Podcasts about iops

In the armed forces and struggling with alcohol addiction? Here's how the Addiction Resource Center's intensive outpatient programs (IOPs) can help you. Visit https://sayarc.com/tricare-approved-iop/ for details. Addiction Resource Center LLC. City: Yuba City Address: 1002 Live Oak Blvd. Website: https://sayarc.com

Yuba City's Addiction Resource Center offers TRICARE-approved, career-safe treatment programs specifically designed for active-duty military personnel, addressing unique challenges like combat-related PTSD and substance use disorders in a confidential, specialized setting. Visit https://sayarc.com/tricare-approved-iop/ to learn more. Addiction Resource Center LLC. City: Yuba City Address: 1002 Live Oak Blvd. Website: https://sayarc.com

Active-duty personnel and veterans can now access specialized addiction treatment through Addiction Resource Center's TRICARE-approved IOP in Yuba City. Visit https://sayarc.com/tricare-approved-iop/ for details. Addiction Resource Center LLC. City: Yuba City Address: 1002 Live Oak Blvd. Website: https://sayarc.com

Today, we have Sam Lambert back on the show! Sam is the CEO of PlanetScale, and if you follow him on X, you know he's one of the sharpest voices in the database space—cutting through the hype with deep experience and a no-nonsense approach. In this episode, we dive into PlanetScale's new Metal offering, which has been battle-tested with PlanetScale's high-scale cloud business partners and is now GA. Sam also shares why staying profitable is crucial—not just for the business but for the stability and reliability it guarantees for customers. While many cloud infrastructure companies chase the next hype cycle, Sam prefers to keep it boring—delivering rock-solid performance with no surprises Finally, we close with Sam's thoughts on other happenings in the database space -- Aurora DSQL, Aurora Limitless, MySQL benchmarks, and multi-region strong consistency. Tune in for a deep dive into databases, cloud infrastructure, and what it takes to build a sustainable, high-performance tech company. Timestamps 01:34 Start 06:42 PlanetScale Metal 11:15 The problem with separation of storage and compute 15:02 EBS Tax 17:32 How does Vitess handle durability 22:58 Metal recommended for all PlanetScale users? 27:20 The hidden expense of IOPS for cloud databases 37:41 Timeline of creating PlanetScale Metal 41:32 Focus on profitability 47:52 Removal of hobby plan 57:45 Deprecation of PlanetScale Boost 01:00:24 DSQL 01:01:51 Aurora Limitless 01:04:15 AWS as a partner 01:07:00 The spectacle of AWS re:Invent 01:12:22 Benchmarks and benchmarketing 01:15:51 AWS Databases + multi-region strong consistency

Send us a textJanuary 2025 FinOps news.Instances/Computehttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/announcing-smaller-machine-types-for-a3-high-vms - The A3 Ultra machine type is available in the following region and zone: St. Ghislain, Belgium, Europe - europe-west1-bhttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/first-google-axion-processor-c4a-now-ga-with-titanium-ssd - Google Axion Processor-based C4A VMs with Titanium SSD are now generally available. Part of our general-purpose machine family, these instances come with up to 6 TiB of Titanium SSD disks. Titanium SSD is our latest generation of Local SSD. It uses Titanium I/O offload processing and offers enhanced SSD security, performance, and management.Compute Engine - Generally available: Managed instance groups (MIGs) let you create pools of suspended and stopped virtual machine (VM) instances. You can manually suspend and stop VMs in a MIG to save on costs, or use suspended and stopped pools to speed up scale out operations of your MIG. For more information, see About suspending and stopping VMs in a MIG.Data/DBs/AIAzure OpenAI provisioned reservations (June - but not sure we mentioned it)With the introduction of 1-month and 1-year Provisioned Reservations, businesses that commit to using Azure OpenAI on a scale can enjoy substantial discounts compared to the standard pay-as-you-go pricing. You can manage these reservations in Cost analysis in the same way as any other reservation.For further details on how to purchase and manage these reservations, please refer to the article below: Save costs with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service Provisioned Reservations  Storagehttps://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/01/amazon-s3-metadata-generally-available Generally available: Azure NetApp Files now supports minimum volume size of 50 GiB.Generally Available: Azure Files provisioned v2 billing model for HDD (Standard) - (Added to Roadmap 8th Jan 2025 - but released in October 24) The provisioned v2 model for Azure Files HDD (standard) pairs predictability of total cost of ownership with flexibility, allowing you to create a file share that meets your exact storage and performance requirements. Provisioned v2 shares enable independent provisioning of storage, IOPS, and throughput. In addition to predictable pricing and flexible provisioning, provisioned v2 also enables increased scale and performance, up to 256 TiB, 50,000 IOPS, and 5 GiB/sec of throughput; and per share monitoring. Provisioned v2 is generally available in a subset of regions. For the current list of available regions, see provisioned v2 availability.Visibility (Billing conductor - Tags - cost categories)New fields for cost allocation (Enterprise Agreement customers)You can use different le

AWS Morning Brief for the week of December 2, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon CloudWatch adds context to observability data in service consoles, accelerating analysisAmazon Cognito introduces Managed Login to support rich branding for end user journeysAmazon Cognito now supports passwordless authentication for low-friction and secure loginsAmazon Connect Email is now generally availableAmazon EBS announces Time-based Copy for EBS SnapshotsAmazon EC2 Auto Scaling introduces highly responsive scaling policiesAmazon EC2 Capacity Blocks now supports instant start times and extensionsAmazon ECR announces 10x increase in repository limit to 100,000Amazon EFS now supports up to 2.5 million IOPS per file systemAmazon S3 now supports enforcement of conditional write operations for S3 general purpose bucketsApplication Signals provides OTEL support via X-Ray OTLP endpoint for tracesAWS delivers enhanced root cause insights to help explain cost anomaliesEnhanced Pricing Calculator now supports discounts and purchase commitments (in preview)AWS PrivateLink now supports cross-region connectivityAnnouncing the new AWS User Notifications SDKAnnouncing new feature tiers: Essentials and Plus for Amazon CognitoAnnouncing Savings Plans Purchase AnalyzerData Exports for FOCUS 1.0 is now in general availabilityIntroducing a new experience for AWS Systems ManagerIntroducing generative AI troubleshooting for Apache Spark in AWS Glue (preview)Understanding how certain database parameters impact scaling in Amazon Aurora Serverless v2Analyzing your AWS Cost Explorer data with Amazon Q Developer: Now Generally AvailableYour guide to AWS for Advertising & Marketing at re:Invent 2024AWS IoT Services alignment with US Cyber Trust MarkStreamlining AWS Organizations Cleanup StrategiesSponsorWiz: wiz.io/lastweek

Tiff and Dana discuss the importance of coding accuracy in dental practices. That includes universal codes everyone can understand, how to stay up-to-date on resources, the best way to know team members are getting paid for all their work, different codes across specialties, and more. Episode resources: Reach out to Tiff and Dana Tune Into DAT's Monthly Webinar Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:01.11) Hello Dental A Team listeners, we are back at you today. I have the one and only Miss Dana here with me to podcast. I love pulling Dana in. I love pulling all the consultants in, but I truly love pulling in Dana. think I shouted you out this morning. do. Wednesday core value shout out in our.   I know that we've done some podcasts on that. So if you're not already doing a core value shout out every day or every week, please by all means go listen to those podcasts because it's freaking incredible and Dana you truly are the epitome of ease within our company and for your clients and I just think you need to publicly shout it from the rooftops be Just recognized for that aspect of your personality. You truly do make life easier I know a lot of your clients feel the same way you are   so good at finding the easiest path for the systems implementation for whatever it is that needs to be done for us as a company. So Dana, welcome today. I'm so excited to have you here with me. Thank you for joining me on this beautiful Wednesday. I don't know what day this is gonna air, but it's a Wednesday today. And it's absolutely gorgeous here in Arizona. How are you, Dana?   Dana (01:08.193) doing good, Tim, doing good. love days like today.   The Dental A Team (01:11.629) I do too, I do too. It's starting to get fallish in Arizona, which means 85 degrees instead of the 105 that we had last week, least up in Phoenix. I know you get a little bit more fall down where you're at, but I'll take the 85 over the 105 for sure. Today, Dina, I wanted to pick your brain.   I've got some information today I wanna share with the doctors. It's also for billing departments, for treatment coordinators, for whomever wants to listen to this. But I really wanted us to shout out our doctors for really, really just knowing everything about their businesses. I know that you guys are all here listening. I know you're watching, whatever it might be, to really learn more about the business side and about what the team is doing to help support your practice. So I wanna shout you out for that. And I just think it's a really incredible tool.   and resource to have to truly know what it is that's going on, the inner workings behind the scenes of your practice, aside from just the dentistry that you're performing. So shout out to you guys for being here, for listening. Team members, if your doctor's not listening yet, please share it with them. Dana, today I really wanted to pick your brain and go over some coding information. I know it sounds super boring, you guys, but stick with us. We've got some great tips and tricks and some tools, especially for you doctors who are out there to really   focus in and pay attention to the things that are being input into the system and sent off to insurance companies, or if you're fee for service, you still need to be insanely accurate within your system and making sure that we're using the right tools. So doctors, again, this one's for you as well. Billing representatives, treatment coordinators, front office representatives, office managers, whoever you might be, whoever might be touching a ledger or an account or a code in general dental assistance, hi, Genes, you guys.   This is all gonna be really great information for all of you. Coding with Accuracy happens to be a book, by the way, you can purchase that. But honestly, coding with accuracy is incredibly important and valuable to your system, not only for the billing portion to ensure that we're accurately sending things off to insurance companies, accurately getting paid, but realistically to show super accurately what you've actually done with your patients to your patients. That way, if anything were to ever come about and anyone needed to look into it or   The Dental A Team (03:28.327) your patients had questions and they asked for the account, it makes sense to the next person who's looking at it. And you can say, yes, I did that, that was me. I did that filling, I did that crown, I did that crown seat, I did those pieces. I know a lot of practices, and Dana, I think you've probably seen this too, a lot of practices will overuse, in my opinion, an office visit or a palliative treatment, to certain codes like that and unspecified, because they're just not sure.   what to use. And so they throw one of those, especially office visits, and I'm like, what is this office visit? How many, this patient's been in for 20 office visits. They're like, most of those are crown seats or like if a filling needed to be adjusted or like, and I'm like, wow, so we don't have any documentation right here that we ever sat any of these crowns.   That's an issue. looking at those pieces and making sure that we're super accurate with what we're calling things is something I really, really want to talk about today, Dana. Have you noticed that as well? I know you see a lot of clients, you do a lot of virtual clients, but you see a lot of ledgers, you get a lot of things sent to you, and you have been traveling a ton this year in office to practices as well. So what are you seeing when you're out there when it comes to coding and just kind of like randomness that you're seeing thrown around?   Dana (04:40.983) Yeah, I agree with you on just like the miscellaneous codes. I delivery. What did we deliver? Because we need to know exactly what we delivered today. And then a lot of just like 999 things and sometimes a 999 code you absolutely   The Dental A Team (04:47.133) Yeah.   Dana (04:55.967) can utilize it, should be utilizing it, but oftentimes too, it's like, no, there's actually a code for that. Like we don't have to send a 999 with documentation and notes, there's a code specific for that. So making sure that offices really are up to date, also to like when things change because they do change occasionally. And so just having somebody who knows those things in and out has resources to spot check and that we are billing what we're doing and coding exactly what we're doing.   The Dental A Team (05:25.511) Yeah, I totally agree. The 999 code, I love that one. It is thrown in there for everything and I am guilty of the 999 code because I'm like, don't know what he's even talking about. 999, that sucker. And I'll explain, I'll say exactly what he just said to me. I have no idea what he said, but I've got this. So I'm surely, surely guilty of that one. I do love the staying up to date and doctors, I really want you to know and understand within dentistry.   There's not, like we have a course for billing that will review billing for you and will go over the basics of billing, what it needs to look like, how to send a claim, how to input an EOB and a payment and all of those pieces. But there's really not a good school for billing where it's like, gosh, I'm gonna send them to a billing school and now they've got this accredited school has shown them this kind of like medical billing, right? You can go to medical billing school and now you're a medical biller.   to be a dental biller, you just needed someone ahead of you to show you how to do it. So within this world, it's just super important, like Dana said, that we stay on top of it as best we can. So making sure that we're getting ADA emails sent to us and that we're watching for any codes that change, because they will let us know. Whatever your state's dental association is, I know here it's the AZDA, the California Dental Association.   Whatever it is, make sure that you're signed up for those auto emails, because that's going to be the best resource. And then as those yearly conventions come around that we all love to go to, that we hate taking boring classes, look for any updates. I wouldn't say you've got to hit the billing courses yourself, or you have to send your billing rep to the billing courses. Sometimes they're a bust. Sometimes they're super insurance prone or driven. I don't love that. But if there's anything that's like coding updates or   New laws things like that. It's always a good idea. So I do want to preface it with that Just know always staying up to date just getting those resources sent to you is going to be super super important And now aside from that there are things like coding with confidence coding with accuracy All of those different books that you can get I believe coding with confidence you can order from Amazon or ADA I think both of them have it. I think it probably comes from the ADA when you do it from Amazon, whatever you choose   The Dental A Team (07:37.7) It's a fantastic book and having that resource, there's a companion book that goes with it as well. I always had that resource with me. It was literally in a drawer behind my desk and as soon as I had something pop up for an implant or gosh, when we were doing over dentures and there's just so many parts and pieces and little things that need to be accurately coded.   There's no way I'm gonna remember all of these things or intuitively know it. So I would pull those books out constantly and I would go through it with my doctor and I'd say, okay, does this describe, is this what you're saying? Is this describing it? Because even just for regular dentures, there's different codes that can be used. And if you use one that's a maxillary but you're doing a mandibular denture, you're not gonna get paid, right? And even if you put upper denture in the thing and you did a mandibular code, they're still not gonna pay it because it doesn't match.   So just making sure that those codes are super accurate. Now from a doctor's standpoint, why is this important? Super important because you need to be paid, right? So my owner doctors, you need to be sure that your practice is being paid, that you're being paid for what you're doing, your hygiene team's being paid for what they're doing, and that if, again, anything were ever to have been and come about, somebody looking at the ledger, looking at the account, looking at the chart, can accurately and confidently see exactly what you performed. So not only do you need to get paid,   you need to cover your tail. For my associate doctors and even my hygienist who might be listening, you really, really wanna watch your production and your collections, because typically, especially my associates, you guys are gonna be paid off of that in some form or fashion. So making sure that the coding is correct and that it accurately, actually reflects what you've done is key. Otherwise, you might get paid for a filling when you did an onlay.   Right, and the billing representative, has, or he has no idea, they were not chair side with you. So if it's not fixed chair side, or if you, gosh, Dina, how many times have you seen this one, where chair side, you know, we were scheduled for an MO, chair side, doctor's like, this went into the distal, we've gotta update that. So we update it, we tell the patient, we're like, got another service added, get the treatment plan going, lay them back, finish the filling, and then they go up front, and then they get paid on an MO.   The Dental A Team (09:51.99) because the MOD was never switched out and the appointment went before it was set complete. again, the billing representative, he's not chair side. They have no idea that that billing changed. The dental assistant needed to update and change it. So making sure that that's accurate in there. Now, Dina, I know you have a lot of practices and a lot of associates. You've got a lot of big practices that have a lot of associates. How do you make sure at the end of the day, at the end of the month, at the end of everything, that these guys are knowing exactly what their   being paid on? Like how do you make sure that they know with confidence that they're getting paid for everything that they did?   Dana (10:28.329) Yeah, I have them usually daily check their provider production and check their individual provider day sheet just to make sure that everything was accounted for. If there were changes, if something was walked out inaccurately, catching that from the very beginning is super important because honestly, like you pointed out, the difference in some of these codes is hundreds of dollars worth of production. And that can be even within implant parts, even with indentures, like a difference in that   that coding can majorly impact production. So making sure that everything is accounted for, everything that they did is on there and everything is walked out and ready to submit. So that whether it's insurance based or we've got to call a patient and say, hey, you know, we under collected that service did change, we had added. whether it is patient portion that we've got to update or insurance portion, just making sure that we're catching that. And I like to do it daily because   Claims are submitted daily. We're reaching out to patients and we don't want a patient to go till the end of the month before we're like, hey, by the way, you missed a thing, right? So I like my, especially my associates and hygiene to just look and make sure everything's accounted for each and every day.   The Dental A Team (11:34.98) Yeah. Yes.   The Dental A Team (11:47.01) Yeah, I agree. think that's perfect because pulling that sheet, especially like Dentrix and Eagle Soft and OpenDone, like all of these programs have a super easy sheet to print at the end of the day or even like print screen and then just look at it. So we're not using all the paper all the time. I've definitely had it where a doctor will come back like a week later and be like, we didn't actually do a buildup because we just, you you treat and plan a crown and we should plan a buildup just in case, or you have your doctors who treat and plan only a crown and then add a buildup.   if we needed a buildup and so vice versa. A week later, we're like, I didn't build up on that crown. I'm like, well, bro, she gone, she lost. There's no way, it's so uncomfortable to call a patient and be like, by the way, we forgot to charge you for that billing that's underneath the crown that's to build the tooth back up because of the K. And now I'm in this whole conversation of like, why didn't this just get done the first time? So I totally agree. I think that's brilliant. And doctors also, looking ahead at your schedule,   Dana (12:21.687) It was true.   The Dental A Team (12:43.172) Prepping your schedule in conjunction with that is gonna be huge. We get really comfortable. Our dental assistants are incredible. I was a dental assistant near and dear to my heart. It's my favorite position. If I were ever to like quit everything in life and go back to in-office dentistry, it would have to be as a dental assistant. I would not do anything else. It's my favorite space. But you guys, I messed up sometimes. Like it happens. I would get forgetful.   Like how many times did I forget to grab the bond? And I'm like, you can't do a filling without a bond. How did you forget that? And then expecting me to change it every single time in the chart or make sure that it was accurate ahead of time. Things flip through the cracks. So we've gotta have checks and balances. We can't just rely on one person to get it right every single time. So your dental assistants prepping the charts, prepping your schedule for the next day is huge, but I really wanna implore that you guys, you doctors,   You are looking at your schedules as well. You know what's coming up and you know that it's accurate. I had a dentist that worked in our practice. He's fantastic. He's gone to all of this oral surgery, like extracurricular. He's just, it's insane. I watch his videos on Instagram and I'm like, that's so gross. I always must do him. Like I remember the first time I did a bone flap with you and I was like, what? I can't do this, but he's so good. He did all of these like perio surgeries, oral surgeries. He did so many things in our practice and holy cow.   A GP girl over here, learning how to code for all of these extensive procedures that he was doing. He was doing, you know, he's doing the blood draws before it was even a thing. I am like, are we allowed to do that? Like I'm in my practice, like what the heck? This is crazy. And now I'm having to code things that to me are like outlandish.   and I'm sitting there Googling things. Like, this doesn't make sense. So I'm pulling out my little code book and like, gosh, it is in here. This is a dental thing. We can do this, but there's no way those added procedures would have been accurately coded if I didn't take those extra steps to ensure it. And if he didn't, bless his heart, come to me every day.   The Dental A Team (14:47.322) with a list of the things that needed to be added to tomorrow that wasn't accurate or things that we missed today. He would double check his treatment plans just because they were so extensive. And honestly, there were times, like he did GP work in our practice as well. So there were times too where he would catch a filling surface was missed or an onlay surface was missed. And I'm like, dang, not only are, you know, did we miss something on your giant surgery over here that I literally cannot assist with, cause I will pass out.   But we also miss like a surface on an online, like, goodness gracious, right? But he is my example because he was so diligent about making sure that the charting was accurate. Like, of course he wanted to get paid for the things he was doing, but he's like, I need to make sure that whatever it is that I'm doing, it's all here. It's all accounted for. And when he went to go do all of the accrediting with the oral surgery boards and implant boards and like, he's got all this crazy stuff behind him now. He needed all of those things. He called me from Texas years later.   And I was like, remember that patient that we did that thing? And I'm like, my gosh, yeah. So I'm like looking for this patient. He's like, I need all of their notes and I need all of their ledger and I need everything to submit to the implant board. And I was like, my gosh, thank goodness we went through and did all of those things. So you guys, it doesn't matter what you're doing. You don't have to be doing crazy dentistry or crazy oral surgery within your practice. Those minor things need to get caught as well. And Dana, earlier you mentioned like the 999 code.   And I know we have to go in or have the auto updates done and make sure that the codes are being updated. But I did notice there are more and more systems that even have as simple as broken appointment code already in there, Crown Seat Code, Denture Seat Code, all of these pieces. So when you're working with practices and you're seeing this, or they ask us, we'll get text messages from office managers that are like, this is what he said, what do I code that as?   I don't know, right? But what are you doing? How are you helping them to figure out, this is probably not a pallet over 999 or what an office visit, this is probably X, Y, or Z.   Dana (16:52.117) Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, if a lot of times I am pulling like a coding with confidence, or I'm googling things and, I'm trying to piece it together or I'm asking, you know, okay, well, like, walk with what does that look like? Walk me through like, can you explain the process to me? So maybe I can find it in here or send me a picture of the part that maybe I can look it up. But it's really just doing due diligence and combing through the codes that are available. And then determining   The Dental A Team (16:58.797) Yeah.   The Dental A Team (17:10.987) Yes.   Dana (17:20.083) If there is a specific code for that procedure and if there's not, then yeah, you do a 999 code with lots of documentation, IOPs, all the things, so that once it gets to insurance, they can determine if it's something that they're covering.   The Dental A Team (17:35.266) I agree, yeah, I love that. I do love Google, I have Googled so many times. I've been in office trying to help them come up with cheat sheets, which is the next little topic here, but that I'm like, what is this? Or give me a picture of this so that I can put it on their cheat sheet. And doctors who are doing things like implants or dentures even, crowns, anything you're doing, having those cheat sheets is super helpful.   I have a lot of my practices throw those into their operations manual. So with the crown setup or whatever, it'll also have the steps and the codes that would be used. We have to update it when they update, but have all of those available there side by side with it. So it'll be like, crown seed, and it'll be the setup, and then it'll be all of the codes. The ones that get wild are our implants, right? Our All-On-X denture cases. Those ones get wildly insane.   dentures, right, start to finish because what happens is in the treatment planning mode, let's use denture, right, as a treatment planner, right, so I'm a dental assistant and the doctor says we need to do a full denture. Cool, maxillary denture. And then I'm like, treatment coordinator, here you go. And they're like, cool. And then they schedule a denture. There's like 16 steps sometimes to a denture.   Right, so having that and being able to break it down and break it apart shows that all the steps and processes were done and then having a cheat sheet that goes along with it helps not only your treatment coordinator and your scheduler, but it helps your biller and your dental assistant, even your hygienist. I've had so many hygienists come to me and say, what step are we on? And I'm like, well, I'm not sure, let's look. Like, let's look at our checklist and see where we're at. So even within that denture, having the denture treatment plan for pricing.   Dana (18:56.011) Yes.   The Dental A Team (19:24.294) Obviously, right, any extractions, any bone grafts that need to be done. If you're doing a temporary denture before the final is done, if you're doing, gosh, if you're doing a scan and a final delivery, like they're getting much faster. But before, remember, we had to have a wax rim, we had to have teeth and wax, we had to have the color shade, we had to have a try-in, then we had to have a realign. Like all of these pieces needed to be segregated out in there so that we treatment plan.   the one thing, but we have those steps readily available so that it can be scheduled correctly and in order. And then having those cheat sheets with those codes lined up is super helpful. I have a practice in Wisconsin that was just getting so confused on the implant process and an ortho process. And I was like, easy peasy, let's just like section this out. And now every single time they've got it laminated and they just pull it out. They're like, I've got my implant sheet. I've got my ortho sheet or whatever. So I always have them add that as well. So Dana.   Wrap it up for us. So we've got coding, checking, all the pieces. What could an office do, a doctor do to ensure maybe even adding it to their operations manual? What's the process they should make sure that is being followed and updated yearly within all of these pieces that we've talked about today?   Dana (20:42.627) Yeah, I think it's added to your yearly calendars that you make sure that you do know the updates you have the codes every year and just like we get Insurance fee schedules and we do all of our insurance updates just add that to that list one So add and make sure we've got do we have the resource for it? And do we know what they are? I think to any time that you are adding a new service just checking and double-checking that you know what the codes are So if you're bringing in a CBC team, make sure that those codes are in there and you've got fees attached to them   and all of those pieces. I love your cheat sheet idea as far as especially where there's a there's a lot of nitty-gritty things that need to get built out for specific things like ortho-like implants making sure that you've got cheat sheets and you make it really really easy and then make sure you've got a very clear communication system for when treatment changes so that it gets changed all the way okay and then I think daily having people look at them and just one   Final tip I guess in in with your cheat sheets oftentimes we call things things that like are not in the code, right? The description of the code is not that and then we're constantly like, what are they actually? What do they actually call right? A lot of your systems will allow you to add notes to like those procedure codes put in what you call it in the office so that it's easy to find it will still put the actual code definition on your piece going on your claims go out, but if you call something something specific   just update it in your system so it's easy for the team to buy.   The Dental A Team (22:12.623) That was brilliant. I know my dentist had like five different terms for a hater bar and I never, was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And the Ribon, he would call the, you know, the Perio procedure by the name of the material he needed. And I was like, so, and he only do this once every, I don't know, 10 years. Like this procedure is never done. He's like, we've got to do a Ribon. Where's the Ribon? I'm like, I don't even remember what this is.   I don't know what that says. So yes, I agree. I love that idea, the descriptions and making sure too then I would transfer. We do this in our Google Drive, you guys. Whatever you might call it, also probably put that on your cheat sheet, maybe in parentheses. Like this is what it is. These are the five different terms that any of our doctors may call it so that it is easy to find and easy to figure out. I think that's brilliant. Awesome, thank you for wrapping us, Dana. I think this was insanely beneficial for all of our doctors out there and our team members again.   Doctors, if you're here listening, congrats. I think that's so huge. It's really important for you to know and understand these things. Share it with your team, because they can use these pieces too, especially anyone who's doing your billing and your practice. And then team members who are out there whose doctors haven't heard this one yet, share it with them. Make sure that they understand what they're getting into as well, and that they're supporting you in your position as a team member to be super accurate, because you're depending on them.   to get things right so that you can do your job. So share it with them. Make sure you guys are all up to date and as always, reach out for any questions you might have. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. We are not code masters, but you guys, we are solution masters and we will find the answers or find the way and we can help you with just about anything you can think of. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. We can't wait to catch you next time.  

