64 years into its independence, India is one of the world's fastest growing economies. But sadly, the fruits of development have not been shared with rural, agricultural India, a space we often refer to as Bharat. Wrestling with poverty, hunger, malnutrition and illiteracy. The rural poor migrate to big cities in sheer desperation, often ending up in sub-human conditions. To offer fellow citizens a better life, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was passed in 2005, promising 100 days of work to any rural household whose adult members are willing to do unskilled manual labour. Every household needs register for a job card first and then file an application for work. Within 15 days of applying, work has to be allocated to that family, failing which an unemployment allowance is to be paid. And in most states, the wages paid are not below the minimum wages of that state. Five years into its implementation across the country, the Mahatma Gandhi-Narega scheme is creating change that is now visible. From restoring water tables in Rajasthan to shaking power structures in Bihar, the economic empowerment of the poor is also contributing towards enhancing their dignity and self-respect. Sikkim, nestled in the Himalayas, under the benign watchfulness of Kanchen Zonga, the Guardian deity. Pristine and serene, Sikkim is an amazing experience. This state is using Mahatma Gandhi-Narega as a scheme to transform the countryside. Narega has come like a bone to the state and we have these proud indigenous people in this mountain state. And there was this issue of having employment opportunities in the village which were pretty few. So we look at Narega as a source of additional income for our people. And instead of positioning Narega as a scheme for the unskilled labour, we are positioning it more or less like a scheme where the people can build their village, where they can build their country. And at the same time some community assets are also getting created. An irrigation channel is being built here in Arithar, Regu district, to divert the flow of monsoon water to 20 individual households, generating employment as well as long-term benefits. In my opinion, the single most important achievement of the department, it lies in conversion of this scheme, transformation of this scheme, from a wage-oriented, labour-oriented scheme to a social movement, where a lot of people are working in the same way. At the Rang Kablok, I am impressed with the use of biometric smart cards at the varying worksite. Ensuring transparency is the top-most priority of the program in Sikkim. And we have various safeguards to ensure that the program really performs and delivers. And to ensure transparency, we have various ways to ensure that the program performs and delivers. The state, with the most impressive track record of clean and detailed social audits, is under probation, where the program was first launched. The Rural Development Ministry here has accepted that the onus of providing information is on the state. An independent body, the Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency has been entrusted with the implementation of the social audit process. I think the Act had a provision. They said there was this one line which said the social audit would be done by the Gram Sabha. Who are members of the Gram Sabha? Who is going to train them? Nobody mentioned what the process of doing a social audit is. It's a 10-day process or a 15-day process. You have to collect records. You have to ensure that people are able to understand those records. They need to know where to access those records. They need to know what to do once they've accessed those records. The Society oversees all activities. The Rural Development Ministry has been working with the Rural Development Ministry to ensure that the program performs and delivers. The Society oversees all activities. From training village youth to become village social auditors to holding Gram Sabha meetings that bring together all the adults living in the area who are beneficiaries under the scheme. After a social audit is completed, they'll read out the issues in the Gram Sabha. Basically, the Sarpanch presides Gram Sabha and all the weight seekers and the maid, everybody who belongs to that village come and attend the meeting. Three days later, the public hearing is held, presided over by the Project Development Officer. Here, all the audited records are presented and lakhs of officials brought to task. A lot of things have come out if you find that, you know, we've spent close to about 10,000 plus crores in this state. We have, through our three rounds of social audits, managed to unearth more than 100 plus crores of financial deviation. We've managed to recover close to 25 crores. We've removed people from their jobs. More than 7,000 people have lost their jobs. What we find now is right across the country, either through innovative bureaucrats or through a government and political will, which is extremely important, but even where there isn't political will, there is now a demand from the people, because the people realize that they should be getting these 100 days of work. They are not getting it. They are up in arms about it. They are realizing that people are stealing some of the resources. They are realizing that people are, that job cards are not being provided or work is not being provided. And that has provided the kind of impetus and energy that people needed, which was missing for 60 years in India's development efforts. People say that too much money has been spent on Mahatma Gandhi Narayana. I wonder. Each state has its own story to tell, but at the end of the day, does this act not pass the touchstone of Mahatma Gandhi's talisman, who once said that when in doubt, recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man who you may have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Basically, I think the M.J. NREGA will continue to operate till such time as we really get rid of poverty. In a process of many years, we also hope that the M.J. NREGA will then only become a small act, an act which will cater to a small number of people who will really need the act. But till such time comes, this is extremely important guarantee for the life, livelihood and dignity of poor people.


Welcome to All Hands Update. Here's what's happening around your Navy. Sailors requesting to retire, transfer to the Fleet Reserve, or separate can now do so online according to NAVADMIN 13316. Routing online will allow for verification and transparent tracking of applications for Sailors, their command, personnel support attachment, and Navy personnel command. The Navy's newest Oceanographic Survey vessel, USNS Mori, completed its maiden voyage from Pasigoula, Mississippi to Port Everglades, Florida. The surveyed attachment and ship's crew held a reef laying ceremony to commemorate the Battle of Midway during the ship's first underway. Naval ships, aircraft, and personnel from India, Japan, and the United States participate in Malabar 2016. Malabar 2016 is a continued series of complex high-end warfighting exercises conducted to advance multinational maritime relationships and mutual security issues. You can read more about what's happening around your Navy at Navy.mil.


And here we have a new Inspiron laptop right here. It's the Inspiron 7000 series. So that's a new one. Is it the first time you show this one? Yes. So here at IFA is the first time. So this we're upgrading to the 8th Gen Intel 4 versus S. So we'll see a different response on there. We have actually been moving to the narrow bezels either side. It's helping us to get to a smaller screen size. Some versions have touch, some don't? Yeah, we do models with touch and without. But we're looking at it's a brushed aluminium finish. So it's good quality material. It's also a nice thinner light system. So it's very easy and portable. You'll see we have it in the pink champagne colour. We also do versions with silver. So we have a choice on the colour options here. Good size SD card. Two superspeed USB. One more here. What we also have is we have models that have an option where we have a fingerprint reader. Indeed powerful. Might not be on this one. But that allows us to support for Windows Hello. So authentication with the fingerprint. Again just improving usability. And so what's the price for that one? On the 8th generation Intel. It would be 899 Euros. Start again with different models. Like 6 or 8 gigabytes around. I'm not sure in the exact configuration. But this is available now. So as of today. So all the details will be on the website to delve up the... Two different sizes, right? Yeah, we do 13 inch and 15 inch. So this is a 13 inch clamshell. We have a 15 inch clamshell. We also do a 15 inch with a 360 hinge. So a 2 in 1. Which means you can actually turn around and use it in a tablet mode. We have support for active pen as well. So you have a very natural drawing or writing interface with the Windows operating system. We also have on the system, we have a software called SmartBite. And that's, we're seeing much more users are using the laptops now for consuming video content. And with the SmartBite technology it allows you to prioritize video streaming or communications. So it gives a better user experience and minimizes the times when you have to have buffering. So it kind of like pauses every other process? It prioritizes other things. Not the processes, it's the network. So it's similar as we have in our XPS portfolio where it's a killer wireless. It has it in hardware. But this is bringing in a software level and we have that across the Inspiron 7000 series now. And it has a good battery life? Yes, I can't remember exactly. We've ran about nine hours I think on the battery life. And it's available how soon? 31st of August, available today. Right now.


