaway I would offer anybody is focus on that first, because that's where the outcome needs to shine. The rest of the stuff is a means to an end. I am an infrastructure guy through and through. I have been for the last 20 years. It hurts me to say infrastructure is a means to an end, but it is, right? Let the people dealing with the infrastructure, deal with the infrastructure. If you are a customer or a client of the service, focus on the outcome, focus on the apps, focus on the services, focus on the data. That would be the biggest takeaway. I appreciate your transparency. Yeah, no, exactly. Where it's wisdom, I'm very honest, where it's wisdom. Really great to talk to you about intelligent infrastructure. Thank you so much for being on the show. Pleasure, thank you. It's been awesome. Paul, it's always a pleasure. Thank you all for tuning in today, here live from the show floor at AWS Reinvent in a beautiful sin city in the high desert and the high-end dry desert. With Paul Gillan, my name is Savannah Peterson, and you're watching theCube, the leader in high-tech coverage.