Michael shares insights into Addiction, trauma, attachment, and EFT. Women in particular have a tendency to take care of everyone else around them first, while putting their own self care and wellness on the back burner. This podcast is designed to give you actionable advice and tools to help you power up your own wellness journey, and live the best life possible!I am your host, Amy Zellmer. I am editor-in-chief of Midwest YOGA Magazine and author of The Chair Yoga Pocket Guide. Additionally I am passionate about yoga, photography, wellness, and all things glittery! You can find out more about me at www.creatingwellnessfromwithin.comFollow me on: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter         Today's guest is: Michael BarnettHe is a licensed psychotherapist with over 30 years of clinical experience, and an ICEEFT certified trainer in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). He founded the Atlanta Center for EFT in 2007 and is the cofounder and codirector of the EFT Center of Los Angeles. Prior to beginning private practice in 1993, Michael worked for 8 years in inpatient, dual diagnosis units, and IOPs for addictive disorders.  He began his training in EFT in 2005. Since 2008 Michael has facilitated over 100 EFT certification trainings, workshops and speaking engagements throughout North America and abroad. Throughout his career Michael has worked ardently toward integrating traditional and experiential processes in his approach to working with addictive disorders. He contributed to the existing EFT canon through tailoring EFT to effectively treat couples struggling with trauma and addiction. In 2017, he completed a 3-year research project implementing EFT into the treatment regimen of an inpatient addiction facility in Atlanta. Michael presented with Dr. Gabor Mate on working with addiction from a trauma-informed, attachment perspective at the 2017 EFT Summit. Michael is the author of the Emotionally Focused Therapy Workbook for Addiction: How to Heal the Loneliness and Shame that Trigger Addictive Behaviors. www.michaelbarnettlpc.com Consider supporting the podcast for $5 though BuyMeACoffeeSupport the show

Did you know that with the Accelerated Logs feature in Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical service tier, the service provides 100% improvement in throughput? Additionally, you can automatically scale IOPS up to 80k and storage up to 32TB based on your workload needs. Siddhant (Sidd) Sawant joins Scott Hanselman to walk through the benefits of this tier and highlight its superior performance. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:55 - Updates to Azure DB for MySQL 04:53 - Demo of Accelerated Logs 08:28 - Discussion 10:52 - Wrap-up Recommended resources Advancements in the Business Critical service tier for Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server Microsoft Azure innovation powers leading price-performance for MySQL database in the cloud New advancements in Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server Business Critical service tier (YouTube) Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server service tiers Create a Pay-as-You-Go account (Azure) Create a free account (Azure) Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter/X: @SHanselman Azure Friday | Twitter/X: @AzureFriday Azure | Twitter/X: @Azure

Did you know that with the Accelerated Logs feature in Azure Database for MySQL Business Critical service tier, the service provides 100% improvement in throughput? Additionally, you can automatically scale IOPS up to 80k and storage up to 32TB based on your workload needs. Siddhant (Sidd) Sawant joins Scott Hanselman to walk through the benefits of this tier and highlight its superior performance. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:55 - Updates to Azure DB for MySQL 04:53 - Demo of Accelerated Logs 08:28 - Discussion 10:52 - Wrap-up Recommended resources Advancements in the Business Critical service tier for Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server Microsoft Azure innovation powers leading price-performance for MySQL database in the cloud New advancements in Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server Business Critical service tier (YouTube) Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server service tiers Create a Pay-as-You-Go account (Azure) Create a free account (Azure) Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter/X: @SHanselman Azure Friday | Twitter/X: @AzureFriday Azure | Twitter/X: @Azure

Welcome to episode 263 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we're diving into the world of Snowflake, including announcements from their latest conference and details about their recent breach. Seriously – MFA is important! Plus we look at updates to Terraform, Claude 3, and OCI pushing the IOPS limits and much more. Join us!  Titles we almost went with this week: Snowflake Announces State-of-the-Art way for hackers to Talk to your Data Ticketmaster gets a snow job – MFA matters!  The CloudPod wouldn't use Oracle even for a million IOPS Azure finally wakes up to hibernation support JJB No one ever called a Bastion Host Premium until Today – JPB MK I look forward to connecting Kinesis to Pub Sub to Event Hub in the most rube        goldberg eventing architecture ever Hashicorp shows you the way 10 ways to say I want you Matt (I'm not bias with the name) Can we just hibernate ourselves on AI announcements Sus is how i feel about the new Susscanner from AWS OCI has enough power to run Oracle databases with 1 MIllion IOPS OCI wants 1 Million IOPS (dr evil voice) Monday, Tuesday, Hashidays… General News  Terraform AWS Cloud Control API provider is now generally available  The AWS Cloud Control Provider (AWSCC), built around the AWS Cloud Control API and designed to bring new services to Terraform faster, is now generally available.  The 1.0 release represents a step in their effort to provide launch-day support of AWS services.   This service was put into tech preview in 2021.  Glad it’s finally here; although we thought this effort was abandoned, honestly.  Interesting that you can mix HCL Terraform and AWSCC, but specify the different resource types in the configurations.   00:53 New Vault and Boundary offerings advance Security Lifecycle Management at HashiDays 2024   Hashicorp held their “Hashidays” event in London this last week, and announced improvements to their Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) products: Vault and Boundary Vault will be getting Workload Identify Federation, coming soon to Vault Enterprise which enables secretless configuration for vault plugins that integrate with external systems supporting WIF, such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.  By enabling secretless configuration, organizations reduce security concerns that can come with using long-lived and highly privileged security credentials.  With WIF

Cale, Evan and Sujit have an insightful discussion with Niko Pamboukas and Siri Velauthapillai about the new Azure Boost feature that is being deployed into the Azure substrate for VMs. They explain the specialized FPGAs and ARM SoCs that provide extreme IOPs for storage and networking and almost no downtime for system upgrades.   Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode496.mp3 YouTube: https://youtu.be/4FPQCAmYrzw Resources: Learn more about Azure Boost at https://aka.ms/AzureBoost Learn about accelerated networking with Boost at https://aka.ms/MANA Learn about accelerated storage with Boost at https://aka.ms/NVMe   Other updates: Public preview: Azure Load Balancer now supports Admin State | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-bastion-premium/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/kubernetesmetadataandlogsfilteringpublicpreview/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-load-balancer-health-event-logs/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/generally-available-azure-chaos-studio-supports-a-new-pause-process-fault-for-windows-virtual-machines/

Join us for a deep dive into a perinatal IOP and what that involves. Today's expert shares helpful information so we can understand the value of this higher level of perinatal support. Roxanne Rosenberg is the co-founder and clinical director of Anchor Perinatal Wellness, the Southeast's only perinatal-specific intensive outpatient program (IOP). She is a member of the new federal Maternal Mental Health Task Force and has volunteered with Postpartum Support International at the local and national levels. She earned her bachelor's degree in psychology with honors from Yale University and her master's degree in psychology from Duke University. Roxanne has been supporting pregnant and postpartum people for over 15 years through individual psychotherapy, intensive outpatient programming, birth doula work, and advocacy. Her trainings in perinatal mental health and women's trauma have been available across the country. She is a bilingual Latina mom of two and is a survivor of perinatal loss and trauma.  Show Highlights: What is a perinatal IOP? Reasons why someone might need an IOP Understanding the history of IOPs in the US (first began in Rhode Island in 2000; even now, there are only 32 across the US) IOP resources are available both in-person and virtually. Typical perinatal symptoms that indicate the need for an IOP Barriers to IOP treatment, like insurance limitations (although most insurance will cover it!) Roxanne's role as the facilitator of the support system Promising results in Roxanne's IOP in the last two years Benefits of support in a group setting with a structured program Specific needs and concerns in the IOP environment How to find a perinatal IOP (and housing if you need to go to a different state for care) Anchor Perinatal Wellness supports and accommodates a parent with attachment to their baby by providing childcare. Perinatal IOPs are an underutilized resource because people are unaware of their existence! Roxanne's vision to make these IOPs more available to everyone who needs them The process of starting a perinatal IOP Advice for therapists who want to send their patients for this level of perinatal care Resources: Connect with Roxanne and Anchor Perinatal Wellness: Website, Roxanne's email, Anchor Perinatal's email, Facebook, YouTube, and phone: 919-275-0806 Please find resources in English and Spanish at Postpartum Support International, or by phone/text at 1-800-944-4773. There are many free resources, like online support groups, peer mentors, a specialist provider directory, and perinatal mental health training for therapists, physicians, nurses, doulas, and anyone who wants to better support people for whom they provide services.  You can also follow PSI on social media: Instagram, Facebook, and most other platforms Visit www.postpartum.net/professionals/certificate-trainings/ for information on the grief course.   Visit my website, www.wellmindperinatal.com, for more information, resources, and courses you can take today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This article has a concept I've never heard about: invisible downtime. This is the idea that there are problems in your application that the customer sees. Your servers are running, but the application doesn't work correctly or is pausing with a delay that impacts customers. From an IT perspective, the SLA is being met and there aren't any problems. From a customer viewpoint, they're ready to start looking at a competitor's offering. Lots of developers and operations people know there are issues in our systems. We know networks go down or connectivity to some service is delayed. We also know the database gets slow, or at least, slower than we'd like. We know there are poor-performing code and under-sized hardware, running with storage that doesn't produce as many IOPs as our workload demands. We would also like time to fix these issues, but often we aren't given any resources. Read the rest of Invisible Downtime

To introduce this podcast episode, Emily and Jamie discuss Jamie's 13th wedding anniversary and her upcoming trip. They go on to reflect on the importance of self-care and introduce this episode's guest, Jackie Lightner, talking about the different levels of mental health care and the unique approach of her program, Lightwork Therapy.  Jamie talks with Jackie Lightner, LICSW, and Executive Director of Lightwork Therapy and Recovery, a mental health service provider for women in Massachusetts. They discuss the evolving landscape of mental health care for women, acknowledging historical biases and the pressure on women to fulfill multiple roles. They explore societal expectations, the normalization of therapy, and challenges in accessing mental health support. The conversation delves into the need for intensive outpatient programs (IOPs) for women, highlighting issues with insurance coverage and the importance of tailored, supportive environments like Lightwork's female-focused space. They further discuss the challenges individuals face when transitioning from hospitalization to home care, highlighting the unpredictable wait times and insurance coverage issues. They emphasize the importance of navigating the system and advocating for proper care, sharing personal experiences and strategies to streamline the process. Jackie shares Lightwork's different approaches and experts, as well as their structured 20 week curriculum that covers themes like safety, guilt, and shame. They emphasize the importance of self-care for high-functioning individuals, providing accessible help without the need for referrals. Jackie highlights their commitment to connecting individuals with appropriate care, even if it's not with them. She encourages reaching out via their website or Instagram for support. In this week's Q&A, Emily and Jamie prepare listeners for the warmer weather by answering a question about the use of bug spray on 2 year olds.  This podcast is proudly brought to you by our fabulous sponsors: Feast & Fettle: Use code NAPSPOD for $30 off your first order kozēkozē: Use code NAPS for 20% off your purchase Kibou: Use code NAPS for 15% off your purchase of $89+

In this week's episode, Anna (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Kobi (https://twitter.com/kobigurk) chat with Gal Arnon (https://galarnon42.github.io/), Ph.D student from the Weizmann Institute of Science (https://weizmann.ac.il/pages/) & Giacomo Fenzi (https://twitter.com/GiacomoFenzi), Ph.D. student in the COMPSEC Lab (https://compsec.epfl.ch/) at EPFL (https://epfl.ch/). Gal and Giacomo are amongst the co-authors of ‘STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries' (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/390) and in this conversation, they discuss how their research led them to work on these topics and where the thesis for this particular work sparked from. They set the stage by exploring the history of FRI and discussing some hidden nuances in how FRI works. And then they introduce STIR, a system that can be used in place of FRI, which incorporates various optimisations to improve the performance. Here's some additional links for this episode: FRIDA: Data Availability Sampling from FRI by Hall-Andersen, Simkin and Wagner (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/248.pdf) Lattice-Based Polynomial Commitments: Towards Asymptotic and Concrete Efficiency by Fenzi, Moghaddas and Nguyen (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/846.pdf) DEEP-FRI: Sampling Outside the Box Improves Soundness by Ben-Sasson, Goldberg, Kopparty and Saraf (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/336.pdf) Proximity Gaps for Reed–Solomon Codes by Ben-Sasson, Carmon, Ishai, Kopparty and Saraf (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/654.pdf) IOPs with Inverse Polynomial Soundness Error by Arnon, Chiesa and Yogev (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1062.pdf) Episode 293: Exploring Security of ZK Systems with Nethermind's Michał & Albert (https://zeroknowledge.fm/293-2/) Circle STARKs by Haböck, Levit and Papini (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/278.pdf) Episode 304: Exploring FRI, LogUp and using M31 for STARKs with Ulrich Haböck (https://zeroknowledge.fm/304-2/) FRI-Binius: Improved Polynomial Commitments for Binary Towers (https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fri-binius) The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com (https://www.zkkrakow.com/) Aleo (http://aleo.org/) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/ (http://aleo.org/) If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

In this episode, we provide an overview of Amazon EBS, which stands for Elastic Block Storage. We explain what block storage is and how EBS provides highly available and high-performance storage volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances. We discuss the various EBS volume types, including GP3, GP2, provisioned IOPS, and HDD volumes, and explain how they differ in performance characteristics like IOPS and throughput. We go over important concepts like IOPS, throughput, and volume types so listeners can make informed decisions when provisioning EBS. We also cover EBS features like snapshots, encryption, direct API access, and ECS integration. Overall, this is a comprehensive guide to understanding EBS and choosing the right options based on your workload needs.