Good afternoon. You can all move up. There's plenty of space if you want. Thank you for making up to the session. My name is Hazar Saeed. I am one of the chief architects in Red Hat and the telco team. My job is to work with lots of service providers, understand their requirements, understand their deployment models, and I hope to share some experiences with you based on those deployment models today in this multi-site open stack deployment options and challenges for telco. A quick disclaimer, I'm not a product manager, so don't ask me for roadmaps, please. Don't ask me for product support questions. They are owned by the product team. They are owned by the product managers. What I do want to do, though, through this presentation is start a dialogue and start a conversation with all of you in terms of what are those multi-site deployment options, what are the challenges, why do we need them, what are the use cases, and how do we actually make things happen. So what we'll do is very quickly we'll zoom in on the open stack architecture very, very quickly just to identify some components that are critical to us in terms of multi-site deployment. Well, I'm not going to go into the details of open stack history or architecture or anything of that sort. We'll talk about the telco deployment use case in quite a bit of depth. We'll look at a couple of different use cases, see where it's applicable, how does it work. Then we'll look at the distributed deployment models or options that are available to us. Especially some of the newer projects that are going on, some code that's actually being committed now. It's also the code that's coming in the next release of Pyke. Then we'll look at what are some of the issues with those options that are there. And we'll see if we can find a solution that's relevant in the context of what we do. How many of you, by the way, before I start attended the Verizon session on microCPE? I think it was also shown as part of the keynote. One, two, three, four, five. Quite a few. That's good. So it was shown as part of the keynote, the microCPE. And actually, there was a session that described what they did inside that microCPE. That's actually in a very interesting use case, and we'll dive down into that particular use case here and see what did Verizon do? Why did they do it? What were the options? And what are some possibilities in terms of how we do the deployment? We all know this picture, right? Everybody has seen this. It's on the OpenStack documentation. Pretty complex picture, but two things that are important for you to note. One is Keystone, right at the bottom, right here. Another one is NOVA. Those are the two important components that we will actually see how they can address some of the multi-site deployment conversations. Of course, there's also Storage, OpenStack Block Storage right here that connects into the AMQP with respect to the Keystone. So if you don't want to listen to the rest of the presentation, you've got the three hints that I gave you in my first opening sentence, AMQP, Keystone, NOVA. Same picture, just redrawn it in a slightly different way to look at it against the same three important points to focus on in terms of all of their connectivity and the models. Now let's look at the use case a little bit. Let's understand why do we need to deploy a really multi-site OpenStack? What are those use cases? Of course, no telco operates on a single data center. If there is a telco that operates on a single data center, I would like to meet that telco. Every telco has multiple data centers, primary backup, two, three, four, one in each region. Some have tens, some have hundreds, some have even thousand. Now especially with some of the architectures that are going around like virtualized central office where every central office is kind of becoming a data center, you will actually, how many central offices are there in the US? More than 10,000. You want to have 10,000 data centers? Each data center with an OpenStack install? Awesome. How are you going to manage that many? That's an interesting question. Mobile edge compute, a lot of telcos, mobile providers are deploying compute much closer to the user. Why are they doing it? Because they need that compute power to deal with latency and roundtip times so that they can process it locally and transmit it back. Virtual reality, smart car or self-driven cars, those are the, they impose a set of requirements in terms of the amount of compute that needs to be available as close as possible to the consumer or to the user in the IoT context as well as in this entire mobile edge. Virtualized RAM, virtualized CRAN, VRAN, many people use different names for it. Again, the idea is to actually remove the active components from antenna locations and put them into a compute location that's virtualized and much closer to those antenna locations using some sort of a front hall for a mobile carrier so that you can actually process that information right there, make those antennas passive elements that can be reprogrammed and redirected based on software. Of IoT gateways and fog computing model. I mean, Cisco has been pushing around this fog computing model for a little while in terms of, again, trying to put those compute capabilities much, much closer to the data acquisition points for sensors so that you can provide information or much faster decisions based on the data that you've acquired back to those endpoints that can then process it and actually act accordingly. So again, speed is of essence, latency is of essence. That's why you need those compute sitting in those remote sites. Of course, everybody knows the collapse branch application that's been sitting around the collapse branch deployment model that has been around for a very long time where you have multiple sets of different capabilities within a branch that are all being collapsed due to the power of virtualization into some number of virtual functions that sit on standard hardware or standard servers and they can be virtualized and they can be managed remotely. So all of those requirements push the telcos into looking at options in terms of deploying compute capability much, much closer to the edge of their network or closer to the consumer. When you deploy compute capability much, much closer to the edge of the network and closer to the consumer, the challenge you will have is how are you going to manage those compute nodes? How are you going to instantiate those compute nodes? How are you going to orchestrate those compute nodes? So going back, just illustrating that in a big picture environment, you have all these remote sites. You have multiple data centers that sit out there. Each one runs an open stack instance. You may have a hierarchical connectivity model that doesn't mean anything. Each one is an independent island. Each one actually manages its own local sets of resources. And every telco has this particular deployment model today. In fact, most people, if you ask them, how are you deploying open stack, that's how they say they do it. Each one is a separate instance. The HA functionality in or the service functionality that they bring to the table through this multiple deployments is not at an infrastructure layer, but it's at the VNF layer or at the network applications layer in that particular context. So this is a standard deployment model that you typically see every single. But the thing is that service always spans across multiple data centers. What does that mean? Suppose I'm a residential customer to my service provider or I'm a business customer to my service provider. Some functions may be hosted in one data center. Other functions may be hosted in other data centers. What the service provider really has to do is stitch that functionality together to provide that overall service for me, which means the service provider is actually looking at those multiple different entities of open stack deployment as a separate zone or a separate model. Service provider has to ensure that the policies are appropriate, the authentication models are appropriate, and that when you go provision a service, when you have to provision some VMs in one data center and other set of VMs in another data center and then do the network stitching across them, that needs to be really done in order to really offer a typical service for me as a user, as a consumer. So that's not as easy as it sounds. Well, open stack is great at deploying a single data center.  Within the limits, within that operational boundary, within that administration domain, it's very, very good at operating that. It's very, very good at controlling that. It's very, very good at providing those set of resources to you on demand. You can do elasticity. You can do all of that. Now you have to actually go to each location, pick a template to the deployment model, worry about autoscaling a different way on those different contexts, and then actually deliver the service. So you need some level of service orchestration over and above this open stack island deployment. Let's take a real case. This is a real case, by the way. I've hidden the name of the service provider. This particular service provider came to us and said, well, we have 25 locations, not too many, not hundreds, not thousands, only 25 locations. We really need two to five VNFs in each one of those locations to provide services. Two to five VNFs can easily be hosted in one or two compute blades, maximum. Now, you want a redundant model. Two compute nodes per site, 25 sites, you get to 50 compute nodes total. 50 compute nodes total for a large telco is a two rack, three rack deployment in one site, simple. But here it's a distributed model, right? You have these 25 locations. It has to be closer to the user. If you want to deploy a redundant configuration, the minimum redundant configuration supported model is, what, three controllers. So you're burning three controllers for two compute nodes, or maybe even one compute node per site. What's your overhead? If you just do a simple math, you have 75 storage nodes, you have 75 control nodes, but you have 50 compute nodes that are sitting there. That doesn't make any economical sense. Why should I go deploy OpenStack in this particular situation? I'm going to try to find something else. And what is that something else? I don't know the answer to what that something else is. But it's an interesting problem. And this is a real problem. It's a real service provider with real number of sites, with a real requirement that came to us and said, help us. How are we going to do this? So you have literally 75% overhead in terms of compute power that's going there into controllers, into storage nodes for initializing three VNFs literally per site. Here's another example. Take a telco that has about 1,000 central offices. You want to go CORD, anybody heard of the word CORD? C-O-R-D, central office redirected as data center? A few. Good. So what that architecture is all about, it's all about creating or building that central office like you would build a data center with a fabric, with compute nodes, with controller nodes, with VNFs that are hosted there, with appropriate service chaining, orchestration, and so on. And oh, by the way, for those of you who know CORD, we are also interested in building a CORD-like architecture with ODL instead of onus controller, and so on. But that's a separate topic. Regardless, whether you adopt the VCO architecture that's being discussed in the ODL working group, or whether you adopt the CORD architecture as defined by Linux Foundation and onLab, you still have to deploy OpenStack. When you deploy OpenStack, you have 1,000 central offices. Each central office, now you're going to go deploy full OpenStack. How many subs a central office may serve depends on where that central office is located. If the central office is in Boston City, then you're serving probably lots of customers, no issues.  