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 16:30:00 +0000 https://podcast.cloudonaut.io/85-losing-trust-in-kms c88b842d6dc869b9d099d0c0a50d6ca5 Andreas and Michael are losing trust in KMS because of a potential key policy privilege escalation. Andreas and Michael Wittig are building on AWS since 2009. Follow their journey of developing products like bucketAV, marbot, and HyperEnv and learn from practice. Topics KMS Key Policy Privilege Escalation AWS Management Console misses ability to integrate with AWS Marketplace solutions AWS News Check Links KMS Key Policy Privilege Escalation AWS CodeBuild announces support for reserved capacity Amazon ECS announces managed instance draining AWS announces higher read IOPS for Amazon Elastic File System Amazon ECS Service Connect introduces support for automatic traffic encryption with TLS Certificates Amazon Inspector now supports CIS Benchmark assessments for operating systems in EC2 instances Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.29 Provisioned capacity for API limits now available in Amazon Cognito Yan Cui on Provisioned capacity for Cognito API limits Subscribe Make sure you are not missing upcoming shows … Podcast feed YouTube channel Newsletter Projects bucketAV — Antivirus protection for Amazon S3 marbot — AWS Monitoring made simple! HyperEnv for GitHub Actions — Deploy self-hosted GitHub runners on AWS with ease! attachmentAV — Antivirus for Atlassian Jira and Confluence Contact and Feedback hello@cloudonaut.io Mastodon (Andreas) Mastodon (Michael) LinkedIn (Andreas) LinkedIn (Michael) 85 full Andreas and Michael are losing trust in KMS because of a potential key policy privilege escalation. no Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig focusing on AWS Cloud

Evelyn Osman, Principal Platform Engineer at AutoScout24, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the dire need for developers to agree on a standardized tool set in order to scale their projects and innovate quickly. Corey and Evelyn pick apart the new products being launched in cloud computing and discover a large disconnect between what the industry needs and what is actually being created. Evelyn shares her thoughts on why viewing platforms as products themselves forces developers to get into the minds of their users and produces a better end result.About EvelynEvelyn is a recovering improviser currently role playing as a Lead Platform Engineer at Autoscout24 in Munich, Germany. While she says she specializes in AWS architecture and integration after spending 11 years with it, in truth she spends her days convincing engineers that a product mindset will make them hate their product managers less.Links Referenced:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyn-osman/TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is Evelyn Osman, engineering manager at AutoScout24. Evelyn, thank you for joining me.Evelyn: Thank you very much, Corey. It's actually really fun to be on here.Corey: I have to say one of the big reasons that I was enthused to talk to you is that you have been using AWS—to be direct—longer than I have, and that puts you in a somewhat rarefied position where AWS's customer base has absolutely exploded over the past 15 years that it's been around, but at the beginning, it was a very different type of thing. Nowadays, it seems like we've lost some of that magic from the beginning. Where do you land on that whole topic?Evelyn: That's actually a really good point because I always like to say, you know, when I come into a room, you know, I really started doing introductions like, “Oh, you know, hey,” I'm like, you know, “I'm this director, I've done this XYZ,” and I always say, like, “I'm Evelyn, engineering manager, or architect, or however,” and then I say, you know, “I've been working with AWS, you know, 11, 12 years,” or now I can't quite remember.Corey: Time becomes a flat circle. The pandemic didn't help.Evelyn: [laugh] Yeah, I just, like, a look at that the year, and I'm like, “Jesus. It's been that long.” Yeah. And usually, like you know, you get some odd looks like, “Oh, my God, you must be a sage.” And for me, I'm… you see how different services kind of, like, have just been reinventions of another one, or they just take a managed service and make another managed service around it. So, I feel that there's a lot of where it's just, you know, wrapping up a pretty bow, and calling it something different, it feels like.Corey: That's what I've been low-key asking people for a while now over the past year, namely, “What is the most foundational, interesting thing that AWS has done lately, that winds up solving for this problem of whatever it is you do as a company? What is it that has foundationally made things better that AWS has put out in the last service? What was it?” And the answers I get are all depressingly far in the past, I have to say. What's yours?Evelyn: Honestly, I think the biggest game-changer I remember experiencing was at an analyst summit in Stockholm when they announced Lambda.Corey: That was announced before I even got into this space, as an example of how far back things were. And you're right. That was transformative. That was awesome.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. Because before, you know, we were always, like, trying to figure, okay, how do we, like, launch an instance, run some short code, and then clean it up. AWS is going to charge for an hour, so we need to figure out, you know, how to pack everything into one instance, run for one hour. And then they announced Lambda, and suddenly, like, holy shit, this is actually a game changer. We can actually write small functions that do specific things.And, you know, you go from, like, microservices, like, to like, tiny, serverless functions. So, that was huge. And then DynamoDB along with that, really kind of like, transformed the entire space for us in many ways. So, back when I was at TIBCO, there was a few innovations around that, even, like, one startup inside TIBCO that quite literally, their entire product was just Lambda functions. And one of their problems was, they wanted to sell in the Marketplace, and they couldn't figure out how to sell Lambda on the marketplace.Corey: It's kind of wild when we see just how far it's come, but also how much they've announced that doesn't change that much, to be direct. For me, one of the big changes that I remember that really made things better for customers—thought it took a couple of years—was EFS. And even that's a little bit embarrassing because all that is, “All right, we finally found a way to stuff a NetApp into us-east-1,” so now NFS, just like you used to use it in the 90s and the naughts, can be done responsibly in the cloud. And that, on some level, wasn't a feature launch so much as it was a concession to the ways that companies had built things and weren't likely to change.Evelyn: Honestly, I found the EFS launch to be a bit embarrassing because, like, you know, when you look closer at it, you realize, like, the performance isn't actually that great.Corey: Oh, it was horrible when it launched. It would just slam to a halt because you got the IOPS scaled with how much data you stored on it. The documentation explicitly said to use dd to start loading a bunch of data onto it to increase the performance. It's like, “Look, just sandbag the thing so it does what you'd want.” And all that stuff got fixed, but at the time it looked like it was clown shoes.Evelyn: Yeah, and that reminds me of, like, EBS's, like, gp2 when we're, like you know, we're talking, like, okay, provision IOPS with gp2. We just kept saying, like, just give yourself really big volume for performance. And it feel like they just kind of kept that with EFS. And it took years for them to really iterate off of that. Yeah, so, like, EFS was a huge thing, and I see us, we're still using it now today, and like, we're trying to integrate, especially for, like, data center migrations, but yeah, you always see that a lot of these were first more for, like, you know, data centers to the cloud, you know. So, first I had, like, EC2 classic. That's where I started. And I always like to tell a story that in my team, we're talking about using AWS, I was the only person fiercely against it because we did basically large data processing—sorry, I forget the right words—data analytics. There we go [laugh].Corey: I remember that, too. When it first came out, it was, “This sounds dangerous and scary, and it's going to be a flash in the pan because who would ever trust their core compute infrastructure to some random third-party company, especially a bookstore?” And yeah, I think I got that one very wrong.Evelyn: Yeah, exactly. I was just like, no way. You know, I see all these articles talking about, like, terrible disk performance, and here I am, where it's like, it's my bread and butter. I'm specialized in it, you know? I write code in my sleep and such.[Yeah, the interesting thing is, I was like, first, it was like, I can 00:06:03] launch services, you know, to kind of replicate when you get in a data center to make it feature comparable, and then it was taking all this complex services and wrapping it up in a pretty bow for—as a managed service. Like, EKS, I think, was the biggest one, if we're looking at managed services. Technically Elasticsearch, but I feel like that was the redheaded stepchild for quite some time.Corey: Yeah, there was—Elasticsearch was a weird one, and still is. It's not a pleasant service to run in any meaningful sense. Like, what people actually want as the next enhancement that would excite everyone is, I want a serverless version of this thing where I can just point it at a bunch of data, I hit an API that I don't have to manage, and get Elasticsearch results back from. They finally launched a serverless offering that's anything but. You have to still provision compute units for it, so apparently, the word serverless just means managed service over at AWS-land now. And it just, it ties into the increasing sense of disappointment I've had with almost all of their recent launches versus what I felt they could have been.Evelyn: Yeah, the interesting thing about Elasticsearch is, a couple of years ago, they came out with OpenSearch, a competing Elasticsearch after [unintelligible 00:07:08] kind of gave us the finger and change the licensing. I mean, OpenSearch actually become a really great offering if you run it yourself, but if you use their managed service, it can kind—you lose all the benefits, in a way.Corey: I'm curious, as well, to get your take on what I've been seeing that I think could only be described as an internal shift, where it's almost as if there's been a decree passed down that every service has to run its own P&L or whatnot, and as a result, everything that gets put out seems to be monetized in weird ways, even when I'd argue it shouldn't be. The classic example I like to use for this is AWS Config, where it charges you per evaluation, and that happens whenever a cloud resource changes. What that means is that by using the cloud dynamically—the way that they supposedly want us to do—we wind up paying a fee for that as a result. And it's not like anyone is using that service in isolation; it is definitionally being used as people are using other cloud resources, so why does it cost money? And the answer is because literally everything they put out costs money.Evelyn: Yep, pretty simple. Oftentimes, there's, like, R&D that goes into it, but the charges seem a bit… odd. Like from an S3 lens, was, I mean, that's, like, you know, if you're talking about services, that was actually a really nice one, very nice holistic overview, you know, like, I could drill into a data lake and, like, look into things. But if you actually want to get anything useful, you have to pay for it.Corey: Yeah. Everything seems to, for one reason or another, be stuck in this place where, “Well, if you want to use it, it's going to cost.” And what that means is that it gets harder and harder to do anything that even remotely resembles being able to wind up figuring out where's the spend going, or what's it going to cost me as time goes on? Because it's not just what are the resources I'm spinning up going to cost, what are the second, third, and fourth-order effects of that? And the honest answer is, well, nobody knows. You're going to have to basically run an experiment and find out.Evelyn: Yeah. No, true. So, what I… at AutoScout, we actually ended up doing is—because we're trying to figure out how to tackle these costs—is they—we built an in-house cost allocation solution so we could track all of that. Now, AWS has actually improved Cost Explorer quite a bit, and even, I think, Billing Conductor was one that came out [unintelligible 00:09:21], kind of like, do a custom tiered and account pricing model where you can kind of do the same thing. But even that also, there is a cost with it.I think that was trying to compete with other, you know, vendors doing similar solutions. But it still isn't something where we see that either there's, like, arbitrarily low pricing there, or the costs itself doesn't really quite make sense. Like, AWS [unintelligible 00:09:45], as you mentioned, it's a terrific service. You know, we try to use it for compliance enforcement and other things, catching bad behavior, but then as soon as people see the price tag, we just run away from it. So, a lot of the security services themselves, actually, the costs, kind of like, goes—skyrockets tremendously when you start trying to use it across a large organization. And oftentimes, the organization isn't actually that large.Corey: Yeah, it gets to this point where, especially in small environments, you have to spend more energy and money chasing down what the cost is than you're actually spending on the thing. There were blog posts early on that, “Oh, here's how you analyze your bill with Redshift,” and that was a minimum 750 bucks a month. It's, well, I'm guessing that that's not really for my $50 a month account.Evelyn: Yeah. No, precisely. I remember seeing that, like, entire ETL process is just, you know, analyze your invoice. Cost [unintelligible 00:10:33], you know, is fantastic, but at the end of the day, like, what you're actually looking at [laugh], is infinitesimally small compared to all the data in that report. Like, I think oftentimes, it's simply, you know, like, I just want to look at my resources and allocate them in a multidimensional way. Which actually isn't really that multidimensional, when you think about it [laugh].Corey: Increasingly, Cost Explorer has gotten better. It's not a new service, but every iteration seems to improve it to a point now where I'm talking to folks, and they're having a hard time justifying most of the tools in the cost optimization space, just because, okay, they want a percentage of my spend on AWS to basically be a slightly better version of a thing that's already improving and works for free. That doesn't necessarily make sense. And I feel like that's what you get trapped into when you start going down the VC path in the cost optimization space. You've got to wind up having a revenue model and an offering that scales through software… and I thought, originally, I was going to be doing something like that. At this point, I'm unconvinced that anything like that is really tenable.Evelyn: Yeah. When you're a small organization you're trying to optimize, you might not have the expertise and the knowledge to do so, so when one of these small consultancies comes along, saying, “Hey, we're going to charge you a really small percentage of your invoice,” like, okay, great. That's, like, you know, like, a few $100 a month to make sure I'm fully optimized, and I'm saving, you know, far more than that. But as soon as your invoice turns into, you know, it's like $100,000, or $300,000 or more, that percentage becomes rather significant. And I've had vendors come to me and, like, talk to me and is like, “Hey, we can, you know, for a small percentage, you know, we're going to do this machine learning, you know, AI optimization for you. You know, you don't have to do anything. We guaranteed buybacks your RIs.” And as soon as you look at the price tag with it, we just have to walk away. Or oftentimes we look at it, and there are truly very simple ways to do it on your own, if you just kind of put some thought into it.Corey: While we want to talking a bit before this show, you taught me something new about GameLift, which I think is a different problem that AWS has been dealing with lately. I've never paid much attention to it because it is the—as I assume from what it says on the tin, oh, it's a service for just running a whole bunch of games at scale, and I'm not generally doing that. My favorite computer game remains to be Twitter at this point, but that's okay. What is GameLift, though, because you want to shining a different light on it, which makes me annoyed that Amazon Marketing has not pointed this out.Evelyn: Yeah, so I'll preface this by saying, like, I'm not an expert on GameLift. I haven't even spun it up myself because there's quite a bit of price. I learned this fall while chatting with an SA who works in the gaming space, and it kind of like, I went, like, “Back up a second.” If you think about, like, I'm, you know, like, World of Warcraft, all you have are thousands of game clients all over the world, playing the same game, you know, on the same server, in the same instance, and you need to make sure, you know, that when I'm running, and you're running, that we know that we're going to reach the same point the same time, or if there's one object in that room, that only one of us can get it. So, all these servers are doing is tracking state across thousands of clients.And GameLift, when you think about your dedicated game service, it really is just multi-region distributed state management. Like, at the basic, that's really what it is. Now, there's, you know, quite a bit more happening within GameLift, but that's what I was going to explain is, like, it's just state management. And there are far more use cases for it than just for video games.Corey: That's maddening to me because having a global session state store, for lack of a better term, is something that so many customers have built themselves repeatedly. They can build it on top of primitives like DynamoDB global tables, or alternately, you have a dedicated region where that thing has to live and everything far away takes forever to round-trip. If they've solved some of those things, why on earth would they bury it under a gaming-branded service? Like, offer that primitive to the rest of us because that's useful.Evelyn: No, absolutely. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if you peeled back the curtain with GameLift, you'll find a lot of—like, several other you know, AWS services that it's just built on top of. I kind of mentioned earlier is, like, what I see now with innovation, it's like we just see other services packaged together and releases a new product.Corey: Yeah, IoT had the same problem going on for years where there was a lot of really good stuff buried in there, like IOT events. People were talking about using that for things like browser extensions and whatnot, but you need to be explicitly told that that's a thing that exists and is handy, but otherwise you'd never know it was there because, “Well, I'm not building anything that's IoT-related. Why would I bother?” It feels like that was one direction that they tended to go in.And now they take existing services that are, mmm, kind of milquetoast, if I'm being honest, and then saying, “Oh, like, we have Comprehend that does, effectively detection of themes, keywords, and whatnot, from text. We're going to wind up re-releasing that as Comprehend Medical.” Same type of thing, but now focused on a particular vertical. Seems to me that instead of being a specific service for that vertical, just improve the baseline the service and offer HIPAA compliance if it didn't exist already, and you're mostly there. But what do I know? I'm not a product manager trying to get promoted.Evelyn: Yeah, that's true. Well, I was going to mention that maybe it's the HIPAA compliance, but actually, a lot of their services already have HIPAA compliance. And I've stared far too long at that compliance section on AWS's site to know this, but you know, a lot of them actually are HIPAA-compliant, they're PCI-compliant, and ISO-compliant, and you know, and everything. So, I'm actually pretty intrigued to know why they [wouldn't 00:16:04] take that advantage.Corey: I just checked. Amazon Comprehend is itself HIPAA-compliant and is qualified and certified to hold Personal Health Information—PHI—Private Health Information, whatever the acronym stands for. Now, what's the difference, then, between that and Medical? In fact, the HIPAA section says for Comprehend Medical, “For guidance, see the previous section on Amazon Comprehend.” So, there's no difference from a regulatory point of view.Evelyn: That's fascinating. I am intrigued because I do know that, like, within AWS, you know, they have different segments, you know? There's, like, Digital Native Business, there's Enterprise, there's Startup. So, I am curious how things look over the engineering side. I'm going to talk to somebody about this now [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's the—like, I almost wonder, on some level, it feels like, “Well, we wound to building this thing in the hopes that someone would use it for something. And well, if we just use different words, it checks a box in some analyst's chart somewhere.” I don't know. I mean, I hate to sound that negative about it, but it's… increasingly when I talk to customers who are active in these spaces around the industry vertical targeted stuff aimed at their industry, they're like, “Yeah, we took a look at it. It was adorable, but we're not using it that way. We're going to use either the baseline version or we're going to work with someone who actively gets our industry.” And I've heard that repeated about three or four different releases that they've put out across the board of what they've been doing. It feels like it is a misunderstanding between what the world needs and what they're able to or willing to build for us.Evelyn: Not sure. I wouldn't be surprised, if we go far enough, it could probably be that it's just a product manager saying, like, “We have to advertise directly to the industry.” And if you look at it, you know, in the backend, you know, it's an engineer, you know, kicking off a build and just changing the name from Comprehend to Comprehend Medical.Corey: And, on some level, too, they're moving a lot more slowly than they used to. There was a time where they were, in many cases, if not the first mover, the first one to do it well. Take Code Whisperer, their AI powered coding assistant. That would have been a transformative thing if GitHub Copilot hadn't beaten them every punch, come out with new features, and frankly, in head-to-head experiments that I've run, came out way better as a product than what Code Whisperer is. And while I'd like to say that this is great, but it's too little too late. And when I talk to engineers, they're very excited about what Copilot can do, and the only people I see who are even talking about Code Whisperer work at AWS.Evelyn: No, that's true. And so, I think what's happening—and this is my opinion—is that first you had AWS, like, launching a really innovative new services, you know, that kind of like, it's like, “Ah, it's a whole new way of running your workloads in the cloud.” Instead of you know, basically, hiring a whole team, I just click a button, you have your instance, you use it, sell software, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they went towards serverless, and then IoT, and then it started targeting large data lakes, and then eventually that kind of run backwards towards security, after the umpteenth S3 data leak.Corey: Oh, yeah. And especially now, like, so they had a hit in some corners with SageMaker, so now there are 40 services all starting with the word SageMaker. That's always pleasant.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. And what I kind of notice is… now they're actually having to run it even further back because they caught all the corporations that could pivot to the cloud, they caught all the startups who started in the cloud, and now they're going for the larger behemoths who have massive data centers, and they don't want to innovate. They just want to reduce this massive sysadmin team. And I always like to use the example of a Bare Metal. When that came out in 2019, everybody—we've all kind of scratched your head. I'm like, really [laugh]?Corey: Yeah, I could see where it makes some sense just for very specific workloads that involve things like specific capabilities of processors that don't work under emulation in some weird way, but it's also such a weird niche that I'm sure it's there for someone. My default assumption, just given the breadth of AWS's customer base, is that whenever I see something that they just announced, well, okay, it's clearly not for me; that doesn't mean it's not meeting the needs of someone who looks nothing like me. But increasingly as I start exploring the industry in these services have time to percolate in the popular imagination and I still don't see anything interesting coming out with it, it really makes you start to wonder.Evelyn: Yeah. But then, like, I think, like, roughly a year or something, right after Bare Metal came out, they announced Outposts. So, then it was like, another way to just stay within your data center and be in the cloud.Corey: Yeah. There's a bunch of different ways they have that, okay, here's ways you can run AWS services on-prem, but still pay us by the hour for the privilege of running things that you have living in your facility. And that doesn't seem like it's quite fair.Evelyn: That's exactly it. So, I feel like now it's sort of in diminishing returns and sort of doing more cloud-native work compared to, you know, these huge opportunities, which is everybody who still has a data center for various reasons, or they're cloud-native, and they grow so big, that they actually start running their own data centers.Corey: I want to call out as well before we wind up being accused of being oblivious, that we're recording this before re:Invent. So, it's entirely possible—I hope this happens—that they announce something or several some things that make this look ridiculous, and we're embarrassed to have had this conversation. And yeah, they're totally getting it now, and they have completely surprised us with stuff that's going to be transformative for almost every customer. I've been expecting and hoping for that for the last three or four re:Invents now, and I haven't gotten it.Evelyn: Yeah, that's right. And I think there's even a new service launches that actually are missing fairly obvious things in a way. Like, mine is the Managed Workflow for Amazon—it's Managed Airflow, sorry. So, we were using Data Pipeline for, you know, big ETL processing, so it was an in-house tool we kind of built at Autoscout, we do platform engineering.And it was deprecated, so we looked at a new—what to replace it with. And so, we looked at Airflow, and we decided this is the way to go, we want to use managed because we don't want to maintain our own infrastructure. And the problem we ran into is that it doesn't have support for shared VPCs. And we actually talked to our account team, and they were confused. Because they said, like, “Well, every new service should support it natively.” But it just didn't have it. And that's, kind of, what, I kind of found is, like, there's—it feels—sometimes it's—there's a—it's getting rushed out the door, and it'll actually have a new managed service or new service launched out, but they're also sort of cutting some corners just to actually make sure it's packaged up and ready to go.Corey: When I'm looking at this, and seeing how this stuff gets packaged, and how it's built out, I start to understand a pattern that I've been relatively down on across the board. I'm curious to get your take because you work at a fairly sizable company as an engineering manager, running teams of people who do this sort of thing. Where do you land on the idea of companies building internal platforms to wrap around the offerings that the cloud service providers that they use make available to them?Evelyn: So, my opinion is that you need to build out some form of standardized tool set in order to actually be able to innovate quickly. Now, this sounds counterintuitive because everyone is like, “Oh, you know, if I want to innovate, I should be able to do this experiment, and try out everything, and use what works, and just release it.” And that greatness [unintelligible 00:23:14] mentality, you know, it's like five talented engineers working to build something. But when you have, instead of five engineers, you have five teams of five engineers each, and every single team does something totally different. You know, one uses Scala, and other on TypeScript, another one, you know .NET, and then there could have been a [last 00:23:30] one, you know, comes in, you know, saying they're still using Ruby.And then next thing you know, you know, you have, like, incredibly diverse platforms for services. And if you want to do any sort of like hiring or cross-training, it becomes incredibly difficult. And actually, as the organization grows, you want to hire talent, and so you're going to have to hire, you know, a developer for this team, you going to have to hire, you know, Ruby developer for this one, a Scala guy here, a Node.js guy over there.And so, this is where we say, “Okay, let's agree. We're going to be a Scala shop. Great. All right, are we running serverless? Are we running containerized?” And you agree on those things. So, that's already, like, the formation of it. And oftentimes, you start with DevOps. You'll say, like, “I'm a DevOps team,” you know, or doing a DevOps culture, if you do it properly, but you always hit this scaling issue where you start growing, and then how do you maintain that common tool set? And that's where we start looking at, you know, having a platform… approach, but I'm going to say it's Platform-as-a-Product. That's the key.Corey: Yeah, that's a good way of framing it because originally, the entire world needed that. That's what RightScale was when EC2 first came out. It was a reimagining of the EC2 console that was actually usable. And in time, AWS improved that to the point where RightScale didn't really have a place anymore in a way that it had previously, and that became a business challenge for them. But you have, what is it now, 2, 300 services that AWS has put out, and out, and okay, great. Most companies are really only actively working with a handful of those. How do you make those available in a reasonable way to your teams, in ways that aren't distracting, dangerous, et cetera? I don't know the answer on that one.Evelyn: Yeah. No, that's true. So, full disclosure. At AutoScout, we do platform engineering. So, I'm part of, like, the platform engineering group, and we built a platform for our product teams. It's kind of like, you need to decide to [follow 00:25:24] those answers, you know? Like, are we going to be fully containerized? Okay, then, great, we're going to use Fargate. All right, how do we do it so that developers don't actually—don't need to think that they're running Fargate workloads?And that's, like, you know, where it's really important to have those standardized abstractions that developers actually enjoy using. And I'd even say that, before you start saying, “Ah, we're going to do platform,” you say, “We should probably think about developer experience.” Because you can do a developer experience without a platform. You can do that, you know, in a DevOps approach, you know? It's basically build tools that makes it easy for developers to write code. That's the first step for anything. It's just, like, you have people writing the code; make sure that they can do the things easily, and then look at how to operate it.Corey: That sure would be nice. There's a lack of focus on usability, especially when it comes to a number of developer tools that we see out there in the wild, in that, they're clearly built by people who understand the problem space super well, but they're designing these things to be used by people who just want to make the website work. They don't have the insight, the knowledge, the approach, any of it, nor should they necessarily be expected to.Evelyn: No, that's true. And what I see is, a lot of the times, it's a couple really talented engineers who are just getting shit done, and they get shit done however they can. So, it's basically like, if they're just trying to run the website, they're just going to write the code to get things out there and call it a day. And then somebody else comes along, has a heart attack when see what's been done, and they're kind of stuck with it because there is no guardrails or paved path or however you want to call it.Corey: I really hope—truly—that this is going to be something that we look back and laugh when this episode airs, that, “Oh, yeah, we just got it so wrong. Look at all the amazing stuff that came out of re:Invent.” Are you going to be there this year?Evelyn: I am going to be there this year.Corey: My condolences. I keep hoping people get to escape.Evelyn: This is actually my first one in, I think, five years. So, I mean, the last time I was there was when everybody's going crazy over pins. And I still have a bag of them [laugh].Corey: Yeah, that did seem like a hot-second collectable moment, didn't it?Evelyn: Yeah. And then at the—I think, what, the very last day, as everybody's heading to re:Play, you could just go into the registration area, and they just had, like, bags of them lying around to take. So, all the competing, you know, to get the requirements for a pin was kind of moot [laugh].Corey: Don't you hate it at some point where it's like, you feel like I'm going to finally get this crowning achievement, it's like or just show up at the buffet at the end and grab one of everything, and wow, that would have saved me a lot of pain and trouble.Evelyn: Yeah.Corey: Ugh, scavenger hunts are hard, as I'm about to learn to my own detriment.Evelyn: Yeah. No, true. Yeah. But I am really hoping that re:Invent proves me wrong. Embarrassingly wrong, and then all my colleagues can proceed to mock me for this ridiculous podcast that I made with you. But I am a fierce skeptic. Optimistic nihilist, but still a nihilist, so we'll see how re:Invent turns out.Corey: So, I am curious, given your experience at more large companies than I tend to be embedded with for any period of time, how have you found that these large organizations tend to pick up new technologies? What does the adoption process look like? And honestly, if you feel like throwing some shade, how do they tend to get it wrong?Evelyn: In most cases, I've seen it go… terrible. Like, it just blows up in their face. And I say that is because a lot of the time, an organization will say, “Hey, we're going to adopt this new way of organizing teams or developing products,” and they look at all the practices. They say, “Okay, great. Product management is going to bring it in, they're going to structure things, how we do the planning, here's some great charts and diagrams,” but they don't really look at the culture aspect.And that's always where I've seen things fall apart. I've been in a room where, you know, our VP was really excited about team topologies and say, “Hey, we're going to adopt it.” And then an engineering manager proceeded to say, “Okay, you're responsible for this team, you're responsible for that team, you're responsible for this team talking to, like, a team of, like, five engineers,” which doesn't really work at all. Or, like, I think the best example is DevOps, you know, where you say, “Ah, we're going to adopt DevOps, we're going to have a DevOps team, or have a DevOps engineer.”Corey: Step one: we're going to rebadge everyone with existing job titles to have the new fancy job titles that reflect it. It turns out that's not necessarily sufficient in and of itself.Evelyn: Not really. The Spotify model. People say, like, “Oh, we're going to do the Spotify model. We're going to do skills, tribes, you know, and everything. It's going to be awesome, it's going to be great, you know, and nice, cross-functional.”The reason I say it bails on us every single time is because somebody wants to be in control of the process, and if the process is meant to encourage collaboration and innovation, that person actually becomes a chokehold for it. And it could be somebody that says, like, “Ah, I need to be involved in every single team, and listen to know what's happening, just so I'm aware of it.” What ends up happening is that everybody differs to them. So, there is no collaboration, there is no innovation. DevOps, you say, like, “Hey, we're going to have a team to do everything, so your developers don't need to worry about it.” What ends up happening is you're still an ops team, you still have your silos.And that's always a challenge is you actually have to say, “Okay, what are the cultural values around this process?” You know, what is SRE? What is DevOps, you know? Is it seen as processes, is it a series of principles, platform, maybe, you know? We have to say, like—that's why I say, Platform-as-a-Product because you need to have that product mindset, that culture of product thinking, to really build a platform that works because it's all about the user journey.It's not about building a common set of tools. It's the user journey of how a person interacts with their code to get it into a production environment. And so, you need to understand how that person sits down at their desk, starts the laptop up, logs in, opens the IDE, what they're actually trying to get done. And once you understand that, then you know your requirements, and you build something to fill those things so that they are happy to use it, as opposed to saying, “This is our platform, and you're going to use it.” And they're probably going to say, “No.” And the next thing, you know, they're just doing their own thing on the side.Corey: Yeah, the rise of Shadow IT has never gone away. It's just, on some level, it's the natural expression, I think it's an immune reaction that companies tend to have when process gets in the way. Great, we have an outcome that we need to drive towards; we don't have a choice. Cloud empowered a lot of that and also has given tools to help rein it in, and as with everything, the arms race continues.Evelyn: Yeah. And so, what I'm going to continue now, kind of like, toot the platform horn. So, Gregor Hohpe, he's a [solutions architect 00:31:56]—I always f- up his name. I'm so sorry, Gregor. He has a great book, and even a talk, called The Magic of Platforms, that if somebody is actually curious about understanding of why platforms are nice, they should really watch that talk.If you see him at re:Invent, or a summit or somewhere giving a talk, go listen to that, and just pick his brain. Because that's—for me, I really kind of strongly agree with his approach because that's really how, like, you know, as he says, like, boost innovation is, you know, where you're actually building a platform that really works.Corey: Yeah, it's a hard problem, but it's also one of those things where you're trying to focus on—at least ideally—an outcome or a better situation than you currently find yourselves in. It's hard to turn down things that might very well get you there sooner, faster, but it's like trying to effectively cargo-cult the leadership principles from your last employer into your new one. It just doesn't work. I mean, you see more startups from Amazonians who try that, and it just goes horribly because without the cultural understanding and the supporting structures, it doesn't work.Evelyn: Exactly. So, I've worked with, like, organizations, like, 4000-plus people, I've worked for, like, small startups, consulted, and this is why I say, almost every single transformation, it fails the first time because somebody needs to be in control and track things and basically be really, really certain that people are doing it right. And as soon as it blows up in their face, that's when they realize they should actually take a step back. And so, even for building out a platform, you know, doing Platform-as-a-Product, I always reiterate that you have to really be willing to just invest upfront, and not get very much back. Because you have to figure out the whole user journey, and what you're actually building, before you actually build it.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Evelyn: So, I used to be on Twitter, but I've actually got off there after it kind of turned a bit toxic and crazy.Corey: Feels like that was years ago, but that's beside the point.Evelyn: Yeah, precisely. So, I would even just say because this feels like a corporate show, but find me on LinkedIn of all places because I will be sharing whatever I find on there, you know? So, just look me up on my name, Evelyn Osman, and give me a follow, and I'll probably be screaming into the cloud like you are.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Evelyn: Thank you, Corey.Corey: Evelyn Osman, engineering manager at AutoScout24. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, and I will read it once I finish building an internal platform to normalize all of those platforms together into one.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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Amir Szekely, Owner at CloudSnorkel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he got his start in the early days of cloud and his solo project, CloudSnorkel. Throughout this conversation, Corey and Amir discuss the importance of being pragmatic when moving to the cloud, and the different approaches they see in developers from the early days of cloud to now. Amir shares what motivates him to develop open-source projects, and why he finds fulfillment in fixing bugs and operating CloudSnorkel as a one-man show. About AmirAmir Szekely is a cloud consultant specializing in deployment automation, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and CI/CD. His background includes security, virtualization, and Windows development. Amir enjoys creating open-source projects like cdk-github-runners, cdk-turbo-layers, and NSIS.Links Referenced: CloudSnorkel: https://cloudsnorkel.com/ lasttootinaws.com: https://lasttootinaws.com camelcamelcamel.com: https://camelcamelcamel.com github.com/cloudsnorkel: https://github.com/cloudsnorkel Personal website: https://kichik.