That's about it. So do you then go and deploy the same model? Do you put the entire keystone? Do you put the entire authentication models on those sites? What do you do? That's a real, again, a real challenge and a real question. Now if you ask Verizon, what did they do in their micro-CPE? What they did, they put actually the entire OpenStack on the micro-CPE. I didn't get a chance to ask the question, but if anybody from Verizon is in the audience, maybe they can answer my question. Is what's the compute power you put on that particular micro-CPE? I know they containerized it. I know they made it lightweight. I know they made it run, but it runs the full OpenStack suite. Now what telcos have done, and I did ask the question to the presentation after the presentation was done, is how do you create, how do you manage the authentication model in such a situation, where you have thousands of those micro-CPEs that are scattered around in your network? Well, they said, look, we don't do that. We don't worry about trying to build an common central authentication model in this particular case. We use TACACs from a user's perspective to actually manage that. And we still let the standard keystone templates recite, and speed users aside, and authenticate the local resources on the micro-CPE. The advantage that it gives them is nobody can interfere with local containers that are sitting on that particular micro-CPE. OK, that's fine. Is that an option for everybody? I don't know. Now let's go look into those deployment options and models. And I kind of described them a little bit for you before I got into the slide, multiple independent island model. We've seen that. It's being done today. That's how people are doing it today, in fact. Common authentication model, I kind of hinted that a bit. We'll actually dig down a little bit more into this common authentication model. Then we'll also dig down into the stretch deployment model. What does that stretch deployment model mean? Can we peel off nodes functionality from a single open stack and then start to go deploy them in different places? That's what we'll look into it a little bit more in detail. Then another model maybe, while I still want independent open stack islands, maybe what I need is availability of resources to be able to orchestrate within those open stack islands. So that's what kind of tricycle tries to do. And we'll actually dig into tricycle also a little bit what that tricycle approach is. Proxying some of the APIs, creating an API gateway model, those are the things that we need to look at. And this is the work that's happening in the open stack projects or groups these days. Maybe we look at a complete agent-based model. I don't know what that will look like. I have an idea in my head, but I want to be able to code it before I come back to you and say this idea works. And of course, is there anything else? Any other wild ideas? I don't know. There was a very interesting presentation that was done, I think, yesterday or today. I don't remember now I'm drawing a blank because I did one presentation on Tuesday, and this is my second one, so everything's lost in between, about something called Kubernetes sandwich. We'll take a look at that Kubernetes sandwich as well. So in the first one, you have multiple different, and this is, by the way, what is being done by most people, is you go deploy open stack in different locations.  You authenticate your users through the directory, through LDAP, or through TACACs, or through some other means, outside, out of band, nothing to do with the open stack environment. You authenticate the user through that. And then once you hit the load balancer, the load balancer is the one that's responsible for you to push your request to A or B, depending on how you divide it. Of course, within OpenStack 2, you already have those capabilities of regions and projects and all of that. But here, this is like you're masking some of the deployment capabilities behind some load balancers. And you're making, for the user, things become transparent. Of course, when you have a load balancer type of model, then everything in one OpenStack instance or one data center has to be identical to another data center, because only then the load balancer situation will work. If you want specific workloads in specific locations, obviously that's not going to be helpful for you to put a load balancer in front. Then you want to go to a specific instance, go configure that, pick a project, pick a template, pick a good deploy, go do your heat deployment, hot-tem deployment models, and so on. Disaster recovery is an external problem. It's probably an application issue, it's not an infrastructure issue. So then you actually use some of the disaster recovery tools to be able to actually recover data from one data center to another. Now, in each of those data centers, you have a fully redundant configuration with three controllers, three storage nodes. By the way, I use 3.3 a lot, because 3 is kind of the minimal HA deployment. You need an odd number of controllers, 2N plus 1, in terms of any, to create a quorum and to ensure that HA operates appropriately. So we use a three controller model here. Each data center has to have those three controllers. You roll with the idea. The next one is to actually have a common keystone. This is an interesting model, and this is of interest to actually a lot of people, which is you pull the keystone out or you point to a central keystone. This is sometimes referred to as shared keystone or distributed, in other cases, in the previous cases it was distributed keystone, common backend integration, right? So keystone integrates with LDAP in terms of the authentication capabilities. You have one central keystone to point to and you take all of those remote locations and point back to the keystone. In keystone, each, again, region or each area is a fully redundant system. It's independent, except that the keystone is common. So what you do in keystone is there is something in keystone services. There are, you know, keystone services has tables associated with each of those capabilities, Nova, Neutron, and so on, right? In that, there is something called an endpoint table. You can actually, if you have access to your open stack, you can actually do it. Check that. There's something called an endpoint table. In the endpoint table, you define the following. You define the endpoint type, you define the service, you define a region, and you define an IP address. So what you do is you actually go modify that endpoint service table, right? Endpoint table to point to the same keystone in each one of those locations. So it's a manual hack, but it works to create a central model, and if somebody wants a centralized keystone, that's how they do it. Now, the advantage of having a centralized keystone is the ability to have one central location for all of the authentication models, right? For all of the users, resources, and so on. And then the rest of them can still continue to operate in the same way for those distributed open stack instances. Now, you can still have a central controller, but this is another common requirement that we get, which is how about if I just do storage and compute in those different remote locations, like HCI, right, hyperconversion infrastructure? I have controllers in one site, and then on another site, I put storage in, I put compute in, and I have a hyperconversion for structure there, and now I'm gonna operate that remote site as if it was part of my master site with the same set of controllers. This is doable, this works, if you wanna do it today. The key question is how far can you put that remote site? The key question is how much workload that crosses the WAN boundary between those two sites. And that's what we'll dig into a little bit later during the presentation. In this particular model, when you have this remote hyperconverged clusters or hyperconverged nodes, you can potentially replicate some of the databases and some of the storage capabilities across from one site to another, and you can do a manual restore later on. So it's almost like that's a stub site. It just doesn't have full control of everything. You've replicated some information, you're pointing it to it locally on that remote site for faster access, and you're doing some RBD mirroring or some synchronization across from the master to the stub site. So this is like a stretch deployment model for storage and compute, but it is limited to the number of few sites. Obviously, you can't take this model and say I'm gonna deploy this across thousand sites, or 500 sites, or even 100 sites, or even 20 sites. It becomes really complicated. Two sites, five sites, maybe you can. Now let's revisit that thick CPE branch office use case. I showed you a little picture about those telco use cases and I said, here is a deployment model of converged branch where you're converging a whole bunch of functionality onto a couple of servers, one, two, three, whatever those servers are. If you start to do that and start to deploy these type of servers on those branch offices, there is a deployment model that people have coined called thick CPE. The reason why they call it thick CPE is instead of putting a router, a firewall, a switch, and something else, they put a server there. Take those functions, virtualize them, run it on that server, and that server has a V router, virtual router function that actually tunnels traffic back into the data center where you do the traffic manipulation and provide the rest of the services. Now that, again, is an interesting requirement in terms of a thick CPE, but if you have, you know, how many customers do you have as a telco? 1,000, 2,000, 10,000, 5,000, lots of numbers. Each customer has how many sites? An average customer has what, five to eight sites. How many are we looking? 35,000 sites, 50,000 sites. Now you start putting servers in all of those sites, 30,000 sites, 20,000 sites. And you want to actually put, you know, you want to put compute there, you're gonna be able, you need to be able to manage that compute, that bare metal in some way. Can you start to put open stack? That's exactly what micro CPE is for Verizon. It is that three VNFs, if you remember the picture of Verizon, you'd have three VNFs, full open stack embedded in that particular box that they showed up on the keynote. It's thousands of sites that you have to go and deploy that. Is it gonna work? Excuse me. Now one may say, well, why can't I look at the flexibility that was provided to me since OSP10 in terms of splitting some functionality on the controllers? And then trying to put those functionality in an appropriate way that I can actually architect my infrastructure, architect my open stack capability to actually just distribute them. So OSP10 allows you to actually do what is called as composable roles. So you can build controllers with certain set of capabilities. What it has done is you have actually split that into place maker and system D level of functionality and you can actually split those across and create custom roles for controllers. What this custom roles allows you, this has been available since OSP10, by the way there are some more enhancements that came in in 11 as well.  