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and this is an episode that I have been angling for for longer than you might imagine. My guest today is Amir Szekely, who's the owner at CloudSnorkel. Amir, thank you for joining me.Amir: Thanks for having me, Corey. I love being here.Corey: So, I've been using one of your open-source projects for an embarrassingly long amount of time, and for the longest time, I make the critical mistake of referring to the project itself as CloudSnorkel because that's the word that shows up in the GitHub project that I can actually see that jumps out at me. The actual name of the project within your org is cdk-github-runners if I'm not mistaken.Amir: That's real original, right?Corey: Exactly. It's like, “Oh, good, I'll just mention that, and suddenly everyone will know what I'm talking about.” But ignoring the problems of naming things well, which is a pain that everyone at AWS or who uses it knows far too well, the product is basically magic. Before I wind up basically embarrassing myself by doing a poor job of explaining what it is, how do you think about it?Amir: Well, I mean, it's a pretty simple project, which I think what makes it great as well. It creates GitHub runners with CDK. That's about it. It's in the name, and it just does that. And I really tried to make it as simple as possible and kind of learn from other projects that I've seen that are similar, and basically learn from my pain points in them.I think the reason I started is because I actually deployed CDK runners—sorry, GitHub runners—for one company, and I ended up using the Kubernetes one, right? So, GitHub in themselves, they have two projects they recommend—and not to nudge GitHub, please recommend my project one day as well—they have the Kubernetes controller and they have the Terraform deployer. And the specific client that I worked for, they wanted to use Kubernetes. And I tried to deploy it, and, Corey, I swear, I worked three days; three days to deploy the thing, which was crazy to me. And every single step of the way, I had to go and read some documentation, figure out what I did wrong, and apparently the order the documentation was was incorrect.And I had to—I even opened tickets, and they—you know, they were rightfully like, “It's open-source project. Please contribute and fix the documentation for us.” At that point, I said, “Nah.” [laugh]. Let me create something better with CDK and I decided just to have the simplest setup possible.So usually, right, what you end up doing in these projects, you have to set up either secrets or SSM parameters, and you have to prepare the ground and you have to get your GitHub token and all those things. And that's just annoying. So, I decided to create a—Corey: So much busy work.Amir: Yes, yeah, so much busy work and so much boilerplate and so much figuring out the right way and the right order, and just annoying. So, I decided to create a setup page. I thought, “What if you can actually install it just like you install any app on GitHub,” which is the way it's supposed to be right? So, when you install cdk-github-runners—CloudSnorkel—you get an HTML page and you just click a few buttons and you tell it where to install it and it just installs it for you. And it sets the secrets and everything. And if you want to change the secret, you don't have to redeploy. You can just change the secret, right? You have to roll the token over or whatever. So, it's much, much easier to install.Corey: And I feel like I discovered this project through one of the more surreal approaches—and I had cause to revisit it a few weeks ago when I was redoing my talk for the CDK Community Day, which has since happened and people liked the talk—and I mentioned what CloudSnorkel had been doing and how I was using the runners accordingly. So, that was what I accidentally caused me to pop back up with, “Hey, I've got some issues here.” But we'll get to that. Because once upon a time, I built a Twitter client for creating threads because shitposting is my love language, I would sit and create Twitter threads in the middle of live keynote talks. Threading in the native client was always terrible, and I wanted to build something that would help me do that. So, I did.And it was up for a while. It's not anymore because I'm not paying $42,000 a month in API costs to some jackass, but it still exists in the form of lasttootinaws.com if you want to create threads on Mastodon. But after I put this out, some people complained that it was slow.To which my response was, “What do you mean? It's super fast for me in San Francisco talking to it hosted in Oregon.” But on every round trip from halfway around the world, it became a problem. So, I got it into my head that since this thing was fully stateless, other than a Lambda function being fronted via an API Gateway, that I should deploy it to every region. It didn't quite fit into a Cloudflare Worker or into one of the Edge Lambda functions that AWS has given up on, but okay, how do I deploy something to every region?And the answer is, with great difficulty because it's clear that no one was ever imagining with all those regions that anyone would use all of them. It's imagined that most customers use two or three, but customers are different, so which two or three is going to be widely varied. So, anything halfway sensible about doing deployments like this didn't work out. Again, because this thing was also a Lambda function and an API Gateway, it was dirt cheap, so I didn't really want to start spending stupid amounts of money doing deployment infrastructure and the rest.So okay, how do I do this? Well, GitHub Actions is awesome. It is basically what all of AWS's code offerings wish that they were. CodeBuild is sad and this was kind of great. The problem is, once you're out of the free tier, and if you're a bad developer where you do a deploy on every iteration, suddenly it starts costing for what I was doing in every region, something like a quarter of per deploy, which adds up when you're really, really bad at programming.Amir: [laugh].Corey: So, their matrix jobs are awesome, but I wanted to do some self-hosted runners. How do I do that? And I want to keep it cheap, so how do I do a self-hosted runner inside of a Lambda function? Which led me directly to you. And it was nothing short of astonishing. This was a few years ago. I seem to recall that it used to be a bit less well-architected in terms of its elegance. Did it always use step functions, for example, to wind up orchestrating these things?Amir: Yeah, so I do remember that day. We met pretty much… basically as a joke because the Lambda Runner was a joke that I did, and I posted on Twitter, and I was half-proud of my joke that starts in ten seconds, right? But yeah, no, the—I think it always used functions. I've been kind of in love with the functions for the past two years. They just—they're nice.Corey: Oh, they're magic, and AWS is so bad at telling their story. Both of those things are true.Amir: Yeah. And the API is not amazing. But like, when you get it working—and you know, you have to spend some time to get it working—it's really nice because then you have nothing to manage, ever. And they can call APIs directly now, so you don't have to even create Lambdas. It's pretty cool.Corey: And what I loved is you wind up deploying this thing to whatever account you want it to live within. What is it, the OIDC? I always get those letters in the wrong direction. OIDC, I think, is correct.Amir: I think it's OIDC, yeah.Corey: Yeah, and it winds up doing this through a secure method as opposed to just okay, now anyone with access to the project can deploy into your account, which is not ideal. And it just works. It spins up a whole bunch of these Lambda functions that are using a Docker image as the deployment environment. And yeah, all right, if effectively my CDK deploy—which is what it's doing inside of this thing—doesn't complete within 15 minutes, then it's not going to and the thing is going to break out. We've solved the halting problem. After 15 minutes, the loop will terminate. The end.But that's never been a problem, even with getting ACM certificates spun up. It completes well within that time limit. And its cost to me is effectively nothing. With one key exception: that you made the choice to use Secrets Manager to wind up storing a lot of the things it cares about instead of Parameter Store, so I think you wind up costing me—I think there's two of those different secrets, so that's 80 cents a month. Which I will be demanding in blood one of these days if I ever catch you at re:Invent.Amir: I'll buy you beer [laugh].Corey: There we go. That'll count. That'll buy, like, several months of that. That works—at re:Invent, no. The beers there are, like, $18, so that'll cover me for years. We're set.Amir: We'll split it [laugh].Corey: Exactly. Problem solved. But I like the elegance of it, I like how clever it is, and I want to be very clear, though, it's not just for shitposting. Because it's very configurable where, yes, you can use Lambda functions, you can use Spot Instances, you can use CodeBuild containers, you can use Fargate containers, you can use EC2 instances, and it just automatically orchestrates and adds these self-hosted runners to your account, and every build gets a pristine environment as a result. That is no small thing.Amir: Oh, and I love making things configurable. People really appreciate it I feel, you know, and gives people kind of a sense of power. But as long as you make that configuration simple enough, right, or at least the defaults good defaults, right, then, even with that power, people still don't shoot themselves in the foot and it still works really well. By the way, we just added ECS recently, which people really were asking for because it gives you the, kind of, easy option to have the runner—well, not the runner but at least the runner infrastructure staying up, right? So, you can have auto-scaling group backing ECS and then the runner can start up a lot faster. It was actually very important to other people because Lambda, as fast that it is, it's limited, and Fargate, for whatever reason, still to this day, takes a minute to start up.Corey: Yeah. What's wild to me about this is, start to finish, I hit a deploy to the main branch and it sparks the thing up, runs the deploy. Deploy itself takes a little over two minutes. And every time I do this, within three minutes of me pushing to commit, the deploy is done globally. It is lightning fast.And I know it's easy to lose yourself in the idea of this being a giant shitpost, where, oh, who's going to do deployment jobs in Lambda functions? Well, kind of a lot of us for a variety of reasons, some of which might be better than others. In my case, it was just because I was cheap, but the massive parallelization ability to do 20 simultaneous deploys in a matrix configuration that doesn't wind up smacking into rate limits everywhere, that was kind of great.Amir: Yeah, we have seen people use Lambda a lot. It's mostly for, yeah, like you said, small jobs. And the environment that they give you, it's kind of limited, so you can't actually install packages, right? There is no sudo, and you can't actually install anything unless it's in your temp directory. But still, like, just being able to run a lot of little jobs, it's really great. Yeah.Corey: And you can also make sure that there's a Docker image ready to go with the stuff that you need, just by configuring how the build works in the CDK. I will admit, I did have a couple of bug reports for you. One was kind of useful, where it was not at all clear how to do this on top of a Graviton-based Lambda function—because yeah, that was back when not everything really supported ARM architectures super well—and a couple of other times when the documentation was fairly ambiguous from my perspective, where it wasn't at all clear, what was I doing? I spent four hours trying to beat my way through it, I give up, filed an issue, went to get a cup of coffee, came back, and the answer was sitting there waiting for me because I'm not convinced you sleep.Amir: Well, I am a vampire. My last name is from the Transylvania area [laugh]. So—Corey: Excellent. Excellent.Amir: By the way, not the first time people tell me that. But anyway [laugh].Corey: There's something to be said for getting immediate responsiveness because one of the reasons I'm always so loath to go and do a support ticket anywhere is this is going to take weeks. And then someone's going to come back with a, “I don't get it.” And try and, like, read the support portfolio to you. No, you went right into yeah, it's this. Fix it and your problem goes away. And sure enough, it did.Amir: The escalation process that some companies put you through is very frustrating. I mean, lucky for you, CloudSnorkel is a one-man show and this man loves solving bugs. So [laugh].Corey: Yeah. Do you know of anyone using it for anything that isn't ridiculous and trivial like what I'm using it for?Amir: Yeah, I have to think whether or not I can… I mean, so—okay. We have a bunch of dedicated users, right, the GitHub repo, that keep posting bugs and keep posting even patches, right, so you can tell that they're using it. I even have one sponsor, one recurring sponsor on GitHub that uses it.Corey: It's always nice when people thank you via money.Amir: Yeah. Yeah, it is very validating. I think [BLEEP] is using it, but I also don't think I can actually say it because I got it from the GitHub.Corey: It's always fun. That's the beautiful part about open-source. You don't know who's using this. You see what other things people are working on, and you never know, is one of their—is this someone's side project, is it a skunkworks thing, or God forbid, is this inside of every car going forward and no one bothered to tell me about that. That is the magic and mystery of open-source. And you've been doing open-source for longer than I have and I thought I was old. You were originally named in some of the WinAMP credits, for God's sake, that media player that really whipped the llama's ass.Amir: Oh, yeah, I started real early. I started about when I was 15, I think. I started off with Pascal or something or even Perl, and then I decided I have to learn C and I have to learn Windows API. I don't know what possessed me to do that. Win32 API is… unique [laugh].But once I created those applications for myself, right, I think there was—oh my God, do you know the—what is it called, Sherlock in macOS, right? And these days, for PowerToys, there is the equivalent of it called, I don't know, whatever that—PowerBar? That's exactly—that was that. That's a project I created as a kid. I wanted something where I can go to the Run menu of Windows when you hit Winkey R, and you can just type something and it will start it up, right?I didn't want to go to the Start menu and browse and click things. I wanted to do everything with the keyboard. So, I created something called Blazerun [laugh], which [laugh] helped you really easily create shortcuts that went into your path, right, the Windows path, so you can really easily start them from Winkey R. I don't think that anyone besides me used it, but anyway, that thing needed an installer, right? Because Windows, you got to install things. So, I ended up—Corey: Yeah, these days on Mac OS, I use Alfred for that which is kind of long in the tooth, but there's a launch bar and a bunch of other stuff for it. What I love is that if I—I can double-tap the command key and that just pops up whatever I need it to and tell the computer what to do. It feels like there's an AI play in there somewhere if people can figure out how to spend ten minutes on building AI that does something other than lets them fire their customer service staff.Amir: Oh, my God. Please don't fire customer service staff. AI is so bad.Corey: Yeah, when I reach out to talk to a human, I really needed a human.Amir: Yes. Like, I'm not calling you because I want to talk to a robot. I know there's a website. Leave me alone, just give me a person.Corey: Yeah. Like, you already failed to solve my problem on your website. It's person time.Amir: Exactly. Oh, my God. Anyway [laugh]. So, I had to create an installer, right, and I found it was called NSIS. So, it was a Nullsoft “SuperPiMP” installation system. Or in the future, when Justin, the guy who created Winamp and NSIS, tried to tone down a little bit, Nullsoft Scriptable Installation System. And SuperPiMP is—this is such useless history for you, right, but SuperPiMP is the next generation of PiMP which is Plug-in Mini Packager [laugh].Corey: I remember so many of the—like, these days, no one would ever name any project like that, just because it's so off-putting to people with sensibilities, but back then that was half the stuff that came out. “Oh, you don't like how this thing I built for free in the wee hours when I wasn't working at my fast food job wound up—you know, like, how I chose to name it, well, that's okay. Don't use it. Go build your own. Oh, what you're using it anyway. That's what I thought.”Amir: Yeah. The source code was filled with profanity, too. And like, I didn't care, I really did not care, but some people would complain and open bug reports and patches. And my policy was kind of like, okay if you're complaining, I'm just going to ignore you. If you're opening a patch, fine, I'm going to accept that you're—you guys want to create something that's sensible for everybody, sure.I mean, it's just source code, you know? Whatever. So yeah, I started working on that NSIS. I used it for myself and I joined the forums—and this kind of answers to your question of why I respond to things so fast, just because of the fun—I did the same when I was 15, right? I started going on the forums, you remember forums? You remember that [laugh]?Corey: Oh, yeah, back before they all became terrible and monetized.Amir: Oh, yeah. So, you know, people were using NSIS, too, and they had requests, right? They wanted. Back in the day—what was it—there was only support for 16-bit colors for the icon, so they want 32-bit colors and big colors—32—big icon, sorry, 32 pixels by 32 pixels. Remember, 32 pixels?Corey: Oh, yes. Not well, and not happily, but I remember it.Amir: Yeah. So, I started just, you know, giving people—working on that open-source and creating up a fork. It wasn't even called ‘fork' back then, but yeah, I created, like, a little fork of myself and I started adding all these features. And people were really happy, and kind of created, like, this happy cycle for myself: when people were happy, I was happy coding. And then people were happy by what I was coding. And then they were asking for more and they were getting happier, the more I responded.So, it was kind of like a serotonin cycle that made me happy and made everybody happy. So, it's like a win, win, win, win, win. And that's how I started with open-source. And eventually… NSIS—again, that installation system—got so big, like, my fork got so big, and Justin, the guy who works on WinAMP and NSIS, he had other things to deal with. You know, there's a whole history there with AOL. I'm sure you've heard all the funny stories.Corey: Oh, yes. In fact, one thing that—you want to talk about weird collisions of things crossing, one of the things I picked up from your bio when you finally got tired of telling me no and agreed to be on the show was that you're also one of the team who works on camelcamelcamel.com. And I keep forgetting that's one of those things that most people have no idea exists. But it's very simple: all it does is it tracks Amazon products that you tell it to and alerts you when there's a price drop on the thing that you're looking at.It's something that is useful. I try and use it for things of substance or hobbies because I feel really pathetic when I'm like, get excited emails about a price drop in toilet paper. But you know, it's very handy just to keep an idea for price history, where okay, am I actually being ripped off? Oh, they claim it's their big Amazon Deals day and this is 40% off. Let's see what camelcamelcamel has to say.Oh, surprise. They just jacked the price right beforehand and now knocked 40% off. Genius. I love that. It always felt like something that was going to be blown off the radar by Amazon being displeased, but I discovered you folks in 2010 and here you are now, 13 years later, still here. I will say the website looks a lot better now.Amir: [laugh]. That's a recent change. I actually joined camel, maybe two or three years ago. I wasn't there from the beginning. But I knew the guy who created it—again, as you were saying—from the Winamp days, right? So, we were both working in the free—well, it wasn't freenode. It was not freenode. It was a separate IRC server that, again, Justin created for himself. It was called landoleet.Corey: Mmm. I never encountered that one.Amir: Yeah, no, it was pretty private. The only people that cared about WinAMP and NSIS ended up joining there. But it was a lot of fun. I met a lot of friends there. And yeah, I met Daniel Green there as well, and he's the guy that created, along with some other people in there that I think want to remain anonymous so I'm not going to mention, but they also were on the camel project.And yeah, I was kind of doing my poor version of shitposting on Twitter about AWS, kind of starting to get some traction and maybe some clients and talk about AWS so people can approach me, and Daniel approached me out of the blue and he was like, “Do you just post about AWS on Twitter or do you also do some AWS work?” I was like, “I do some AWS work.”Corey: Yes, as do all of us. It's one of those, well crap, we're getting called out now. “Do you actually know how any of this stuff works?” Like, “Much to my everlasting shame, yes. Why are you asking?”Amir: Oh, my God, no, I cannot fix your printer. Leave me alone.Corey: Mm-hm.Amir: I don't want to fix your Lambdas. No, but I do actually want to fix your Lambdas. And so, [laugh] he approached me and he asked if I can help them move camelcamelcamel from their data center to AWS. So, that was a nice big project. So, we moved, actually, all of camelcamelcamel into AWS. And this is how I found myself not only in the Winamp credits, but also in the camelcamelcamel credits page, which has a great picture of me riding a camel.Corey: Excellent. But one of the things I've always found has been that when you take an application that has been pre-existing for a while in a data center and then move it into the cloud, you suddenly have to care about things that no one sensible pays any attention to in the land of the data center. Because it's like, “What do I care about how much data passes between my application server and the database? Wait, what do you mean that in this configuration, that's a chargeable data transfer? Oh, dear Lord.” And things that you've never had to think about optimizing are suddenly things are very much optimizing.Because let's face it, when it comes to putting things in racks and then running servers, you aren't auto-scaling those things, so everything tends to be running over-provisioned, for very good reasons. It's an interesting education. Anything you picked out from that process that you think it'd be useful for folks to bear in mind if they're staring down the barrel of the same thing?Amir: Yeah, for sure. I think… in general, right, not just here. But in general, you always want to be pragmatic, right? You don't want to take steps are huge, right? So, the thing we did was not necessarily rewrite everything and change everything to AWS and move everything to Lambda and move everything to Docker.Basically, we did a mini lift-and-shift, but not exactly lift-and-shift, right? We didn't take it as is. We moved to RDS, we moved to ElastiCache, right, we obviously made use of security groups and session connect and we dropped SSH Sage and we improved the security a lot and we locked everything down, all the permissions and all that kind of stuff, right? But like you said, there's stuff that you start having to pay attention to. In our case, it was less the data transfer because we have a pretty good CDN. There was more of IOPS. So—and IOPS, specifically for a database.We had a huge database with about one terabyte of data and a lot of it is that price history that you see, right? So, all those nice little graphs that we create in—what do you call them, charts—that we create in camelcamelcamel off the price history. There's a lot of data behind that. And what we always want to do is actually remove that from MySQL, which has been kind of struggling with it even before the move to AWS, but after the move to AWS, where everything was no longer over-provisioned and we couldn't just buy a few more NVMes on Amazon for 100 bucks when they were on sale—back when we had to pay Amazon—Corey: And you know, when they're on sale. That's the best part.Amir: And we know [laugh]. We get good prices on NVMe. But yeah, on Amazon—on AWS, sorry—you have to pay for io1 or something, and that adds up real quick, as you were saying. So, part of that move was also to move to something that was a little better for that data structure. And we actually removed just that data, the price history, the price points from MySQL to DynamoDB, which was a pretty nice little project.Actually, I wrote about it in my blog. There is, kind of, lessons learned from moving one terabyte from MySQL to DynamoDB, and I think the biggest lesson was about hidden price of storage in DynamoDB. But before that, I want to talk about what you asked, which was the way that other people should make that move, right? So again, be pragmatic, right? If you Google, “How do I move stuff from DynamoDB to MySQL,” everybody's always talking about their cool project using Lambda and how you throttle Lambda and how you get throttled from DynamoDB and how you set it up with an SQS, and this and that. You don't need all that.Just fire up an EC2 instance, write some quick code to do it. I used, I think it was Go with some limiter code from Uber, and that was it. And you don't need all those Lambdas and SQS and the complication. That thing was a one-time thing anyway, so it doesn't need to be super… super-duper serverless, you know?Corey: That is almost always the way that it tends to play out. You encounter these weird little things along the way. And you see so many things that are tied to this is how architecture absolutely must be done. And oh you're not a real serverless person if you don't have everything running in Lambda and the rest. There are times where yeah, spin up an EC2 box, write some relatively inefficient code in ten minutes and just do the thing, and then turn it off when you're done. Problem solved. But there's such an aversion to that. It's nice to encounter people who are pragmatists more than they are zealots.Amir: I mostly learned that lesson. And both Daniel Green and me learned that lesson from the Winamp days. Because we both have written plugins for Winamp and we've been around that area and you can… if you took one of those non-pragmatist people, right, and you had them review the Winamp code right now—or even before—they would have a million things to say. That code was—and NSIS, too, by the way—and it was so optimized. It was so not necessarily readable, right? But it worked and it worked amazing. And Justin would—if you think I respond quickly, right, Justin Frankel, the guy who wrote Winamp, he would release versions of NSIS and of Winamp, like, four versions a day, right? That was before [laugh] you had CI/CD systems and GitHub and stuff. That was just CVS. You remember CVS [laugh]?Corey: Oh, I've done multiple CVS migrations. One to Git and a couple to Subversion.Amir: Oh yeah, Subversion. Yep. Done ‘em all. CVS to Subversion to Git. Yep. Yep. That was fun.Corey: And these days, everyone's using Git because it—we're beginning to have a monoculture.Amir: Yeah, yeah. I mean, but Git is nicer than Subversion, for me, at least. I've had more fun with it.Corey: Talk about damning with faint praise.Amir: Faint?Corey: Yeah, anything's better than Subversion, let's be honest here.Amir: Oh [laugh].Corey: I mean, realistically, copying a bunch of files and directories to a.bak folder is better than Subversion.Amir: Well—Corey: At least these days. But back then it was great.Amir: Yeah, I mean, the only thing you had, right [laugh]?Corey: [laugh].Amir: Anyway, achieving great things with not necessarily the right tools, but just sheer power of will, that's what I took from the Winamp days. Just the entire world used Winamp. And by the way, the NSIS project that I was working on, right, I always used to joke that every computer in the world ran my code, every Windows computer in the world when my code, just because—Corey: Yes.Amir: So, many different companies use NSIS. And none of them cared that the code was not very readable, to put it mildly.Corey: So, many companies founder on those shores where they lose sight of the fact that I can point to basically no companies that died because their code was terrible, yeah, had an awful lot that died with great-looking code, but they didn't nail the business problem.Amir: Yeah. I would be lying if I said that I nailed exactly the business problem at NSIS because the most of the time I would spend there and actually shrinking the stub, right, there was appended to your installer data, right? So, there's a little stub that came—the executable, basically, that came before your data that was extracted. I spent, I want to say, years of my life [laugh] just shrinking it down by bytes—by literal bytes—just so it stays under 34, 35 kilobytes. It was kind of a—it was a challenge and something that people appreciated, but not necessarily the thing that people appreciate the most. I think the features—Corey: Well, no I have to do the same thing to make sure something fits into a Lambda deployment package. The scale changes, the problem changes, but somehow everything sort of rhymes with history.Amir: Oh, yeah. I hope you don't have to disassemble code to do that, though because that's uh… I mean, it was fun. It was just a lot.Corey: I have to ask, how much work went into building your cdk-github-runners as far as getting it to a point of just working out the door? Because I look at that and it feels like there's—like, the early versions, yeah, there wasn't a whole bunch of code tied to it, but geez, the iterative, “How exactly does this ridiculous step functions API work or whatnot,” feels like I'm looking at weeks of frustration. At least it would have been for me.Amir: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it wasn't, like, a day or two. It was definitely not—but it was not years, either. I've been working on it I think about a year now. Don't quote me on that. But I've put a lot of time into it. So, you know, like you said, the skeleton code is pretty simple: it's a step function, which as we said, takes a long time to get right. The functions, they are really nice, but their definition language is not very straightforward. But beyond that, right, once that part worked, it worked. Then came all the bug reports and all the little corner cases, right? We—Corey: Hell is other people's use cases. Always is. But that's honestly better than a lot of folks wind up experiencing where they'll put an open-source project up and no one ever knows. So, getting users is often one of the biggest barriers to a lot of this stuff. I've found countless hidden gems lurking around on GitHub with a very particular search for something that no one had ever looked at before, as best I can tell.Amir: Yeah.Corey: Open-source is a tricky thing. There needs to be marketing brought into it, there needs to be storytelling around it, and has to actually—dare I say—solve a problem someone has.Amir: I mean, I have many open-source projects like that, that I find super useful, I created for myself, but no one knows. I think cdk-github-runners, I'm pretty sure people know about it only because you talked about it on Screaming in the Cloud or your newsletter. And by the way, thank you for telling me that you talked about it last week in the conference because now we know why there was a spike [laugh] all of a sudden. People Googled it.Corey: Yeah. I put links to it as well, but it's the, yeah, I use this a lot and it's great. I gave a crappy explanation on how it works, but that's the trick I've found between conference talks and, dare I say, podcast episodes, you gives people a glimpse and a hook and tell them where to go to learn more. Otherwise, you're trying to explain every nuance and every intricacy in 45 minutes. And you can't do that effectively in almost every case. All you're going to do is drive people away. Make it sound exciting, get them to see the value in it, and then let them go.Amir: You have to explain the market for it, right? That's it.Corey: Precisely.Amir: And I got to say, I somewhat disagree with your—or I have a different view when you say that, you know, open-source projects needs marketing and all those things. It depends on what open-source is for you, right? I don't create open-source projects so they are successful, right? It's obviously always nicer when they're successful, but—and I do get that cycle of happiness that, like I was saying, people create bugs and I have to fix them and stuff, right? But not every open-source project needs to be a success. Sometimes it's just fun.Corey: No. When I talk about marketing, I'm talking about exactly what we're doing here. I'm not talking take out an AdWords campaign or something horrifying like that. It's you build something that solved the problem for someone. The big problem that worries me about these things is how do you not lose sleep at night about the fact that solve someone's problem and they don't know that it exists?Because that drives me nuts. I've lost count of the number of times I've been beating my head against a wall and asked someone like, “How would you handle this?” Like, “Oh, well, what's wrong with this project?” “What do you mean?” “Well, this project seems to do exactly what you want it to do.” And no one has it all stuffed in their head. But yeah, then it seems like open-source becomes a little more corporatized and it becomes a lead gen tool for people to wind up selling their SaaS services or managed offerings or the rest.Amir: Yeah.Corey: And that feels like the increasing corporatization of open-source that I'm not a huge fan of.Amir: Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to lie, right? Like, part of why I created this—or I don't know if it was part of it, but like, I had a dream that, you know, I'm going to get, oh, tons of GitHub sponsors, and everybody's going to use it and I can retire on an island and just make money out of this, right? Like, that's always a dream, right? But it's a dream, you know?And I think bottom line open-source is… just a tool, and some people use it for, like you were saying, driving sales into their SaaS, some people, like, may use it just for fun, and some people use it for other things. Or some people use it for politics, even, right? There's a lot of politics around open-source.I got to tell you a story. Back in the NSIS days, right—talking about politics—so this is not even about politics of open-source. People made NSIS a battleground for their politics. We would have translations, right? People could upload their translations. And I, you know, or other people that worked on NSIS, right, we don't speak every language of the world, so there's only so much we can do about figuring out if it's a real translation, if it's good or not.Back in the day, Google Translate didn't exist. Like, these days, we check Google Translate, we kind of ask a few questions to make sure they make sense. But back in the day, we did the best that we could. At some point, we got a patch for Catalan language, I'm probably mispronouncing it—but the separatist people in Spain, I think, and I didn't know anything about that. I was a young kid and… I just didn't know.And I just included it, you know? Someone submitted a patch, they worked hard, they wanted to be part of the open-source project. Why not? Sure I included it. And then a few weeks later, someone from Spain wanted to change Catalan into Spanish to make sure that doesn't exist for whatever reason.And then they just started fighting with each other and started making demands of me. Like, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to delete that, you have to change the name. And I was just so baffled by why would someone fight so much over a translation of an open-source project. Like, these days, I kind of get what they were getting at, right?Corey: But they were so bad at telling that story that it was just like, so basically, screw, “You for helping,” is how it comes across.Amir: Yeah, screw you for helping. You're a pawn now. Just—you're a pawn unwittingly. Just do what I say and help me in my political cause. I ended up just telling both of them if you guys can agree on anything, I'm just going to remove both translations. And that's what I ended up doing. I just removed both translations. And then a few months later—because we had a release every month basically, I just added both of them back and I've never heard from them again. So sort of problem solved. Peace the Middle East? I don't know.Corey: It's kind of wild just to see how often that sort of thing tends to happen. It's a, I don't necessarily understand why folks are so opposed to other people trying to help. I think they feel like there's this loss of control as things are slipping through their fingers, but it's a really unwelcoming approach. One of the things that got me deep into the open-source ecosystem surprisingly late in my development was when I started pitching in on the SaltStack project right after it was founded, where suddenly everything I threw their way was merged, and then Tom Hatch, the guy who founded the project, would immediately fix all the bugs and stuff I put in and then push something else immediately thereafter. But it was such a welcoming thing.Instead of nitpicking me to death in the pull request, it just got merged in and then silently fixed. And I thought that was a classy way to do it. Of course, it doesn't scale and of course, it causes other problems, but I envy the simplicity of those days and just the ethos behind that.Amir: That's something I've learned the last few years, I would say. Back in the NSIS day, I was not like that. I nitpicked. I nitpicked a lot. And I can guess why, but it just—you create a patch—in my mind, right, like you create a patch, you fix it, right?But these days I get, I've been on the other side as well, right? Like I created patches for open-source projects and I've seen them just wither away and die, and then five years later, someone's like, “Oh, can you fix this line to have one instead of two, and then I'll merge it.” I'm like, “I don't care anymore. It was five years ago. I don't work there anymore. I don't need it. If you want it, do it.”So, I get it these days. And these days, if someone creates a patch—just yesterday, someone created a patch to format cdk-github-runners in VS Code. And they did it just, like, a little bit wrong. So, I just fixed it for them and I approved it and pushed it. You know, it's much better. You don't need to bug people for most of it.Corey: You didn't yell at them for having the temerity to contribute?Amir: My voice is so raw because I've been yelling for five days at them, yeah.Corey: Exactly, exactly. I really want to thank you for taking the time to chat with me about how all this stuff came to be and your own path. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amir: So, I really appreciate you having me and driving all this traffic to my projects. If people want to learn more, they can always go to cloudsnorkel.com; it has all the projects. github.com/cloudsnorkel has a few more. And then my private blog is kichik.com. So, K-I-C-H-I-K dot com. I don't post there as much as I should, but it has some interesting AWS projects from the past few years that I've done.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.Amir: Thank you, Corey. It was really nice meeting you.Corey: Amir Szekely, owner of CloudSnorkel. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment. Heck, put it on all of the podcast platforms with a step function state machine that you somehow can't quite figure out how the API works.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In episode 166 of our SAP on Azure video podcast we go deep on Premium v2 storage with Peter Kalan and Anbu Govindasamy. We look at the different storage options for SAP on Azure, show some performance comparisions, dynamic tiering and snappshotting. Then also talk about how to migrate to premium v2. Find all the links mentioned here: https://www.saponazurepodcast.de/episode166 Reach out to us for any feedback / questions: * Robert Boban: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rboban/ * Goran Condric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gorancondric/ * Holger Bruchelt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holger-bruchelt/ #Microsoft #SAP #Azure #SAPonAzure ## Summary created by AI * Features and benefits of premium SSD V2: Premium SSD V2 is a new version of Azure storage that offers sub-millisecond latency, customizable size and performance, and lower cost than premium SSD V1. It can support large database workloads such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and DB2. * How to use premium SSD V2 for SAP HANA: Premium SSD V2 does not require write accelerator for SAP HANA log, and can use different VM sizes than M series. It also allows changing the IOPS and throughput of the disks on the fly without downtime. It is certified by SAP and has best practice guidelines for optimal configuration. * Demo of premium SSD V2: The document shows a demo of how to create and configure premium SSD V2 disks, how to check the sector size and latency, how to increase the throughput dynamically, and how to take snapshots and create new disks from them. * Comparison of premium SSD V2 and V1: The document compares the price and performance of premium SSD V2 and V1, and shows that V2 is cheaper and faster than V1. It also explains how to optimize the disk size and number to get the best performance for the same price.

Welcome episode 227 of the Cloud Pod podcast - where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan - and they're REALLY excited to tell you all about the 161 one things announced at Google Next. Literally, all the things. We're also saying farewell to EC2 Classic, Amazon SES, and Azure's Explicit Proxy - which probably isn't what you think it is.  Titles we almost went with this week:

Welcome episode 223 of The CloudPod Podcast! It's a full house - Justin, Matt, Ryan, and Jonathan are all here this week to discuss all the cloud news you need. This week, cost optimization is the big one, with a deep dive on the newest AWS blog. Additionally, we've got updates to BigQuery, Google's Health Service, managed services for Prometheus, and more. Titles we almost went with this week:

This week, host Anna Rose (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Nico Mohnblatt (https://twitter.com/nico_mnbl) chat with Ron Rothblum (https://csaws.cs.technion.ac.il/~rothblum/), Professor of Computer Science at Technion. They explore information theory and ZK, diving into the weeds on multiple topics including error correcting codes, FRI, FFTs, Reed-Solomon encoding, Fiat-Shamir and more. Here's some additional links for this episode: Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GMW is not Zero-Knowledge) by Holmgren, Lombardi and Rothblum (https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/286.pdf) Proving as Fast as Computing: Succinct Arguments with Constant Prover Overhead by Ron-Zewi and Rothblum (https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1673.pdf) Faster Sounder Succinct Arguments and IOPs by Holmgren and Rothblum (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/994.pdf) The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited by Canetti, Goldreich and Halevi (https://eprint.iacr.org/1998/011.pdf) Linear-Time Arguments with Sublinear Verification from Tensor Codes by Bootle, Chiesa and Groth (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1426.pdf) Testudo: Linear Time Prover SNARKs with Constant Size Proofs and Square Root Size Universal Setup by Campanelli, Gailly, Gennaro, Jovanovic, Mihali and Thaler (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/961.pdf) Reed-Solomon Codes (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/realworld/reedsolomon/reed_solomon_codes.html) Shannon's Source Coding Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%27s_source_coding_theorem#References) Guy Rothblum Publications (https://guyrothblum.wordpress.com/about/publications/) Episode 274: SNARKs: A Trilogy with Ariel Gabizon (https://zeroknowledge.fm/274-2/) zkSummit 10 is happening in London on September 20, 2023! Apply to attend now -> https://9lcje6jbgv1.typeform.com/zkSummit10 Aleo (https://www.aleo.org/) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. Interested in building private applications? Check out Aleo's programming language called Leo that enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of ZKPs to deploy decentralized exchanges, hidden information games, regulated stablecoins, and more. Visit http://developer.aleo.org (http://developer.aleo.org/). For questions, join their Discord at aleo.org/discord (http://aleo.org/discord). If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

Cast:Dr. Tara Egan - hostEllen Herbert, LCSW - guest expertIs an Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) right for your teen? What exactly is an IOP?Our special guest expert this week helps us understand what Intensive Outpatient Programs look like for teens and shares some great information to educate parents about the process.Ellen Herbert is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She is currently the Clinical Director of the Intensive Outpatient Program at Queen City Counseling, located in Charlotte, NC. She received her Bachelors in Psychology from Vanderbilt University, her Masters in Social Work from Winthrop University and has been practicing as a clinical social worker ever since. Throughout her career, she has worked primarily with adolescents and has held positions in outpatient therapy, intensive in-home services and partial hospitalizationToday Ellen is here to discuss the ins and outs of IOPs, or intensive outpatient programs. What an IOP is? How is it different from outpatient therapy? How is it different from an inpatient program?What type of issues are addressed by IOP (substance use, eating disorders, etc)? How do these programs take into account developmental stage/age (for example, teenage vs adult)?There are many avenues for support and differing levels of care; how would a parent know what level of care is right for their teen?What benefits can a parent expect to see with an IOP Program for teens? Are there any risks or issues that parents should be mindful of?If you are a parent with a teen that needs support – where do you begin?To learn more about Ellen Herbert  and her services: https://qc-counseling.com For more information and resources -Dr. Tara Egan:Website -Dr. Tara Egan's child & adolescent therapy services books, webinars, public speaking opportunities, and coaching/consultation services, Go HERE.Facebook - learn more HERE.YouTube - learn more HERE.Instagram - learn more HERE.Edited by Christian Fox

In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined once again by Alex Bouchereau to discuss how you can use Oracle Database Cloud Service to deploy Oracle Databases in the cloud. They also talk through the fundamentals of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure database system instances, including bare metal and virtual machine shapes and their storage architecture.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Deepak Modi, Ranbir Singh, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   http://traffic.libsyn.com/oracleuniversitypodcast/Oracle_University_Podcast_S02_EP04.mp3     00;00;00;00 - 00;00;38;21 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.   00;00;38;22 - 00;01;07;29 Hi, everyone. In our last episode, we discussed Oracle Exadata Cloud Service with our Oracle Database Specialist Alex Bouchereau. If you missed that episode, please remember to go back and give it a listen. We're so excited to have Alex with us again and today she's going to talk about the fundamentals of OCI database system instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We'll also ask her about the DB system for bare metal and virtual machine shapes.   00;01;08;02 - 00;01;40;22 Hi, Alex. Can you tell us about the Oracle Database Cloud Service? Oracle Database Cloud Service provides you the ability to deploy Oracle databases to the cloud. You can deploy Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition 2 and any database version from 11.2 and later. You have the option to deploy using virtual machine or bare metal shapes. Database Cloud Service VM and BM metal DB systems are deployed in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions around the world.   00;01;40;24 - 00;02;12;01 With Database Cloud Service, you manage the database instance, including provisioning, patching, backup, and disaster recovery using OCI cloud automation tools, such as the OCI console, CLI, and API. There is also an SDK that supports a number of different languages. Using VM shapes, you can deploy real application clusters and scale your storage requirements. Walk us through the various Oracle database editions. You know, from Standard Edition 2 to Enterprise Edition Extreme Performance.   00;02;12;03 - 00;02;37;15 What are the key differences in terms of features, add-ons, and licensing options? Beginning with Standard Edition 2, features included with the service are Multitenant Pluggable Database and Tablespace Encryption. Moving to Enterprise Edition, you add additional database features, such as data guard and the EM packs of data masking and subsetting, tuning, and diagnostics.   00;02;37;17 - 00;03;14;06 With Enterprise Edition High Performance, in addition to the base Enterprise Edition, you add Management and Lifecycle Management packs as well as Advanced Security and Database Vault and Label Security. And finally, Enterprise Edition Extreme Performance has all the previously discussed features, plus Active Data Guard, Oracle RAC, and Database In-Memory. Note that all packages include Oracle Database Transparent Data Encryption, TDE. You have an option to bring your own license, BYOL, which means you could use your organization's existing Oracle Database software licenses.   00;03;14;12 - 00;03;44;27 What's the difference between bare metal instances and virtual machines in the context of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? OCI is the only public cloud that supports BM and VMs during the same set of APIs, hardware, firmware, software stack, and networking infrastructure. Bare metal instances are single tenant and you have full control over the resources provisioned within the service. Virtual machines follow a multitenant model and share servers that are not overprovisioned.   00;03;45;00 - 00;04;11;00 So how is the customer billed for these services? For databases using bare metal and virtual machine infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure uses per second billing. This means that OCPU and storage usage is billed by the second with a minimum usage period of one minute for virtual machine DB systems and one hour for bare metal DB systems.   00;04;11;00 - 00;04;39;29 For bare metal servers, there is an infrastructure charge along with the billing for OCPUs. Alex, can DBCS be customized? I mean, are there different kinds of DBCS offerings to fulfill the various needs of our customers? The maximum number of OCPUs, RAM, and storage for your database depends on the shape you choose. There are two types of DB systems on virtual machines. Single node or one-node virtual machine DB system consists of one virtual machine.   00;04;40;02 - 00;05;13;27 Two-node virtual machine DB systems consist of two virtual machines of separate servers. Virtual machine DB systems use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure block storage. Bare metal systems used NVMe local storage and are therefore not scalable. Storage scaling is available for all VM shapes. Online OCPU scaling is available for bare metal systems or for two-node RAC VMs. Alex, help us understand what Database Cloud Service on bare metal is.   00;05;13;29 - 00;05;43;07 How does it differ from other Oracle Database Service offerings? Database Cloud Service on bare metal is a database service offering that enables customers to deploy and manage full-featured Oracle databases on bare metal servers. Bare metal offers proven and predictable performance with local NVMe storage on dedicated servers that provide high IOPS with extremely low latency. Bare metal DB systems consist of a single bare metal server running Oracle Linux with locally attached NVMe storage.   00;05;43;07 - 00;06;11;25 If the node fails, you can simply launch another system and restore the databases from current backups. Bare metal DB system provide dedicated resources that are ideal for databases that are performance intensive. And how do you start a bare metal instance? When you launch a bare metal DB system, you select the single Oracle Database edition that applies to all the databases on that DB system.   00;06;11;28 - 00;06;49;08 The selected edition cannot be changed. Each DB system can have multiple database homes, which can be different versions. Each database home can have multiple databases, which are, of course, the same version as the database home. Are you attending Oracle CloudWorld 2023? Learn from experts, network with peers, and find out about the latest innovations when Oracle CloudWorld returns to Las Vegas from September 18 through 21. CloudWorld is the best place to learn about Oracle solutions from the people who build and use them.   00;06;49;12 - 00;07;17;22 In addition to your attendance at CloudWorld, your ticket gives you access to Oracle MyLearn and all of the cloud learning subscription content as well as three free certification exam credits. This is valid from the week you register through 60 days after the conference. So what are you waiting for? Register today. Learn more about Oracle CloudWorld at www.oracle.com/cloudworld.   00;07;17;24 - 00;07;46;08 Welcome back. Alex, can you explain how Automatic Storage Management interfaces with disks in OCI? ASM directly interfaces with the disks. When you provision a bare metal system, you will indicate the data storage percentage assigned to data storage, which is user data and database files. Your choice is 40% or 80%. The remaining percentage is assigned to RECO storage consisting of database redo logs, archive logs, and recovery manager backups.   00;07;46;08 - 00;08;20;14 Storage is continuously monitored for any faults. Any disk that fails will be taken offline. Whenever the shapes list a maximum amount of usable space and data in RECO, these reservations for rebalancing are already taken into account. The root user has complete control over the storage subsystem so customization and tuning are possible. But the service already optimally configures these by default according to best practices.   00;08;20;18 - 00;08;58;20 So what are the key benefits of running databases on virtual machines? Database Service on VMs is a Database Service offering that enables customers to build, scale, and manage full-featured Oracle databases on virtual machines. The key benefits of running databases on VMs are cost-effectiveness, ease of getting started, durable and scalable storage, and the ability to run real application clusters, RAC, to improve availability. Database Cloud Service on VMs is built on the same high performance, highly available cloud infrastructure used by all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services.   00;08;58;22 - 00;09;23;21 RAC databases will run on a single availability domain (AD) while ensuring each node is on a separate physical RAC, ensuring high availability. When you launch a virtual machine DB system, you select the Oracle Database edition and version that applies to the database on that DB system. The selected edition cannot be changed. Depending on your selected Oracle database edition and version, your DB system can support multiple pluggable databases, PDBs.   00;09;23;28 - 00;09;59;17 Are there various kinds of compute shapes available with DBCS? Virtual machine database systems offer compute shapes with 1 to 24 cores to support customers with small to large database processing requirements. A virtual machine DB system database uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure block storage instead of local storage. You specify a storage size when you launch the DB system, and you can scale up the storage as needed at any time.   00;09;59;17 - 00;10;27;26 On-demand up and down scaling of database OCPUs use without interrupting database operations on two-node Oracle Real Application Cluster deployments allows customers to meet application needs while minimizing costs. To change to the number of CPU cores on an existing virtual machine DB system, you will change the shape of that DB system. Can you tell us about the node virtual machine DB systems in OCI?   00;10;27;28 - 00;11;01;22 For one-node virtual machine DB systems, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a fast provisioning option that allows you to create a DB system using Logical Volume Manager, LVM, as your storage management software. Fast provisioning for an Oracle Database with Logical Volume Manager increases developer productivity. Can we also choose to use Automatic Storage with DBCS? You have a choice to select ASM storage management. You will select Oracle Grid Infrastructure when you provision your DB system to use Oracle Automatic Storage Management.   00;11;01;25 - 00;11;32;03 This is required for RAC deployments. Virtual machine DB system deployments with ASM support 11.2 database versions and above, whereas virtual machine DB system deployments with LVM support 12.2 database versions and above. When you provision your virtual machine DB system, you will identify the amount of available storage. This is the amount of block storage and gigabyte to allocate to the virtual machine DB system.   00;11;32;05 - 00;11;56;05 Available storage can be scaled up or down as needed after provisioning your DB system. You will also indicate total storage, the total block storage and gigabyte used by the virtual machine DB system. The amount of available storage you select determines this value. Oracle charges for the total storage used. What our customers really want to know is how their data is kept secure?   00;11;56;11 - 00;12;26;29 Lay it out for us. Alex. Identity Management, network controls, and encryption are all built into Database Cloud Service virtual machine and bare metal DB system to provide end-to-end security. Oracle Data Safe is an integrated security service available at no additional cost. With it, you could do a few things. Identify configuration drift through overall security assessments. This helps you identify gaps and then fix the issues. Flag risks users or behavior, and see if they're all well controlled.   00;12;27;02 - 00;12;54;14 Audit user activity. Track risky actions. Raise alerts and streamline compliance checks. Discover sensitive data. Know where it is and how much you have. Mask sensitive data. Three out of four DB instances are copies for dev test. This lets you remove that risk. To help meet security compliance standards, you can optionally enable FIPS, STIG, and SELinux options.   00;12;54;20 - 00;13;15;04 Thank you, Alex, for guiding us through all of this. To learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service, please visit mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at our free Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations Workshop. You'll also find quizzes that you can take to test your understanding of these concepts. That brings us to the end of this episode.   00;13;15;06 - 00;13;39;11 We're very excited about our episode next week in which we'll be talking with Rohit Rahi, Vice President of OCI Global Delivery, and Bill Lawson, Senior Director of Cloud Applications Product Management for Oracle University. We'll be talking about the free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Apps training and certifications that are available for a limited time. So you really won't want to miss that episode!   00;13;39;13 - 00;16;23;28 Until next time, this is Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham signing off. That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew are your hosts this week. Join us as we discuss all things cloud, AI, the upcoming Google AI Conference, AWS Console, and Duet AI for Google cloud.  Titles we almost went with this week:

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew and Peter are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud and AI,  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod is better than Bob's Used Books The Cloud Pod sets up AWS notifications for all The Cloud Pod is non-differential about privacy in BigQuery The Cloud Pod finds Windows Bob The Cloud Pod starts preparing for its Azure Emergency today A big thanks to this week's sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world's most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Implementing parenting tools as preventative measures, even before things get out of hand, is absolutely invaluable when it comes to parenting a struggling teen. Changing the environment, being able to regulate your own emotions differently, being able to relate to your kid's emotions and reason with your kid differently, are all skills that can be learned. Today's guest, Laura Goldstein, has developed an incredibly valuable resource for parents to learn these tools which they can employ not only for their kids but also for themselves. With the development of TheraCourses, Laura made these skills available for parents from anywhere.In this episode on preventative measures, we discuss:The importance of implementing parenting strategies as preventative measures, before things get out of hand;Why it's so important to put what you learn into practice;Learning new parenting skills and tools is a muscle that can be trained;How TheraCourses helps parents learn new parenting skills and implement them right away;Modeling the behavior you wish to see;And more!If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Instagram (@bethhillmancoaching) or go to my website www.bethhillmancoaching.com. And if you're interested in working with me, you can learn more about my private coaching here or my group coaching here.And remember parents, the change begins with us.- - - - - - - - - -Ps. Are you getting great value out of this podcast? It would mean the world to me if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This way, you will help me reach and help more parents of struggling teens develop healthy responses and boundaries instead of acting out of fear and anxiety. You can leave a review by clicking here, scrolling to the bottom, tapping to leave a star rating and then write your review. Thanks so much!And if you haven't already done so, make sure to subscribe to our show so you don't miss any of my future episodes!—--------More about Laura GoldsteinLaura Goldstein is a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist in Rockville MD. She is the founder and Executive Director of Montgomery County Counseling Center and the founder of TheraCourses, which she will talk more about in next week's episode! She has worked across multiple settings including in-home behavioral health services, IOPS for adolescent dual diagnosis treatment and young adults struggling to launch, and her private practice. You can learn more about Laura here or about TheraCourses by clicking here.

If you're familiar with my work or have listened to my podcast before, you know how I strive to help parents see their own part and take responsibility for it. Today I'm having such a valuable conversation around this with my guest, Laura Goldstein, LMFT. She shares some amazing metaphors that will really help shift the way we think and show us the role parents play in their family's dynamics and their child's behavior.Laura also provides us with a very clear explanation of different kinds of therapists out there to help you choose which one is best for your family.In this episode on doing your own work and finding the right therapist, we discuss: The difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist;An explanation of the difference between an LMFT, LCSW, etc.;Great metaphors to show the role parents play in the family dynamics and their child's behavior;And more!If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Instagram (@bethhillmancoaching) or go to my website www.bethhillmancoaching.com. And if you're interested in working with me, you can learn more about my private coaching here or my group coaching here.And remember parents, the change begins with us.- - - - - - - - - -Ps. Are you getting great value out of this podcast? It would mean the world to me if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This way, you will help me reach and help more parents of struggling teens develop healthy responses and boundaries instead of acting out of fear and anxiety. You can leave a review by clicking here, scrolling to the bottom, tapping to leave a star rating and then write your review. Thanks so much!And if you haven't already done so, make sure to subscribe to our show so you don't miss any of my future episodes!- - - - - - - - - - More about Laura GoldsteinLaura Goldstein is a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist in Rockville MD. She is the founder and Executive Director of Montgomery County Counseling Center and the founder of TheraCourses, which she will talk more about in next week's episode! She has worked across multiple settings including in-home behavioral health services, IOPS for adolescent dual diagnosis treatment and young adults struggling to launch, and her private practice. 

Todd Owens, Field Marketing Director, and Nishant Lodha, Director of Product Marketing – Emerging Technologies, discuss some of the metrics most commonly used to refer to storage performance, how the figures are derived from Marvell as well as other I/O device manufacturers, how performance figures drive decisions, and an in-depth discussion around IOPS.  Learn more: https://bit.ly/3STtLkH

Kelly Brown has been sober since 2008 after a 30 year drinking career.  Her journey towards recovery was not easy.  In and out of the rooms for 4 years, she struggled to let go of the perceived comfort of alcohol and the idea she would never be happy without it.  Multiple rehabs, detoxes, IOPs and counselors were not piercing through the wall of fear she had created over decades of addiction. That changed once she was out of options and given the gift of desperation.Kelly grew up in a suburb outside of New York City and lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, Istanbul, and NYC before settling down in the Scranton area in 2008.  Her professional experience includes executive recruiting, human resources, media, and advertising. Since 2013, Kelly has worked for a local non-profit.  Today, her career is beyond her wildest dreams, just like the rest of her life.  #recoveryispossible #recovery #substanceusedisorder #awakening #nyc #lalaland #chicago #istanbul #scranton  Support the show

Ask Kati Anything ep.131 | Your mental health podcast, with Kati Morton, LMFT This week Kati talks about how we can move forward if we were abusive to our siblings when we were younger. She also explains why we can fantasize about going missing or wanting to run away from our lives, and why it's common to have pretend conversations with ourselves and feel like they are real. Kati also shares the best time to journal, how to deal with a push pull urge in therapy, and how to move past denial. She also explains why we can feel the urge to invalidate our little t traumas, how to finally get to the root of our issues, and finally what we can do if it feels like nothing is helping. Audience questions: 1. There are a lot of questions asked by people who were abused by their siblings when they were younger, but what if I was the abuser? It's been over 15 years since but I was put in charge of watching my special needs little sister (only 16 months apart) a lot of the time and I used violence... 2. For years I've had this fantasy of “going missing,” or disappearing intentionally – just getting in my car, driving a thousand miles, leaving it in some parking lot and then just walking away. Over time I learned that this is not actually illegal, as long as you're an adult and you're not evading the... 3. This is kind of embarrassing to ask, but surely I'm not the only one who does this. Why do I pretend I'm having conversations with people who aren't really there? It's as if I'm actually having a back and forth conversation with another person, but in reality I guess I'm just talking to myself? 4. Why do I have such a strong push pull relationship with therapy? I have seen seven different therapists in the past two years and couldn't connect with any of them. It's like the first couple of sessions I want to tell them everything and then on the third and fourth sessions I don't want to... 5. Regarding journaling, is it more used to just write things down in the moment or is there value in going back and re-reading it at some point? I've been journaling pretty regularly for the past year and want to go back through and read it but I'm finding that I'm very hesitant to do so… 6. Is it possible to know you're in denial and yet you still don't want to believe the truth? I am trying to come to terms with being emotionally neglected by my parents but the part I'm struggling with is the acceptance that it happened. I know it sounds like a contradiction because I can name the... 7. How do I stop invalidating my little T traumas as you call them? I had a lot of things happen to me over my lifetime that I would consider smaller traumas if anything. For example, my father was quite abusive, but he left when I was still very young and we didn't see him often. My mother was/is an addict, but she still took care of us quite well... 8. How do I get to the root of my issues? I feel like I'm so caught up in running away by using maladaptive coping strategies (anorexia, over-exercise, suicidality etc) that I don't even know what I'm trying to cope with. I do know that there‘s more emotional pain when I reduce my disordered behaviors... 9. One of your answers prompted me to ask a question. I'm struggling with feeling like I've tried everything and feeling like I have no choice left but to end things. I have been inpatient multiple times, have done multiple IOPs/partials. I have tried so many meds... --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/askkatianything/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/askkatianything/support

Intensive Ouptatient Programs are for more than just addiction treatment. Join Katie Walker of Revitalist as she sits down with Hope Reneau of The Middle Path to discuss Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP). In this multi-part series, Revitalist and The Middle Path discuss IOPs and their integration in a comprehensive approach to helathcare. www.RevitalistClinic.com www.TheMiddlePath.life

I met Dennis in the Reddit sober community - I am very happy that he had the opportunity to come on and share his tenacious story of recovery.There is some GREAT discussion about relapse, white-knuckling & willpower only, the use of humour in recovery and the importance of community and connection.In his own words:"Battled AUD for the better part of a decade. In that time racked up ~20 trips to detox, 4 rehabs and a few IOPs - only one completed (my last).I'm now 2.5 years clean. I used Antabuse as an aid, but also therapy, and literature, I did my AA steps, and re-established and maintain a spiritual connection."Topics include:- drinking at home & in isolation and how that shifted things- being let go from a job, only to find a better job days later (which added to the "justifications pile")- ego getting in the way of recovery- working through impulses- a rock bottom moment on Halloween 2019 that sparked his 2.5+ years sober- reestablishing a spiritual side- the power of awareness and "rewinding" of "fast-forwarding" the tape- the a-ha moment of 'being honest with myself'Great, relatable stuff here. Thank you to Dennis!