Why am I talking about separating these components out? These are the components that we will need to play around with in order to actually build a multi-site OSP infrastructure. And those are the components that potentially have some bottlenecks in them that we will actually need to tune. So then going back to the central site, you could do the same thing. You could create a hierarchical model. You could create a hierarchical model by separating those components out, placing them appropriately in your infrastructure. Now, looking at this picture, this in no way represents a real service provider. I did have a real service provider network from LATAM. They had 220 locations in which they wanted to put OpenStack, 220. And then they had about 18 top level locations where it was full service. And then they had about 1,000 plus lower level locations where they would have compute elements. And they really were after us to say, hey, Red Hat, can you help us get to this particular deployment model? We've tested it. It works. It seemed to work when we can put remote compute nodes out there with this. And we had a very long conversation with them going back and forth to understand what's the deployment model? How are they doing it? Why are they doing it? But it creates an interesting, so what they wanted to do was have that flexibility to say, I'm gonna go deploy a controller capability here, and then manage this region because some of them sit in a fiber path. If there is a big fiber loop, I'm gonna put a controller here. And all those nodes that are sitting in that particular big fiber, all those central offices that are sitting in a big fiber loop, they can be just all compute extensions instead of putting multiple OpenStacks in each one of them. It's a real deployment. It's a real question. It's a real challenge. So what are some considerations then in that case? What do we need to look at? Now, as we started talking to these service providers, as we started to have these detailed conversations, some things became obvious. One that was obvious was, what's the latency between those sites? From where you put the compute to where you put the controllers. What's the latency? What's the round trip time delay that you can expect on an average? I was talking to one of the global providers. They had a location in France, and then they had another location in Miami, and they wanted to actually put some compute locations in Miami and manage it from France with all of the controllers. Well, there's transcontinental link. There's latency challenge. What is it that the maximum that you can get? And not only it's just the latency of that particular link, but it's also what's the outage time. What happens when the node disappears? When the link disappears, the node is still running. The controller thinks the node is down. The controller is trying to rescale, and the link comes back up. How do you deal with that particular? So it's not just saying, my latency is within this boundary, and I can manage it, and I can probably tune the confile to say, expect half a second delay. Expect two seconds delay. That's probably a lot easier if that's the case, and if it's always consistent. But if it's not consistent, and you have an outage, you come back up what happens. So you need that headless operational model and recovery option for that. Also, when you have a link that fails, and maybe there are 10 sites hiding behind that particular link. Now the link comes back up. You have 10 sites that suddenly come back up, awake and say, I'm here. So it causes another thing called startup storm. These are common issues you find in telcos. We are not visiting, or we are not getting these issues because what we focus on always is deploying OpenStack in a data center managing computer infrastructure that's local. Suddenly now you want to take the same OpenStack that's managing computer infrastructure that's local, and start to try to do all these type of funky things. Everybody throws up their hands and says, ah, no, it doesn't work. Okay, where does the other bottleneck show up? The other bottleneck shows up in Oslo messaging. I know that this has been a source of a lot of pain for people just scaling OpenStack within a data center, in terms of scaling message queues, understanding Oslo messaging, understanding the RabbitMQ. Why?  Cylometer is the biggest consumer of RabbitMQ. Also, Nova uses RabbitMQ. To provision, to make changes, Nova uses the same RabbitMQ. Now what happens? You have a remote site, you have Cylometer message, you know, information, agents collecting information and sending it back to the collector, and you also are trying to make changes to the Nova API or to the compute information. And now you have latency, and you have round trip time issues. That's what creates the biggest challenge. Now, one of the conversations we ended up having with at least two different providers here is to come up with a latency bound and say, what is my latency boundary? Can I test within that boundary and say yes, this works, hence go ahead and deploy within that boundary. So what is that round trip time? Based on that round trip time, you can adjust the RabbitMQ queues. So there's something called a bandwidth delay product, BDP. It's a standard, you know, thing BDP in, when you do any kind of queue tuning for our buffer tuning for routers, for switches, and for people who have deployed WANs, this is a standard term that they come up with. It's bottleneck speed, link speed times the round trip time. So you do that. What is the outage time? You do the queue tuning through that. And when you have problems with it, you can have things like Nova Flap, Neutron Timeouts, you know, headless operation recovery and RestartStrom. So what you do is you do bandwidth delay product-based tuning in terms of buffer sizes. You look at the number of messages that you're passing in the system from those remote nodes. One of the conversations is, why don't you split the message queues? So if you split the message queues into a message queue that handles salameter agents, a message queue that handles Nova, a message queue that handles Neutron, perhaps then you can apply some external QOS to actually, you know, tune the environment. It's complicated, it's not easy, but it is possible. There was actually a very interesting presentation done in OpenStack Austin, and there's a video available online in terms of splitting message queues and what the performance gain was for those by splitting those message queues, even inside a single data center, forget about the wide area deployment. Take a look at that presentation. It was actually quite impressive. Now, recently there have been some AMQP enhancements that were done. In the AMQP enhancements, what happens is in the new enhancement, you eliminate the broker model where each time a message needs to go to a broker, you have a tree-like structure and the message travels from broker to broker and out to the actual agent. So what you do is instead of that, you create this mesh router model that allows you to actually pass messages directly and route those messages to the endpoints. If you have to go between exchanges or between domains, then you can actually potentially use a broker to go between domains, but otherwise you can send a message directly to the message router and it gets delivered directly to the endpoint without having to go through a broker latency, re-queuing and so on. So these are some new enhancements that was done. This is a new driver that's available in Newton, I believe, for AMQP for Oslo messaging. Should consider if you must use RabbitMQ, then tune the hell out of RabbitMQ, use exchanges, use shovel plugins, split those into multiple and try to scale this as large as possible. Here's another interesting project called OpenStack Cascading Project. This is another option. This was actually submitted, I think, a few years ago. There was an interesting presentation done on OpenStack Cascading Project. The idea was to actually create a set of proxy APIs at the central site that corresponded to each remote site. So what you see here in yellow there on top is this is a set of proxies for this site and this is a full OpenStack deployment and you see the control functions that are listed out here. Similarly, this set is for this site and likewise, you'll have one set for each site that you deploy full OpenStack on. This is called the Cascaded node or region. This is called the Cascading region. You can create an interesting hierarchy with a parent-child relationship with that. Subsequently, since then, this was obviously quite complicated. So since then, they've actually split that into two different projects called tricircle and trio-tool. Tricircle is the ability to extend the network from one OpenStack site into the other OpenStack site so you can create stretched Galera clusters, for example, or you can create stretched networking. So in other words, from one data center, you can provision resources over into the other data center right here, from one to the other and you can create this through Neutron, through Neutron API and Neutron extensions, you can actually go provision workloads in the other data center. So that's what tricircle is and in fact Verizon team actually stated that as part of their presentation that they're very much interested in tricircle to be able to manage these remote micro-CPEs. Then the other portion, so this is all on Neutron from a tricircle perspective, is to create the API gateway. So instead of creating a proxy API set for every site, you have a common API gateway and in that common API gateway, you actually position that in front of the user as your central management paid or central location and that in turn then goes and provisions down into each data center that's modeled as an availability zone. So now you can create a AZ1 through AZM, you can treat each availability zone as a pod and the way you do it is this API gateway, what it does is it creates this unique ID with a tenant ID and a pod ID. So because these parts, there are some finite number of parts and that are unique, you have finite number of tenants that are unique, you can now create a unique ID to go provision any given workload through this particular API gateway into any one of these open stack regions. So an interesting way of dealing with this, still I don't know for example, how far this will scale to that thick CPE model that we just discussed. So what is the alternative? We are almost getting to the end of our presentation. So what is the alternative? Well, the thick CPE model was the all in one open stack model. Now the question is, should we abandon the idea of open stack on those remote nodes? If you have to run one, two VNFs, do you really wanna do that? Maybe we can do some hypervisor, some workloads, take that and do some level of automation outside open stack and actually go deploy them. That might be an option for that thick CPE model. It might not be an option if you want full-fledged data centers but still want to be able to extend those compute nodes across. Use Kubernetes. Kubernetes as a master orchestrator for those remote sites. I mean, as a master orchestrator that then goes in provisions open stack which then goes in provisions workloads further, whether they are VMs or even containers. And this is where the word container sandwich comes into picture which is, you have Kubernetes sandwich which is you have Kubernetes as a master orchestrator installing open stack control services which then create the compute on which you install further, either containers or VMs. And that's an interesting concept, interesting conversation just in the next room over. Robert Starmer was actually talking about exactly that particular topic. So this is what it is which is to take those control services, run them as containers in those remote nodes and then manage those capabilities across and use Kubernetes as a master orchestrator to drive that particular conversation. So just in summary today, a lot of people are deploying independent open stack islands. They, it is tough for them to manage all of those islands together. They are trying to look at external tools such as cloud management platforms to make that happen. Tricercle and Trio2o is of significant interest to multiple people. They offer a good promise. This is where I need your help, your input, your feedback because this is where we are working in to see whether that really addresses the problem or do we need to fundamentally look at a different way where we have some sort of an agent that sits out on the remote side and actually helps us manage that maybe just in plain Kubernetes environment. Crafting that availability zone model within the bounds of how many different data centers that you have to create that will definitely help. The Nova agent proxy which we just saw in terms