There is (arguably) no faster mainstream storage available than Infinidat's just-launched InfiniBox SSA II array. Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog joins host Steve McDowell, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, to walk us through just how Infinidat is able to increase throughput and IOPs by more than 50% in the new array, while also ensuring a compelling level of data protection and cyber-resilience. The guys also talk about the continuing evolution of storage, with a deep-dive into AIOps and how new workloads (such as cloud-native) impact storage architecture. This is a great podcast for anyone interested in high-performance storage. This podcast is sponsored by Infinidat. Special Guest: Eric Herzog.

Google Biglake takes the feature of the week with the ability to federate data from multiple data lakes. On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the most expensive way to run a VM (Oracle wins). Plus some exciting developments, an AWS OpenSearch 1.2 update with several new features, and Azure's having a party, so bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP). A big thanks to this week's sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights

On The Cloud Pod this week, it's a brave new world for Ryan, who learns all kinds of things. Plus the Okta breach leads to customer outrage over not telling them for months, AWS announces its new Billing Conductor, and Google expands Contact Center AI for a reimagined customer experience.  A big thanks to this week's sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights

Major performance milestones are being hit with new code inbound for Linux, Plasma and GNOME desktops are set to run Wayland on NVIDIA's binary driver, and why the SFC's new GPL fight could have implications for you.

The latest DF Direct Weekly tackles the online bunfight between Nintendo and Bloomberg about the existence of a '4K Switch', goes in-depth on HDR and dashboard changes on Xbox consoles and examines Nvidia DLAA... what is it? Rich Leadbetter, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia perpetrate this one. 00:00:00 Introductions 00:00:39 Nintendo Switch 4K denials 00:06:49 Xbox Dolby Vision support + 4K dashboard 00:18:17 TGS 2021 VR experience 00:27:40 Nvidia DLAA Reaction 00:33:51 DF Content Discussion: Unity 50fps issue fix? 00:40:36 DF Content Discussion: The Medium PS5 00:46:56 DF Content Discussion: The Touryst 8K 60fps 00:55:53 DF Supporter Question 01: Why not release physical games on USB? 01:00:36 DF Supporter Question 02: Why has there not been a CRT resurgence? 01:04:09 DF Supporter Question 03: What do you see as potential use cases in future games to utilize many random read IOPS? 01:10:09 DF Supporter Question 04: Can the AI tech used in DLSS and DLAA be transferred to other graphical improvements? 01:12:51 DF Supporter Question 05: Have you ever considered filming the DF Weekly on Fridays? 01:15:33 DF Supporter Question 06: What is the biggest technical issues you face creating content? 01:24:00 DF Supporter Question 07: Do we pray too much at the altar of ray tracing?