of the Trio2o, that's useful. Perhaps we can just partition Nova agent out of that particular API gateway and look at it differently. Deploying bare metal at remote sites then how do you actually just power on those bare metal? How do you actually make that happen? Not an option. You probably need to ship those remote sites with some image that boots and then does a call back home to be able to make it happen. But if you want to go to the Verizon route then yes you have an option to do a full open stack there. And then I briefly spoke about this Kubernetes sandwich which is of interest to a lot of people where you're running Kubernetes as a master orchestrator running open stack control services containers which in turn then deploy Nova and then you use those compute to go deploy for the workloads in. No good answer, unfortunately. There's a lot of work that's happening in the Trio2o space. There's a lot of work that we are involved in. We'd be happy to work with anybody who's interested here in this particular context and happy to learn more from you in terms of how you're deploying it or how you're solving that particular problem. That's about it. Thank you very much. One or two questions please and then we'll wrap it up because I think we're out of time. Take two questions, one here, one here. Adam Young, Keystone Core. So of course I wanna know what features or what enhancements would you like to see from Keystone to better support multi-site? Thank you, Adam. So Adam, if you don't know, actually works in the next aisle over in the same company so he's also from Red Hat. Thank you for asking that question. That's an important question in terms of what you want to see. You're welcome. What I would want to see from Keystone is the ability to really handle thousands of sites from a scale perspective. These different requirements with respect to compute storage and the ability to manage those at a central site. So when you say that there's a little consistency issue with the assignment database, even if you use Federation for the user in groups, you have to have somebody in charge of doing assignments and propagating that information around. How would you like to see that work? Even if it's in kind of general terms? Perhaps along the conversation, but we can discuss that. I think that UID approach is actually an interesting one in terms of what's being discussed in Tree or 2.0. But we can talk offline, yes. This is a slightly open-ended question. There is a model by which when two entities are disconnected, you can have one entity instead of declaring failure. I expect that the other entity can come back up and the other entity can buffer any state changes and when they get reconnected, the buffer state can be applied. Is any of that, I know it's a harder problem to solve, buffering is needed, it's much more of a research topic, but any of that thought process going on in the community? So yes, it is a harder problem to solve and we don't have answers to that problem because one of the things that Nova does extremely well is when you know that there is a node that's down, then you can auto-orchestrate or kick off a new one. So what should you do? The decision is what should you shut down that process, wait for it to recover, should you make that time out long enough so that then you can actually recover state this way or should you say, no, something else happened, maybe the machine died, not the link, so I'm gonna try to put a new node in that location. Do you ever sense which way telcos are leaning? I mean, are they saying, declare failure, I'll stand up another VNL, that's what they're doing, exactly right, because they want to be able to get the service backup as quickly as possible. All right, all right, thank you very much, I'm sorry we're out of time.


Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two live coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 from Moscone Center in San Francisco. Lisa Martin here as your host with Dave Nicholson. We've got a couple of guests here and we have some props on set.  Keith Bradley joins us, the VP of IT from Nature Fresh Farms. And Allison Beers is back as well, Director of Marketing and Edge Solutions for Dell. Guys, welcome back to the program and thanks for bringing some food. Thank you so much. So Keith, talk to us a little bit about technology from Nature Fresh Farms perspective. How do we look at this farming organization as a tech company? As technical, we're something that measures everything we grow. So we're 200 acres of greenhouse, spanning probably about 300 or 400 acres of land. Everything's entirely environmentally controlled. So the peppers that we have in front of you that's made of, they're all grown and controlled from everything they get from light to moisture, to irrigation and nutrients. So we do all that. So should I be able to taste the Dell goodness in these cucumbers, for example? I like to say Nature Fresh slash Dell goodness. I mean, connect the dots for us. So let's go through that sort of mental exercise of how are these end products for consumers better because of what you're doing in IT? So one of the things that we've been able to do and one of the transformations we made is we are now able to run our ETLs. So analyze the data real time at the edge. So making decisions which used to be only once a day based on analytics to now multiple times a day. Our ETLs used to take eight to 10 hours to run. So extraction, transformation and load. So we consider it a party foul if you use a TLA. And you don't find it the first time.  I'll give you that one. I already had a claim weight on that. I'm sorry, so continue. So it allowed down the growers to make multiple decisions. And then you start adding the next layer. As we expanded our technology base, we started introducing AI into it. So now AI is even starting to make decisions before the grower even knows to make them based on historical data. So it's allowed us to become more proactive in protecting the health and longevity and even taste of that plant and the product coming out to you. That's awesome. Allison, talk to us about, from Dell's perspective, how is it helping NatureFresh to simplify the edge? Which there's a lot of complexity there. You talked about kind of the size of the organization, but how do you help simplify it? I think NatureFresh had a lot of common problems that we see customers have. So they had some really interesting ambitions to improve their produce and do it in a GMO free way and really bring a quality product to their customer. But yet, they were each solving their problems on their individual farms in different ways. And so one of the ways that we were able to help was to consolidate a lot of those silos as they were expanding the scope and scale of what they really wanted to do from a technology perspective. And then being able to do that in a secure way that's delivering the insights they need when they need them right there at the edge is really critical. So can you give it, so again, drilling down on, I think it's wonderful that we have the actual stuff here because we often talk in these abstract terms about outcomes. There's your outcome right there. But talk about this growing in the soil somewhere. You have growers, it's not an abstraction. These are actual people, right? Where does the technology organism interface occur here? You have organically grown crops. Where's that interface? Where's the first technology involved in this process? Literally physically. Physically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a shack with a server in it somewhere? So we actually have, yeah, we have a core data center, the center of nature fresh data, basically where everything ends up. We have our edges, so we have computers right at the edge analyzing stuff. But if you want to go right back to the grassroots of where it actually is, is it's right at not dirt, but a ground up coconut husk. That is what the plants are grown in. And we analyze the data right there because that is our first edge. And people think that's static. For us, the edge isn't static because the edge now moves. We have a plant that grows, then we pick it. And then we have to store it, and then we have to ship it. So our edge actually does move from area to area to area. So statically, one thing isn't the same all the time. So I know it's a hard thing to say how it all starts, but it's just a combination of everything from natural gas to everything. Okay, then are those, because we think of things in terms of like, internet of things and these sensors. Things are being gathered, so you've got stuff happily growing in husks and then being picked. Is that aggregate, what's the next step there? Where is that aggregated? Where does that go? Is that all going straight back to your data center? Or are there sort of intermediate steps in the process? So what we do is we actually store everything at the edge. And we do daily processes right there. And then it aggregates that data and it drops it down from a large number to a smaller number to go to the core. Got it. And then that way at the core, it does the long-term analysis. Because again, a lot of the data that we collect, we don't need to keep. A lot of it is the temperature was X, the temperature, we don't need that. So it aggregates it all down, so that way the information coming to the core doesn't overwhelm it. Because we do store enough information and give you an idea of how our 1.8 million plants are living and breathing. We actually estimated 1.8 million plants throughout our 200 acres. At any moment, that's how many plants they're tracking. And so that real-time information is helping to make sure that they water the plants precisely with the amount that they need, that they're fertilizing them.  You're really maintaining that plant over the life of 12 months. So if you make a mistake at any point along the line, then you're dealing with that in terms of their yield throughout the life of the plant. But you aggregate a lot of that data right there on site so that you're not having to send so much back to the cloud or to the core. And you do that a lot with VxRail as well as other technology you have on site, right? Yeah, our VxRail is the center of the core of how we process things. It allowed us to even expand, not even just for compute, but GPUs for our AIs to do it. So it's what we did and it allowed us to mold how we do things. Alison, question for you. This sounds like a dynamic edge, the way that you described it Keith, you described it so eloquently. How is the partnership that Dell has with NatureFresh, how is Dell enabling and accelerating and advancing its edge solutions based on what you're seeing here in this need for real-time data analytics? We spend a lot of time with customers like Keith and also across all kinds of other industries. And what we see is that they have a really common set of problems. They're all trying to derive real-time data right then and there so that they can make business decisions that impact their profitability and their competitiveness and all of their customers' experience, their product quality. And what we see a lot of times is that they have a common set of concerns around security, how to manage all of the hardware that they're implementing and at the same time they really want to be an enabler for the business outcome. So people have creative ideas and they come to IT hoping for support in that journey. If you're managing everything as a snowflake, it becomes really hard and untenable. So I think one of the things that we have as our mission is to help customers simplify their edge so that they can be that the enabler that's helping the business to transform and modernize. One of the things I really admire about Nature Fresh Farms is that they decided it from a full organization perspective. So everybody from the operational technologists to the IT to the business decision makers and leaders at the company, they all decided to modernize together. And so I think from a partnership perspective too, like that's one of the areas that we try to work with our customers on is really talking about total transformation and modernization. So it sounds like Keith, there was an appetite there as Allison was saying for a digital transformation and IT transformation. Talk to me a little bit about from a historical perspective how old Nature Fresh is and how did you get the team on board? It sounds so eloquent. How did you get the team on board to go, this is what we need to do and technology needs to fuel our business because it's going to impact the end user consumer of our fabulous English cucumbers. So it's actually really neat. Our owner peak wiring, when he first started out, he really wanted to embrace technology. This is going back right to 2000. 2000 is when we first had our first planting and he was actually a builder by nature. He actually was a builder and fabricator and he built greenhouses for other companies but he said they're getting a little bigger and it's the labor amount and the number of growers you needed for a range is getting exponentially higher. So he was one of the first ones that said I'm going to put a computer right in the middle and control this 16 acre range. It's a pretty visionary view when you really think about it. He's trying to operate his farm, right? Operationalize it, it's really cool. Yeah, so it was a neat concept and it was actually very much not a normal concept then. You go back to 2000, people weren't talking about internet of things. They didn't talk about automation, it wasn't there and he basically said this is the way to go and unfortunately he thought I'll sell it to somebody. I'll put a product in for a year and I'll sell it and then guess what happened, he didn't sell it. He says, ah, it's not big enough. I'll build another phase too. And then he said, his comment to me was after he built the fourth phase, he says I guess I'm in the pepper and cucumber business now. And he said, and that's what he's just grown but he said it was a great relationship we had and it's a great concept. And it even goes back and I know we talked about before is the computer allowed one senior grower to control large number of acreages where before you'd need multiple growers that know exactly what to do because they'd have to manually change all these things. Now from a single computer, they can see everything that's going on in the entire range. You mentioned temperature and water and this is kind of out of the blue question but how have global circumstances and increases in the cost of fertilizer affected you or is that fertilizer that's not the type that you use in your operation? Have any insight into that? Yeah, everything has the global change in cost has changed everybody. I don't think there's anybody that's exempt from it. The only thing that we've been able to do is we're able to control it. We don't need to rely on, I guess you can say, rely on the weather to help us do things. We can control how much is and we recycle all of our water. So what the plant doesn't absorb today for nutrients, we'll put it back in the system, sterilize. Wait, when you say 200 acres, it's all enclosed? 200 acres of greenhouse. Yep, 200 acres of greenhouse. I really include, there is not a single portion of our greenhouse that actually gets exposed to the outside. And if you ever see a picture of a greenhouse and you see one of these lovely plants here wet, that's not true, that's just a nice, make it look better. Spray it for the photo. Yeah, spray it for the photo but actually everything is dry. That water goes directly to the roots and we monitor how much we put in and how much comes out and then we recycle it. We even get so much recycling, we run natural gas generators to heat the water to heat the greenhouse. We take the burn off of natural gas, the CO2 and funnel that into the greenhouse to give it natural stimulant. So this is starting to remind me of the Martian. I don't know if you read the book or if you saw the movie. Oh yeah. But you know, planting the potatoes inside the hab in the habitat. And then you cut them in half and the little ones grow with the next ones but yep, we recycle everything that we do. And that's amazing. And all that information at their fingertips, I mean really I think what technology is enabling you all to do is focus on what you all are good at which is focusing on your farming operation and not necessarily the technology. So one of the places I think we deliver some value is invalidating a lot of the solutions so that customers don't have to figure that all out themselves. Yeah, cause I'm not a security expert, I don't always understand the true depth of security but that's where that relationship is. We need this and we need that and we need a secure way to let those communicate and we can hand that off to the experts at Dell and let us do what we do best. What have been some of the changes? In the last couple of years we've seen the security elevate skyrocket to a board level conversation. Ransomware is a when, not if we get attacked. How does Dell help you from a security perspective ensure that what you're able to do ultimately gets these products to market in a secure fashion so that all that data that you're generating isn't exposed? So, like I said, I agree 100% it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. So one of the things that we've actually done is we started to use the Dell solution, the power protect data manager to back up our solutions on the VxRail and it actually did two fold for us. It allowed us to do a lot of database manipulation from restores and stuff like that but we're now actually even investing in the cyber recovery vault that gives us that protection and it allows us to now look at like how long will it take us to get back up and we're doing some tests right now and the last test we did is we're able to get back up going as a company from a full attack in about an hour. Like we've actually done a few simulations now so we are able to recover what our core needs are within an hour. Which is a very different metric than simply saying, oh the data's available. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get zero credit for that. We need our operations to be back up and running. Yeah, even that hour is stressful to our growers. It's a variable within a variable because if you go in the summer or in super hot, they'll be like very stressed over an hour and then you got a nice calm weather day, it's not as bad but the weather can change and how they have to close events and you're not just closing one event, you're closing 32, 64, 100-acres events and you're changing the irrigation cycle, you need that automation to do it for you. How do you let people eat these things after all the care that goes into it? I'm going to feel mildly guilty for just about a second and a half before I sink my teeth into the cucumber. Oh, but that's the joy of it. That's one of the things that I love. This is serious, you're proud of this, aren't you? Oh yeah, you know what, there's not a single person at Nature Fresh that isn't proud of what we do each day. We enjoy what we do and it's a culture that makes us strive to do better every day. It's just a great feeling to be there every day and to just enjoy what you're doing. Yeah, see, it's real, this is real. Isn't it great to be a part of, my background's in economics. I think of these things in terms of driving efficiency and this is just a beautiful thing. When you control those variables, you leverage the technology and what's the end result? You're essentially uplifting everything in the world. It's not just philosophical on you. Right, and feeding the world, especially during the last couple of years, that access, one of the things we learned in the pandemic, one of many, is access to real-time data isn't nice to have anymore, it's essential. So true. And so, I mean, the story that you're telling here, the impact of the growers enabling them to focus what you were saying, Allison, on what they do best, Dell Technologies, BX Rail, enabling Nature Fresh to focus on what it does best, ultimately delivering food to people during the last couple of years was huge. Yeah, yeah, and allowing, even at a reduced labor number, for us to keep growing and doing things by automation. You know, we still need labor in the greenhouse to pick, prune, and do stuff like that. But again, we're looking into technologies to help offset that. And, but again, it was one of those things that we just had to be efficient at everything we do. And we drove that through everything we have. Well, and you guys haven't stopped, right? You're continuing to figure out, I mean, he was just telling me a little bit about what their next step is. So, just getting more and more accurate, more and more intelligence as they grow. So, it's the possibilities, that's what's exciting to me about Edge. You know, I think this example is great because it's so relatable. Everybody can understand what the edge is in this context, and it's really driven by the fact that you can put compute into so many different places now. It's more, though, a matter about how do you gather it? How do you do it in a way where you can actually understand and glean information and insights from it?  Yeah, yeah, information is key. It is key. What's next from Dell's perspective for Edge computing technologies? What are some of the things you guys got cooking? Yeah, I mean, we're going to try to help customers to continue to simplify their Edge. So, to deliver those insights that they need, where they need them, to do it in a really secure way. I mean, I know we talked about security, but to do it in really a zero trust fashion and to help customers to do it also in a zero IT fashion because in this example, it's the growers that are out there in the fields or in your greenhouse in a sense. Like helping people that aren't necessarily IT specialists to be able to get all the benefits from the technology. So, do you think that VxRail technology could be used to optimize, say, the production of olive oil? Because I'm looking here and we have the makings of a pretty good salad. Yeah, there you go. It obviously doesn't just apply to food production.  Whether we're talking about manufacturing or retail or energy, putting technology right there at the point of data creation and being able to figure out how to manage that inflow of data, be able to figure out which portion of the data is really valuable and then driving decisions and being able to understand and intelligently make decisions for your business based on that data is really important. Keith, what's next? Give us, as we wrap up this segment here, what's next from a technology perspective? You mentioned a couple things you're looking into. Yeah, so I think automation is really going to change the way we do things. Automation within the greenhouses is truly just becoming a reality. It's funny we go back and we say, can we do this stuff? And now it's like, oh, even three years ago, I don't think we're quite ready for it. But now it's right there. So I see us doing a lot more work with vendors like Dell and to do automatic picking, automatic scouting, all that stuff that we do by hand to do it in an automated fashion. And at scale, right? That's the important part. I think when you're managing a snowflake, you can only do it to some level and to be able to automate it and to be able to break down those silos, you're going to be able to apply it to so many parts of your business. Now, wide applicability. Guys, thank you so much for joining us, sharing the Nature Fresh Dell story, bringing us actual product. This is so exciting. We congratulate you on how you're leveraging technology in a really innovative way and we look forward to hearing what's next. Maybe we'll see you at Dell Technologies World next year. Sounds great. Thank you so much. All right, our pleasure, guys. Thank you. For our guests, I'm Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So stick around.


10 facts about the U.S. arms trade Number one the U.S. is the largest exporter of weapons. The U.S. alone makes up 37% of the global arms trade Number two Countless civilians are killed by U.S. weapons every year causing grief and community loss everywhere the U.S. arms trade touches Number three weapons companies are complicit in murder From Palestine to Yemen weapons manufactured in the U.S. are being used in conflicts all over the world Number four the arms trade is causing the climate crisis the use of weapons harms our environment the Manufacturing of weapons contributes to greenhouse gas emissions as well as the transportation of weapons to wherever they're being sold Number five the acceleration of the climate catastrophe will be used as a reason to sell more weapons The more we let climate change be referred to as a quote-unquote national security threat The easier it will get for our politicians to react to resource shortages and climate emergencies with the violent and exclusionary policies Number six the reliance on weapons manufacturing stops us from investing in things that really matter We could instead be investing in our present and future by creating more green jobs Number seven the arms trade corrupts U.S. and global politics Members of Congress and people who run for president typically take a lot of campaign donations from weapons companies Making them more beholden to the companies they get money from instead of people like us Since these companies profit off of war and killing our representatives are more likely to vote for war and military spending increases Number eight the U.S. arms trade makes us less safe not the other way around There's no doubt that the United States investing its time and money into violence will only result in more violence If we actually want peace, we won't get it through arming more conflicts Number nine there's no humane way to use a bomb All the large military-grade weapons made by companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing are built with the intention to do harm And last but not least number 10 it's not too late to find a new way to engage with the world People are rising up and resisting the arms trade all over but there needs to be more of us You can join our campaign against the U.S. arms trade at code pink dot org forward slash call to disarm


Hello, I wanted to ask you, you went to NYU and you got a BFA in Experimental Theatre and Modern Dance? No, just I went to the Experimental Theatre Wing and got a BFA and was in debt for, you know, 10, 15 years for that. That was very, that made sense, didn't it? And what were some of the things you learned there? I wanted to hear about your process. No, I really wanted to hear about what you learned there. What I learned at Experimental Theatre. It was the most experimental out of all the Experimental Theatres program. Well, all the other theatre, all the, so NYU had these different schools and there was like Lee Strasburg and Circle of the Square and Stella Adler and mine and then there was the Experimental Theatre Wing where all the completely like freaks that didn't fit in anywhere went. It's like a whole new level of asset trip is what I'm imagining. It's exactly the whole new level of spending a lot of money and not being able to get a job after college. Amazing. I like that these can get tiered. Yeah, that was like the most insane. Like basket weaving is actually more productive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I studied, I studied a lot of, it was all about like Ratowski and physical theatre and rolling around on the floor and postmodern dance and vocal exercises where you had to lie on the floor and then you'd fall asleep because you didn't really know what you were doing and then they'd wake you up later. I'm telling, it's a great, it's actually a great studio. I'm just, it's fun to make fun of it but it was actually a really, I learned a lot there. I remember doing modern dance. We'd always go like this. Yes. That is a key component. And then you rock. Yeah. That's exactly what you do. Sometimes you'd have like one word, like you'd be like racism, although that would be like binary. Exactly. That's exactly what it is. You just like go. Postmodern dance is so, it's so serious that if you went like, I just, I saw so much postmodern dance in my life. Let's see it. I will. Okay. I will. The big comedic moment in a postmodern dance, they would be like, you'd go like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They love that. And that was the big laugh line. Do that again. Do that again.  I love that. The finger would be like, oh my God, she's hilarious. Revelatory. That's just to be great for the podcast.  Anyway. Those of you listening on the radio, she waved her finger around. Yeah, I waved it. Laftrack. I mean, what you were just doing, you were jumping. I was jumping and then I just did the slightest movement with my finger that no one would find funny unless you were in a postmodern dance audience. This takes all the art out of it too. I love it. I'm like, she was jumping and then she pointed her finger at someone.


Heather in the past you've had exhibitions about maps as work of art here You have works of art that are being considered maps. Tell us about how this exhibition came to me Well, there's always been a community of artists in this country and abroad that work with maps as they're Jumping off-place. They're they're medium or they're using the techniques to create their work and over the years we've seen their work here and there and We really liked it and so we finally decided to put together the exhibition It's this has been a long time coming and we've been sort of collecting Artists we'd like to invite we invited them and they all said yes, so here's the exhibition And were these all works that are new for this exhibition or were there some of these Existing works that you brought it It's a little bit of both some of the artists did decide to create new pieces for the exhibition in the same style that they had been working in Previously and many of these things are the artists favorites of their own work and Things that they just wanted hadn't shown for a while and wanted to be shown. I Really want the viewer to look at the items and see what they see they should really Inform their opinion with what a map is Because that is part of the process of the art is this is a map and this has certain cultural connotations For maps and I feel that many of the artists go forward from that into their work It's a doorway if you will I Don't necessarily want people to be unsettled, but I want them to really look and think what does this mean as a Meta concept what does this mean for me? Jeff you have two pieces in this current exhibit at the ocean map library tell us about the one we're standing in front of now It's actually six pieces here. These are all drawings from my sketchbook, and I've been Carrying a leather notebook with the same size sketchbook for the last 30 years And these are all drawings from one year where I was drawing roads that All met in the middle well one thing I've believed for a long time is one of the greatest American sculptures is the the freeway system particularly in California and when you see a stack of freeway Overpasses racked up above each other and look at the sweeping curves. You realize it's incredible Manmade invention and you have to be driving to look at it, and I've driven through so many of them that I Just find them beautiful. Tell me about your second piece in the exhibit. My second piece is a screen print It's a it's from a rubbing of a map that I dissected I took a triple-a road map and I cut away everything that wasn't a road and in order to store them I generally fold them back up So if you've ever folded a road map imagine folding one that's been sliced to ribbons And then I took that and I used a pencil and I made a rubbing of that and I turned that rubbing into a screen print and So because it's tactile rather than visual I ended up with a visual thing where you can see all the layers of the folded map Well, these are visual and they carry a certain information That's divorced from the information that a map carries and one thing you have to remember about maps is they have a lifespan and maps get obsolete and you generally throw them away and so by taking a map and using it in an art you've changed its purpose from an Information carrier to a different kind of information carrier and in a sense you've increased its lifespan I want them to look at the beauty of the map I mean because it's it's one of mankind's densest carriers of information and a lot of them are beautifully done When you're driving down a highway a lot of times all you're seeing is the road in front of you and a line of green trees onto the side and What a map does is it pushes you way up above that and lets you see everything that you can't see and So a lot of my work takes you back and tries to get you to the beauty of the map itself When you look at it normally look at a map you sort of can see where you are. It's a specific place and You get the map maker sort of helps you get to where you want to go in this Exhibition in many of the works the viewer is going to decide where they go and not the map maker Is that is that part of the intention behind the work? I believe so a number of these artists do have Certain recognizable places on the map for instance these maps are of three East Coast cities There are Collage maps in here where if you get close enough you can read place names But it's also kind of Pulling back from this is a thing that shows you where Things are in geography and because it's on a flat piece of paper. That's an abstraction in and of itself but I think they further that and Take away a lot of visual cues that you find on a map But it's still recognizable as something that is or was a map The work we looked at from Jeff Woodbury is very definitely something that is based on a Shape if you will that is used in a map we have for instance the gunpowder drawing of of river systems that is a Map of a river system, but it is also very abstract that work the artist takes a piece of paper and Draws on it with gunpowder, so they take grains of gunpowder and lay it down in lines as if as you would with a pencil then it's sandwiched the paper is sandwiched between two pieces of wood and There's a fuse in there and the artist lights the fuse and it burns away the gunpowder Which marks the paper and if it's done, right? It doesn't consume the paper so at least it leaves a black Smoky mark on the paper and it actually looks like Pencil that's been smudged How long is the exhibit in place for and where can people get more information? The exhibition is up until March 10th of 2018 There is information about it on our website www.oshermaps.org and It's on the I believe it's on the visit tab for exhibitions


Okay. Thank you. So, as you said, I'll be talking about the user role permissions model. So about me, so my name is Akshath. I also go by the name AKJN. I'm a sophomore undergraduate student from IIT Patna, India. And I have been an active open source contributor at FOSS Asia since like over one year now. I was a GSOC student with FOSS Asia last year and I'm also mentoring in Google code in 2018 and code it 2018 with FOSS Asia. So about Suzy. So as the previous speakers have already said, Suzy is an intelligent open source personal assistant. It's a rule-based personal assistant. We have several platforms. We have web, Android, iOS, we have numerous bots, etc. where like Suzy server is integrated. So there are various services we provide. So let's begin the talk. So what exactly are user roles? So each user role basically defines the permissions for a set of users, like what task he or she can perform. So let's say a very basic example can be like let's say we are creating any Google document. So we have all gone through these things, right? Like who like let's say we want to give like edit access to someone like some of our friends or someone. So these are basically these are what user roles are. So for in case of Google Doc, like the least permission one is just him or her being able to view the document. After that comes the next one which is like he or she is able to comment. After that he or she can edit and then comes the directly the owner of the document. So this is in the case of Google document. So this is what user roles are. So in the case of Suzy user role. So earlier we were following the Wikipedia user role permission model but recently we decided to switch to our own permission model. So the main reason for this was like it allows us to make more flexible decisions based on what are our needs for various Suzy services, alright? So as we can also see over on this picture on the right side. So each user creates an account. So each account is linked to a user and each user has a user role and each role is basically linked with a set of permissions which he or she has. So as I said we switch to our own user role permission model but why? So it allows us to have more flexibility. It is a better administrative model based on what we require and it also allows us to provide a better distribution of the various permissions based on what we require. Like we have various services. We have client side. We have bots. We have like various other things. So based on those things we can distribute the permissions like more appropriately based on our needs. So what are the different user roles in Suzy permission model? Like in the case of Google Doc we had like the ability to view, ability to comment, ability to edit and then comes the owner. So in the case of Suzy permission model these are the various user roles which we have. So the least one or the lowest one is the blocked users. These are the users which are basically blocked and then comes the anonymous users and then are the unverified, then are the registered, then are the reviewer, operator, admin, all the way to super admin. So we will be going over all these in the next upcoming slides. So this slide and this next slide. These two slides are basically, so we had a spreadsheet as the spreadsheet was actually quite long enough I couldn't fit them in one slide. So basically this spreadsheet or on the top row we have the various features which we have and on the left side on the left most column we have these different user roles. So this spreadsheet is basically this was a roadmap to implement the new user role model for Suzy. So I basically split this in two parts in like two slides in the presentation. So like the basic gist is that this allows us to basically figure out what we need for each user role, what features we need, what we need to limit for each user role. So coming back to the slide, so starting off with blocked users and also one more thing I'd like to point out here like you can see different colors right? We have green, we have red and we have yellow. So as we are implementing the new user role model like not all can be done at once. So we started doing that we also have this new this tab V1. So this was our roadmap and this current tab is basically what's the current situation. So the green ones have already been implemented. The yellow ones are in the process of being implemented and the red ones like we'll take them after the yellow ones have been implemented. So coming back to this so blocked users. So these are the users which have been blocked by the admins and hence they don't have any access to any of the features of Suzy AI. And as we can see as we saw on the spreadsheet this was marked as yellow as this is still under the process of being implemented on the Suzy AI server and also in the various APIs which we have. So the second one was anonymous user. So these are the users which do not log in and these just browse the websites and use our services without logging in. So like we have services like the users which have not logged in though they also can use all the skills they also can they they can use skills but they cannot create their own skills and they cannot rate any of the existing skills they cannot also make the bots and all those things. So some example APIs where the minimum user role is anonymous are as follows and on the top right side we have like this function this is a Java function so this is how we basically in all the APIs which we have on the server side this is how we control what's the lower most user role which can access this API from the client side. So return user role anonymous so this specifies that the minimum user role required for accessing this API is anonymous. So some example APIs where we have the minimum user role is anonymous like get skill metadata service. So this is an API to fetch the basically the details of all the skills. So as I said the anonymous users can browse all the skills so they should be able to see all the skill details for all the skills. Hence they have access to this service they have the sign up service because they haven't signed up so that's why we have the console service so they also have access to all the console services which we have and then the get API key service which also which is basically like some skills require some API keys to work so as I said that the anonymous users are all they also can use all the skills so they also should be able to get the API keys from the server in order to be able to use some of those skills. So this was about the anonymous users. Nextly so on the spreadsheet we can see that we have these two things unverified user and registered user. So current and these are marked as yellow so these haven't been implemented yet and the current implementation is like we have a user who has we have this user who is already logged in so we want to split this into two parts which are unverified and registered. So the current implementation is on the server side is like this that we have this return user role dot user which specifies that the minimum user role required is user. So we want to split the user user role into two parts which are the unverified user and the verified user which are basically the registered user. So the unverified user are basically those which haven't basically gone to their email and clicked on the verify account link so they haven't been verified yet by the server. So we wish that they shouldn't be able to make their own skills or create any of the bots or rate any of the existing skills as well. So this is in the process of being implemented in the various APIs which we have. So next is the registered user. So these are the users who have registered they have clicked on the verify account link on their email they are able to make the skills they are able to rate any of the existing skills they are able to create their bots they are able to deploy their bots and this is also kind of being in the process of being implemented on the server and the current user role the user which we had so that's like this registered user which would most for the most part inherit most of those things from the user user role. So some example APIs where the minimum user role is user or whenever then this new model gets implemented it will be shifted to registered user so those are as follows. So we have these are some of the APIs we have the list user settings service which is basically user specific thing so and then we have change user setting service it allows users to change their settings we have the password change service we have the get rating by user service so this basically fetches the various ratings done by user on various skills we have the feedback skill service which allows users to submit feedback to the for the for the various skills which we have we have a add new device service we have delete device service and this term device this this is basically being referred to the sujii smart speaker devices which we have and there are various there are lots of various APIs to explore whose minimum user role required is user so next we have these two pages again so here so the next user role was reviewer so if we can see here so between reviewer and between registered user we don't have much much distinction but we wish that reviewer should be able to review the various skills which we have this is why we kept the provision for a separate user role so that in future whenever we wish to give reviewer more power we are able to do that because like shifting to an entirely different user role model isn't something which like we can do like very frequently or like that so let's shift to reviewer so this is the fifth user role which we have so as I said we don't have much distinction between reviewer and normal user as of right now but this allows provision for more distribution of power in future whenever whenever we wish to have like more reviewer specific things alright so the main intent for having a separate user role was because of the number of because of increasing number of skills every day so we need a dedicated user role for this purpose alright and then we have the next user role is operator so this is where things get interesting so this guy gets access to all the admin panel he can see he or she can see the list of all the users and their connected suji as smart speaker devices etc on the admin panel and then we have admin so this gets some even more power than operators so he also obviously gets access to the admin panel