How To Buy NFTs What is a Non-Fungible Token NFT How To Make Your Own NFT Best NFT InvestmentsEpisode SummaryLearn the ins and outs of the NFT selling platform, Rarible NFTS! With Chris, Maz, and Rarible Co-Founder & Head of Product - Alexander Salnikov!!PLUS NFT news, upcoming drops, Roadmaps, and talking about the hottest projects - Art blocks, Cool Cats, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Lazy Lions, Dizzy Dragons, Galactic Apes, and more!Guests:Alexander Salnikov Co-founder of Rarible.comHosts:Chris KatjeMazhttps://bitclout.com/u/mazFollow The Roadmap on Twitter!Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.Unedited TranscriptHey everyone. Welcome to the roadmap. Benzingers new NFT show. The last few episodes we've had some great interviews. We've had the teams behind the Vogue collective robots dose, the dose pound only forest crypto. And the blue team, we've also done some NFTE giveaways and plan on doing those in the future.So stay tuned for more great giveaways. We've got a great show today. Joining us. We'll have the co-founder of referable, and we'll also dive into the news and some current and upcoming drops and events to talk about, but without further ado, everyone, this is the.All right. What's up everyone? Yeah. Welcome to the roadmap. Benzing us new NFT show. We currently air Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2:00 PM. Eastern time. We're working on getting more showtimes cause I know everyone on. Wants more NFT coverage. So if you guys would like fencing to add more NFT shows, go ahead and hit one in the chat and go ahead and smash that like as well.So we can get started up. Let me go ahead and bring on my cohost mass mass. What's going on with. Yo what's going on, Chris? How you doing today, man? Doing great. I mean another exciting week, right? There's so much always going on in NFT lay on there's mints every day there's events, every day. There's, you know, uh, new NFT drops for existing products.There's new roadmaps put out. There's just so much going on out there. Absolutely. Well, first of all, the shout out to the chat, I'm looking at it right now. It looks like we have some. Does he dragon, uh, owners in there. So shout out, you know, thumbs up really quick. Let's get the show going. Uh, so shout out to them.We have some amazing headlines to get to today and yeah. Yeah. We're going to have to dive into dragons in a minute. Uh, it looks like that community is showing up in full force today, uh, mass it's Tuesday. So one of the first things we like to do is talk about the last week, right? So I want to talk about last week's top 10 in sales volume real quick.No surprise Axion infinity and leading the way again for the third straight week sales of 109.0 million. Then we had crypto punks. Number two, art blocks. Number three, again, no big surprises. The big surprise was cup cats, right up cats coming in fourth place, 16.9 mil. Sales volume of 3300%. Um, that was the big gainer and then cool cats at five board apes at six mute Napes at seven and then the other big gainer, lazy lions that eighth lazy lions up 36%.They did have a NFT drop that we'll talk about in a minute. So they did see some heavy volume from that. And then mass, I went and I looked past the top 10 and the other big surprise. Was NBA top shot. They had sales value of 6.8 million last week up 91.8%. Um, I think they were 14th place. So again, not in the top 10, but a nice increase.That was a project we highlighted last week that it was gaining some more, uh, you know, steam getting back up and running. NBA, top shots forth all time with sales volume of 720 million. So nothing to sneeze at here. That's our top 10, uh, mass let's get into some, uh, recent mints and events. Uh, tell me about these galactic apes.Yeah, so we had a stealth drop this weekend, galactic apes. They dropped no marketing. They shut down their discord. They didn't post anything on Twitter. Uh, they have a Genesis drop, which is around a hundred pieces. They launched before board apes. And I think the floor for those was around 15. I think it's definitely much higher now.So there was some sort of substance there, but they dropped 10,000 pieces. I think it was it. What? Saturday night they sold. Yeah. Sold out in five minutes and then just the hype after that has been absolutely insane. I'm a big fan of the art. If you look at them, they're pretty cool. Um, yeah, so the floor is around one eighth right now.And you know, there's some sort of gamification they're doing where you have to collect, you know, the apes, they have three different types of IOPS. They have gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees. You got to collect all three to play the game. Which we're going to see soon what they mean by that. But a lot of hype here.Were you able to meet Chris or have you followed up with them? I followed this project. I wasn't able to mint. Um, the timing just didn't work out with that contract, but I mean that this artwork looks great. And I like the fact that there is three different classes, you know? Having that gamification, you know, wanting people to collect all three or have more than one ape, I think could provide, you know, some additional value.Um, this is a project where, you know, it's one east now and I think the, the flipping's done. And I think this one could have, you know, some long-term lasting value. So I'm definitely looking at it, you know, as more of a long-term play here. Uh, I think the value is going to increase. Absolutely. Yeah. And then I know something big happened yesterday.Do you want to tell us what that was? As far as we had a big slab? Ah, changes. Yeah. I mean, we always talk about celebrities on the show. Again, celebrities don't make or break a project, but when you get a big name to attach themselves to your project, especially if it's as well known as Shaquille O'Neal Shaq himself.15.5 million followers on Twitter and he changed his profile picture to a creature creature world, a well-known, uh, NFT project and mass, no surprise here in the last 24 hours, creature sales $6.2 million. Number four in sales value on cryptos Liam and sales value of 1000. 144%. That is the shack of fact.And this one's got some other big names in that too. I think Gary V owned some, um, you know, and some other big celebrities. So this isn't a first one. The floor price is 2.35. Now on these, um, I think it was a well under two before, more like closer to one. Um, I mean, and these sales just took off yesterday.I mean, this is kind of a different one, right? We, we haven't seen as much artwork like this, so I, I like it. And Shaq didn't really make an announcement. Right. He just changed his profile picture so that there's a chance he could put out a tweet or say something about creature and that could, uh, bring even more value.What do you think? Yeah, that's the crazy part, right? He didn't make an announcement. He didn't say anything. He just changed his profile. And that's it. And you know, and that's so crazy that that created this wave of FOMO, you know, big whales started buying after that and the price shot up. I forget what it was at before, but it's kind of substantially.Um, so yeah, if he does shout out, we don't know if there's a collaboration. We don't know anything. We don't know if he's just a fan. If it was paid, we don't know anything at all. So it's going to be interesting to watch for the next couple of days. I liked the art, uh, creatures, you know, th I think it's different.I think it's definitely blue chip material. So we'll see where that. Um, another big mint that happened yesterday. So it seems like we're in the cycle of cute profile pictures now. Right? So a lot of these cute profile picture NFTs. Going through the moon here. And we had a big one yesterday, winter bears.Uh, were you able to meet those Chris? You know, I wasn't, I'm sad to say that I was actually on a call with a team member here at Benzinga. I saw the activity picking up and by the time I got off the phone, these things had already sold out gas was running crazy, but I mean, it shouldn't come as that big of a surprise, right.Once people saw this, this cute profile that is, you know, the, the hot play right. And look at that. I mean, a 0.2 floor, I think it hit almost 0.3 yesterday. Um, you know, and these were cheap to mint, right? So this was a, a nice project for anyone who was able to, uh, to catch that move there. Exactly. And it seems like, you know what it is, it's a FOMO from cool cats, you know, these all kind of resemble or seem inspired by cool cats.Cool cats at ten eight floor this weekend, there was a big celebration. It was trending on Twitter. So it's no surprise that people are priced out of that. They're trying to find, you know, projects that are cute, like this, and you know, can build community. So community is a big part. Plus the cute profile picture.Definitely. So then the next project I'm scared to talk about. Cause the chat might start going crazy, but we have, we have dizzy dragons. So dizzy dragons, they announced an update to their roadmap. Right? We are the roadmap after all. That's one of the things we still look at, you know, on these projects. So I remember watching this project when it was like 0.0 3.04.They did a fusion where you could merge together to have your dragons sweats, a deflationary project. Right? So there's 6,000 of them right now. The floor is 0.19, and they're actually still fusing through, uh, Thursday the 30th. So that's going to be the last day that you can fuse under the current road.And then they announced that they're expanding that busy universe and lower with a new collection. So if you own a fuse dragon, you will get a free claim to the new collection. So right now, if you were to buy two dresses, Fuse them together. You're going to get a free mint on that next project, a mass, you know how much I like, you know, the, the roadmaps and I like buying into these projects where you get a new NFT out of owning.I'm a big fan of that reward system. I think it provides good value. So here you have two things, right? You have deflationary, there's going to be less dragons out. To getting a new claim to me, that's a win-win. So, uh, I I've been looking at these dragons, hopefully I'm not driving the price up too much right now talking about them.Cause, uh, this is what I, my watch list. What do you think mass? Yeah, so I'm a big fan of deflationary, uh, you know, roadmaps. I like to see less supply or just, you know, ways to reward early community members. And you know, we're still so early in that of T world that doing this, you know, as the projects take on, you know, as more people join.There's less supply, more demand your award people, that huddles. So I love it. And I liked the art. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I'd love the art and it sounds like maybe we need to have the, the dizzy dragons team come on a future show and tell us more about the roadmap in this artwork. So if you're out there, hit us up on Twitter, let us know, and we, we can get Drizzy, uh, you know, with everyone on this.Let's do it. Um, so speaking of, you know, drops, we have not, uh, not fungible bones. You've seen those Chris. I have, they were kind of cool look and right. Cause they were kind of unique. Um, you know, something I hadn't seen yet, um, you know, the skeleton. So we also have a bit of a Halloween theme and mass, these things got hot in a hurry.This is a 10,000 NFT project. The floor is point to, um, you know, this was a cheaper project to begin with that people just said, no, I, I, this one might've been free. This one just shot up in a hurry. And it got a ton of attention. Exactly. And just, yeah, like you said, Halloween's coming up. This seems like a perfect Halloween, like huddle play.Look at that 180 7 eat. That's crazy. Yeah, we might, we might have to do a show on, uh, some Halloween NFTs cause man, I I've been lucky. I I've been thinking, Hey, what's going to be the next, uh, NFTs that everyone, you know, circles around for, for Halloween. We're already seeing some move up. Uh, but I think there's a couple more that could be going.So, uh, stay tuned for that. A future show here. Um, maths, we've got, uh, another. You know, well-known project, lazy lion. So lazy lions, the mint price was 0.05. They sold out in less than five hours. And these things, they recently dropped a bungalows, which were free for all holders minus the cost of gas. Um, and look at that floor price, the floor price to two on these now.I mean, and you heard me say 0.05 to mint that I've seen lots of people with this. I'll picture, which again, that's part of the, that's part of the, you know, the big, uh, you know, bull case for NFTs, right? With some of these ones that are animals. They're cute. They do well as a PFP, as you want to see a lot of people that have them as their PFP.Yes. I've seen a lot of lions out there and I think they look cool. Right? I mean, great artwork. You've got some different, uh, traits there. I mean, the, the cigarettes, the different hair color, you got hats on some, I mean, we got the beanie hat there and then the bungalows right there. I mean, that's kind of cool.Right? Where's your lion going to live? You get a free mint of a bungalow for your, for your lion to, uh, to live at. So a nice reward again for the. Yeah, that's a great point, you know, and I've the lays line community. I see them everywhere. You know, like you said, profile pictures. I see so many of those on Twitter, on divert.And to me, that's a strong sign of the community. So that's really cool to see.Awesome. Well, I, I, I know we've got one that is on referable. Let's save that one for when we get into our interview. Mazza art blocks. We talked about it last week, right? The Cromey squiggles. Did you happen to see that there was another big sale for the Cromey squiggles? Yeah, there was a big sale. I think it was me crummy squiggle 4 6, 9, 7 for 945 Eve, which is around 2.8 million.Uh, there's been big sales in the last week or so, which is interesting. Cause you know, art blocks has, you know, there was a slight dip in the last couple of weeks. So it's interesting to see, you know, the squiggles going for these all times. I mean, those things just continue to, you know, set records and, you know, $2.8 million for a crummy squiggle that that is insane.And art blacks continues to do more and more drops a mass. How about alpha Betty? Right. We had alpha Betty team on not too long ago. And we saw that floor price rise over the past couple of days. We did see some well-known traders and discords, you know, circle around this, but also. Alpha Betty announced a Dow, right?So current and future owners of alpha-beta will own part of the Betty Dow where they will get 2% of secondary sales. And then that Dow also owns 132. 29 coloring books, a mutant eight yacht club, five east and another one east in other NFTs. Uh, you can see some of them in that picture there, um, mass, I'm a big fan of the Dow, uh, component too.So what do you think of this? Uh, alpha-beta news. Yeah, we liked the Betties and shout out to the team. We had them on a couple of weeks ago, such a great team, and to see them, you know, bring the doubt to life is pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, I love the work. I think it's a great longterm play. They've been around for some time in the NFT world.So seeing them have a nice bounce back and trending again. And then mass, have you ever heard of these, uh, the, the bras, this is on rare trouble. Um, Alyssa, if we can get that artwork up, this is an interesting one, right? So we're going to talk to Alex from repairable and I hadn't heard of this project, but I recently found it.I like the artwork. What do you, what do you think of that matters? I mean, these are kind of cool looking. Yeah, they are, uh, the bras. Let me see, I'm looking at them now. Let's see. Yeah, they're pretty cool. Yeah. So we're going to have to do more research in that, or maybe get this team, get this team on. I mean, I haven't seen anything, you know, exactly like this, which I'm always a fan of, you know, uniqueness, something different.And again, you can find these on referable looks like they are auctioning off right now. Um, you know, so, uh, We do have an interview to get to. So I'm super excited. Uh, we get to talk to Alex niqab, the head of product, and co-founder from rare trouble. So in the south further ado, let's bring on Alex, Alex, welcome to the roadmap.How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you guys for hearing me today. I'm so excited. Yeah, we're excited to hear more about referable. Of course, referable is a well-known NFT platform. Uh, but we want to dive into, to some of the specifics, but first off, Alex, can you just tell viewers who may not be familiar with referable?You know, what is rare ball? Variable is all about creating, selling your own NFTs. So we started two years ago as the platform where anyone could create an MTS back then that was a luxury. Uh, every platform was closed out. To pass the B VIP, uh, invite system, get yourself verified, button variable, like everyone was able.So it's like everyone welcome NFT marketplace. And we are really into the yellow and fun and playful stuff. I guess this, this part of, of the world, uh, being, being nice design UI UX is what excites us a lot in the NFC space. Perfect. Well, uh, you know, we talk a lot about big NFT projects, um, you know, celebrities or well-known projects that launched they mint strong secondary sales.Can you tell us about some of the most successful projects that have launched on. Yeah, uh, Justin, this weekend, we had the large drop by . Uh, you can find it in the, uh, in the top collection section, uh, and the hot collection section, uh, they met 700,000, uh, just out of the five or 600. So that basically was like 30.Is there item in the auction? Uh, you can see them all over the world is the famous boys collection, uh, all over the Twitter. Uh, like a lot of, a lot of guys in Twitter have that on their avatar. I think STANY from RV. The protocol, the defy protocol has one on his avatar, so pretty famous one. Uh, and also the previous ones, a big one, probably.No. He ate a person who launched the nuts 10 K, but 8,888 K and T eight collection, uh, of his devils. So he is like long time variable user. He made several consecutive drops of a hundred, 150,000 doors, uh, over and over again with love him so much. I own one. Awesome. Well, we do know that there are, you know, uh, some other NFP platforms out there.I won't name any, but Alex, can you tell us, you know, how is referable different than some of your competitors out? Yeah. So first of all, verbal was always really appealing to the creators. So we have an extended minting functionality. You can mint NFTs with images, gifs, MP3, MP4. She cannot unlock about content.You can, you can check the arbitrary Royal. So like 50%, 30%, the way you want build that into your item and, uh, obviously customize your profile. So it of these was like, uh, get to the leaderboard. It always was about the creator himself. Follow a lot of social aspect on the platform and you have the whole following feed where only the items from the people who follow are displayed.So we love this, this social aspect. Love that. So I have a question for you as far as target audience and customers a little bit more into it. Um, you know, so how do you guys go about finding your ideal customer or target audience as of now considering, you know, all those other NFT platforms are popping up and you guys have been around for a while, which is great.Yeah. We've been around for awhile. Uh, I think our best, our best strategies to be in community. Uh, we are known as community owned and community operated platform. We launched a governance token a year ago, but that's another story, but basically, uh, it's just always be on the spotlight on Twitter. We do have a BD guy, guys that are on the lookout for everyone for big drops, the French Montana team, uh, recently, uh, Sold out there.They're physical sneakers and there are some digital left. You can check those out. Um, Um, our, our target audience is basically the more consumer-based the more mainstream audience, biggest, uh, we design variable to be simple, to be easy to use and fun. And that's why we're looking for people who just want to do something fun for their audience.So not to be like highly transactional, um, but more like cultural spectrum. Love that. And that's a great point. You actually talked about my next question, which was the governance token. So a variable has a governance governance token called Rory. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah. So we'll launch that.Uh, again, we, we started as the most open platform and basically that was another step in becoming even more open. So we'll launch the governance token about a year ago in July, 2020. And that was a massive success. We were amongst the first like 10 projects that launched the liquidity, uh, mining, uh, Um, but, uh, defy projects in their case, like waging mining is like I supplied capital.Uh, whereas in the NFT project, in the marketplace, uh, liquidity is the supply and demand on the marketplace. That's why. Rewarding suppliers and demanders and the marketplace. So basically buyers and sellers, and we distribute governance rights over the platform to the buyers and sellers that how you're you basically receive a cash back on every deal that you've made it where I's like from 5% to 20% on the G on the volume now, uh, at, at, at the time we started, that was a hundred percent.So basically everything was for. So that's the process of progressive decentralization of the variable of the variable project. You earn the ownership over that, and there is the Dow. Uh, we recently launched a product called. Uh, which is basically all the tech behind terrible that allows you to spin up your own NFC project, your own NXT experience much more faster than if you build that ground up.And the protocol is directly governed by the Dao completely built upon this open principles. Um, open-sourced community owned, uh, while, while bearable.com is just one of the apps on top of. So there is a buyer, but ACA system. And the very token is basically the key to that. Love that. So the goal of variable is to evolve into a full-on Dow then.Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Full on down. It's already there. It's not in yet in its best, uh, governance forum. So, uh, we do have, we do have a signaling era right now, which is basically like a multi-six snapshot voting, which has gas lists. And it's early. If you want to participate in the variable Dougie like Jordan, it's a really, never been a better time to do that.Let's go love that. Shout out now. Never a better time. We are gonna make it. Uh, Alex, uh, it was announced, uh, earlier this year when rarer BL uh, raised money that there was a partnership with dapper labs, the company behind NBA top shot. Can you give us an update on the, this partnership with dapper labs and what it means for referable?Basically, it means wearable that the flow blockchain is the next blockchain we are going to adopt, uh, the work isn't. They have a development, uh, it takes a lot of thought process to understand how do we combine two blockchains on the same path for him because they have different wallets and we need to not confuse the user with like, where, where do I go to, to get an item?And there is this, this. Big development under undergoing these days. Uh, I cannot yet say what they were going to launch, but it's, it's, it's basically a bit the next blockchain that we're going to and did that prolapse. Uh, absolutely amazing team. They have absolutely amazing blockchain. Um, now gas prices almost it's really chip, uh, really environmentally friendly.Well, the team behind cryptic curious, aversely knew how to build a blockchain for NFTs in June referable raised money in a new funding round. Can you tell us, do you know why the decision to, to raise money then? And what will it go towards? Yeah. So it's been a really fruitful year for variable in, in just January, 2021.Uh, we're braced, uh, as serious. See it from, from Coinbase ventures, going fund a and one K KX, all those, uh, all those amazing funds. And later, just like five months later, we raised another 14.2 million led by when rock and coin. So, uh, they, if it's basically the. The traction of the, of the market, uh, uh, which, which resulted in, in our understanding that we need to scale the platform.We need to scale the team. We need to, to hire a lot of, a lot of new team members and, uh, well, That always investments always go to the team members, uh, because you, you need, you need to have a lot of people to integrate new blockchains, very simply integrated credit card support. So the Moto is best. It's like, um, we're, we're going to be the best platform for mainstream.It's really easy to use supporting environmentally friendly blockchain. I'm going, multitasking, going to L tools, supporting credit cards, simplified log-in flow, all sorts of things like that are are for this. So at the time of that funding round, I saw an article that mentioned rare bull had $150 million in sales over an 18 month period.Is there any, a revenue or user metrics and figures that you can share with us to, to update viewers? Yeah. So the tutorial sales, the total sales, which are, uh, sit at the level of 212 million doors, uh, it's, it's a crazy number. I never, I never have thought that we will get out, uh, that crazy in just a couple of years.Uh, and with the 30 days, uh, numbers of, of, uh, 20 and 18 million over the past two, uh, respectfully. Um, so that's, that's pretty great. Um, again, where we're doing almost a million door per day, uh, in, in, in sales, um, and, and support a lot of creative. Perfect. So Alex, you know, we are an NFT show, but of course, Benzinga right where I am employed where a stock stock market news site.So one of the questions I have to ask, you know, is, is referable considering an IPO? Is that in the long-term plans? And maybe how close is referable to getting there? Oh, yeah. Uh, it's a really great question. Uh, we have not thought about that yet properly because obviously we have a, we have a governance token.We are moving towards a Dao. And in the same time we have a, a front-end app, which is a private company that can go public. Um, and basically the understanding of are we going public or are we going to full downside on with all the. It's unclear yet.Absolutely. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit more. Can you tell us a little bit more about the new project? Uh, the protocol. Yeah. Uh, I'm, I'm, I'm really glad that you asked. So this have been, uh, the result of basically our six months of work. Well, actually of all the two years of work, biggest, what we did is we've taken out the infrastructure behind.So the smart contracts for creating items, the smart contracts for selling and buying items, the smart contracts for royalties, uh, the tool, which is like 90% of all the code, uh, of the protocol. Tracks all the provenance, like what happened with each NFT when it was born to whom it was transferred when, and for how much that was sold, what the activity is, what are my NFT is what are the NFT insights and collection are?So this is whole like trading infrastructure. Behind variable. We, we took that and separated that into a new project, which has variable protocol. So for everyone who wants to start their own NFT project, it, it became much easier. We basically spent two years developing. Uh, our own and we know how hard that is, and that's why we, we, we made that for the community.So it's built on this open principles, open source community govern, as I mentioned. So we provide certain guarantees to the people right now. There is no, like, there is no open source indexing tool available on the market that supports all the NFTs out. So if you're building a wallet for example, and, uh, you want to show your, your customer, uh, what are the NFTs that belong to that particular wallet?You need an indexing tool that will tell you like, yeah, we know you, you can just go to blockchain and quieter. That information is like spread say in across the whole blockchain and the really, really thin layer. And we aggregate that and provide that to the. So for all the developers that want to build their project, it's, it's an awesome set of infrastructure.That's awesome, man. I love that. Can you tell us a little bit more about the revamped secondary trading? Thank you. Thank you for asking that too. So, uh, obviously in, in, in spite of this, uh, uh, 10 collections, PFP projects, uh, uh, craziness, that's going on. Uh, we, we went and revamped the whole, the whole experience of trading that collections on variable.So, uh, basically it starts, if you're a collection owner, you can go to variable, you can find that collection, you can claim ownership over that. You can set up avatar, you can set up a cover image over that. You can set up a and multiple awards. So like, let's say I want to put the 1% or community treasury.I want to put 0.5% to offset environmental impact of my collection. So set up multiple royalties and spread out the word about this collection to be traded on variable also were released the top collection section, which is now on top of the whole website, which shows you all the leader board of the.The coolest collections and, uh, we track data not only on variable, but on the whole blockchain there. So if a collection originated like 20 million, somewhere on other marketplaces, we, we, we put that data into the leaderboard. So you can find the. Leaderboard of collections on variable, you can click and collection.You can trade that collection. We, the filters by trades, uh, various types of filters, price low to high. Uh, you can now like soar this and get the floor pricing. I know that sounds basic, uh, for a lot of people. Uh, this is a available ranger at some other places, but we've been always, uh, about, we've been all this marketplace about creators, and sometimes I speak to people and they, oh, I never knew that you can trade secondary and variable at all.So I decided that they want to unpack on that you can't trade secondary and variable, and that's been an awesome experience. Love that. Yeah. So the NMT space right now, I mean, has just gone completely parabolic in the last couple months. What can variable do or what is it doing or what's going to do to, you know, kind of establish its spot.And then if T markets, you know, moving forward, Yeah. Uh, basically we stand really highly on this decentralized approach is really important. There is not many decentralized players out there. Protocol is a big play there, uh, on the marketplace layer. Uh, we are building a tool for the generator of art projects.Uh, so if you want to launch in new collection, uh, and you don't have a technical team that would help you to code or. Uh, you can approach variable and we might help you to launch this. Uh, so this, this is a nice addition to the team, but, uh, overall, along along the lines, we want to be open. We want to be decentralized and we want to be fine, fun and joyful in approaching the market.Uh, obviously going multi chain with all the new blockchains that popping up is the big part of our stress. Exactly. That's actually a great question. The salon or the car donno, any implementation of that? Any time. Uh, it's actually really interesting that you named this tool. I know Solano is hugely popular these days, just because everybody tried to scale blockchains by dividing them into shards by sharding and Solana said, no, we weren't going to do.We're going to have one just really fast and strong blockchain, uh, that, that, that played out really well for them. Uh, so Salana is, uh, in, uh, in thoughts we haven't started that, but we are really looking over this Allana and for Cardona, uh, I think it's one of the most esoteric blockchains out there. Uh, it doesn't have a lot of.The stays, they just really sparked contracts. So we haven't even approached that. The things we're looking on is flow, uh, teases polygon, uh, in polka dot. There is Moonbeam, uh, it's an EDM compatible power chain of polka dot. Uh, we're we're looking over those, uh, those changes. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Alex, I mean some great answers there.One of the questions we always like to ask here, you know, we, we try not to, to shell too many projects, but we have to ask people when they come on, what are some of your favorite projects that you own, or that you've kind of followed along the story? Um, in. Uh, it's a, it's a really good question. So I think I cover it.Some of them, uh, my, my, my probably all-time favorite is kid eight, uh, projects with DeVos. Uh, I really liked the aesthetics. It's like a bold and fun, uh, and, and the little, uh, and the little, uh, I don't, I don't have a correct for it. So. Yeah, the cure is I participated in auctions couple of times and never made it, uh, just because there was always a lot of guys who wanted that, uh, and, and were willing to fight better than me.Uh, this, this has been like absolutely amazing. I love this. So, uh, as you can see, there is not many available in the secondary sales. Everybody has got them, put them for sale like 4,000 years. Um, but you might try to get some, to get some, uh, beats. Yeah, there they are on screen. Those those look great. Uh, we've talked about kid eight before we're looking to maybe have him on the show in the future.Love this, uh, artwork and these style projects. So Alex, a great shout out. Uh, well, this was exciting, you know, I can honestly say, you know, I didn't know a ton about rare trouble, but now I think I'm up to speed. Um, I love the Dow component. Uh, I think that could be exciting for the future. So I'll be checking out referable later today.Um, so again, Team joining us on the show. Alex, sail, niqab, the head of product and co-founder of referable. Alex. Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule and joining us on the roadmap today. Thank you, Chris. And that's been exciting to be here. Awesome. We'll see you soon. Thanks Alex. All right guys, another exclusive interview here on the roadmap.I mean, mass that's exciting, right? To hear about referable and NFT platform. One of my favorite things was that he said that the platform was built based on what the creators. All about people who want to mint and create NFT projects, they support the artists, they support the creators. Um, and then also that talk at the end, right.About, you know, when you asked about, you know, Solana and some of these other platforms, I like the dapper labs integration coming soon, the flow blockchain. So some exciting times ahead. What do you think. Yeah. You know, variables interesting because like you said, it's for the creator. And that's actually, how I heard about wearable first was from an artist, you know, a very low key artists, you know, semi has worked through terrible, wanted me to check it out.Uh, so it's interesting now that NFTs have blown up, you know, gone parabolic to see, you know, these competitors and seeing what they do to differentiate, you know, Their market share in that Ft world. So arable is one of those that has been around for a while, and I'm excited to see where they go with all the Dow and the token.Definitely. Well, it looks like the chat loved the interview as well. And again, shout out to the dizzy dragons team for joining us today. Um, I also saw a fun comment from a lion owner saying maybe they should put their lion in their Disney dragon bungalow. Um, so maybe they own both projects out there.Guys it's time. There's that comment there from Michael, uh, guys, it's time to talk about some upcoming items, right? So let's talk about some future. Let's talk about some reveals that we're going to get. So if you have projects out there, you want us to look at, um, you know, again, we're not here to shell, this is not financial advice, but we love looking at projects we know or don't know, and also seeing some of the artwork.So mass I bought into a project yesterday called. Bastard penguins. Right? So bastard penguins. I got some of these and they are going to reveal two night at 8:00 PM Eastern time, I believe. Uh, are you in this project and what do you think about. Yeah, I'm into these as well. Um, you know, it's cute profile picture season, so it looks like, you know, all the cute profile pictures are mooning.So definitely I mentioned a couple of these. I will be keeping up with the reveal. I do like how they look, you know, they're, they're pretty cute. They're pretty, uh, profile pic worthy. So yes, I will be tuning them for these. What are you hoping for any traits? Any specifics there? I like that beanie hat. The Spiderman looking one and a Bart Simpson looking one that I had my eye on, but again, and then also mass.So yeah, go ahead and answer that. And then we gotta talk about their, uh, their giveaway. So what traits are you looking for? Like the power ranger, one man, one shirt. My kids love Powerade, dude. I would love that. Yeah. Speaking to the giveaway. Yeah. Tell us a little bit, a little bit more about that. Yeah. So, I mean, we've talked about projects, right?That do you know giveaways? We had secret society, a whales talk, right where they gave away a board. So bastard penguins will be giving away some, some money, right? Cash, money to a couple of winners. And then also a Tesla. They are giving away a Tesla to one bastard penguin owner. They took their snapshot earlier today.I believe so mass, you have the chance to win a Tesla just for getting one of these cute penguins. So fingers crossed. But if I, if I win that Tesla, I'm going to be pretty good. Exactly. Yeah. That's interesting to see that. Um, so is it, I'm curious to see if it's per wallet or if it's per, uh, ping when that you own it's one per penguin.One entry per penguin is what I read in the discord. So we'll, we'll see if that ends up being true. Cause that gives me a more than one. A exactly. Interesting. And then, so we have, they are unveiling tonight and then we have the bears, right? Bears minted today. What were those called? The bear season bears.Yeah. So we had a bear market bears. That's a fun name, right. And this was kind of cool artwork. And the thing that caught my eye mass, uh, this project didn't have a ton of followers on Twitter or in the discord, but then there were some articles circulated, right? That the artists of this project actually drew a comic for the new Yorker, a well-known magazine.And his story is that he lost his cool cat. He had it stolen. So he modeled this project after the cool cats. Right. And you mentioned that earlier on the show, right? There's a lot of projects out there. A lot of FOMO people looking for the next cool cats. Right? So this project meant to today. And it didn't have a lot of steam at first, but then it blew up in a hurry.Right. We saw gas hit, I think almost 400 as this thing started selling out towards the end. Um, I liked the artwork. I I'm curious to see, it sounds like the reveal is going to be in 24 hours. So I do own some of these, uh, this was 0.03, five to mint, and we're at a floor of 0.06. So a decent return right now.If you got in on this one, Um, what do you think of this one? Mass? Yeah. So again, yeah, there are definitely remind me. I can tell they're inspired by cool cats, but actually, you know, they're inspired by cool cats, but they have their own unique style to them. It's not a complete rip off, which I like. I actually liked these a lot.I like the T the computer one looks pretty cool. The gas masks one looks cool. One that, uh, they compared to a breaking bad. It was a breaking beer. They called it with the mass. So I like that. I mean, I'm a big fan of breaking bad. I watched that whole show. So to get a bear, you know, along that lines would be kind of cool.So I own some of these and I'm excited, uh, another, uh, you know, mint that happened today. That again, started out slow. And then it sold out in a hurry and that's why, you know, sometimes it pays to be early. Uh, you know, if you have the time to be on Twitter, be in these discords, uh, it can pay off, uh, with getting in to some of these projects.So we also have, uh, sub docs, right. Sub docs on September 30th. So that is Thursday. This week, they are dropping king from. So you will be able to claim, um, if you are a duck holder, there's also going to be a public sale. Um, so I, I kinda like this, right? You, you own a sub doc, you're going to get a frog, uh, that picture down below.Um, and your claimed frogs inherit, inherit your duck traits. Mass. That's a question we've asked a lot of these teams, right? When we had on, you know, doge pound when we had on crypto dash. When they normally do these new NFTs, it's a random draw. Right? You don't get any traits from your existing one. Sub ducks is going to do it the other way.You're going to get traits based on your current holding. Uh, I'm a fan of both ways. I don't know which way I prefer you have thoughts on this math. Yeah. Um, it's interesting. I think. Helps, you know, current holders and the other strategy is to bring in new holders, right? So it seems like this strategy is rewarding.Current holders, a little bit more, uh, you know, that bought the rare ones that have been able to, you know, build the community. It's interesting. Cause sub ducks was one of the first projects. When I first got 10 FTEs, it was sub ducks and cool cats. Those were like, you know, below one eighth floor and it's crazy to see them grow so much so quick.So I'm a big fan of them and what they're doing so far. So I will definitely try to snipe a couple of. And then right before the show started, or actually when the show started, we did have a drop mass that I was watt. Didn't get into tropical turtles. Did you hear of that one? Cheers out of this one yet, but they had a pretty big following on social media.So I'm curious to see, um, if this one sold out and what kind of reaction it got. Um, I don't see a tweet from them that it did sell it. Um, 0.03, five per turtle. Um, but this was a project I was watching cause mass, I mean, it's got that cute factor. Right. And we know how well that does. Um, yeah, so it looks like it did not, uh, catch on as quick as people thought.So it looks like a still in progress. So, um, anyone out there in the chat start trapping those projects in mass. Are there any other upcoming mints or events that you're watching that we didn't get to, to. Um, you know what it's interesting now because I've realized a lot of these projects that are successful, they're stealth drops, you know, they're, they're not marketed, they're not promoted anywhere.They just happen at a random time. So no, there's nothing specific, but I feel like the way the most successful projects right now have been stealth drops. So I will keep my eye out for those, because there's just so many projects going around. What about, yeah. Yeah. You know, that's the biggest thing is that either the stealth drops or these ones, like the bears, right.Where maybe it was on a calendar, but it wasn't on a big calendar. It wasn't widely circulated, but then it takes, you know, some different community artwork, seeing the roadmap, seeing the cute factor, right. To really get the momentum going. Um, you know, that's how I found out about. The bears today. Um, the bastard penguins, you know, I didn't see them on a big calendar.It was just a, you know, finding it through the community. Right. Which we're all about, uh, shout out. Ruelle in the chat room L asking about dark horizon. I do not know this one, that artwork though, in that PFS. Looks pretty cool. Uh, so Ruelle saying I love the art I saw from it. Ruelle give us a, some more info maybe while we're looking up.I'm guessing this one has not minted yet. Do we have a date of October? Okay. Mass. What do you think of that artwork? I mean, it looks, you know, similar to some projects, but I think it's a different enough. Yeah, definitely get into Oni, a Omni more five for this one. Um, you know, they're cool. I like them. I would look more into the roadmap and seeing the community.I liked them a lot for sure that the color pops, I think the color with these are pop a little more to me, just looking at them for. Just outside point of view really quick. What do you think of? Yeah, yeah, Andrew, I'll say in, uh, October 10th is the mint date. So we're going to have to add that to the calendar.Um, I'd like that, you know, we've got some time to do the research and look, um, I liked that color. I feel like those colors pop, especially the ones where like the face is purple and the moon behind is purple or green and green. You know what I mean? The color on the color. I kind of like. Yeah, exactly. And I think the question is, you know, what would make a good profile picture.Right. And then if it's, yes, then it's most likely going to do well, you know? Yeah. I mean, that's the big thing, right? Or are we back to Oni and you know, some of the big artwork projects being profile pictures, or are we full in, on the cute factor season math? Another thing we didn't talk about, and I don't know if you saw this, um, I know someone shouted it out.Discord. I wrote an article about it. Discord changed to where, if you are a nitro member. So if you pay the monthly fee of either 4 99 or 9 99, you can now change your discord profile picture in each individual discord, the. I did see that. And I think that's really awesome because we're involved in so many communities.And I wonder if they did that strictly because of that. I think so that was the article I wrote mass was if, if you're big and NFT is right, so discord started, you know, it was heavy in the video game community. Then it was, you know, big for stock trading communities. And now. We know all too well, right?That it is so big for NFTs building communities. So I think this is huge, right? Because you know, if I'm in a bunch of different discords, but I own a bunch of different NFTs. How do I pick which one I display across all the discords I'm in. Also, if you're trying to be a loyal member to a distance. But they see that your profile picture is a different NFT project.I mean, I've had that happen, right? How does that look? But you can't just make it, you know, F you, do you want to be in more than one discord, so you can't just make it one profile. So now if you pay, which, I mean, I think it's worth it, right? Because you also get server boosts, you get unlimited discords. I mean, I know I've hit that right.Where you hit a hundred discords and you can't add anymore, but to be able to change your profile picture, right. Why not show off the NFTs you bought. I mean, isn't that part of, you know, having that, that wallet with all these different MFTs is the value, the rise in growth and also the, the show off factor.Exactly. No, that's awesome. Actually, one other thing I want to talk about, we didn't talk about, did you see Joe Rogan who was talking about apes in his last episode yesterday, he pulled up a picture of an ape and started talking. I didn't which, which eight he was talking about how board apps. Yeah. Yeah.He was just kind of going to over the price and, you know, he was, he, uh, caught, you know, just screenshot at it type of thing. He wasn't really a big believer, which just shows us how early we are. You know, I still think public perception of NFTs are, you can just screenshot this or just, you know, a left click, right.Click save. Uh, so it was interesting to see. Yeah. Uh, I'm seeing a comment here from Omar in the chat thoughts on hall of fame, goats, mass. I remember when these came out. Um, I don't know if you know these, but it is one of the artists behind board apes. Right. And he also recently launched the vampires. So well-known artists in the NFT community.Um, I was surprised that these didn't really take off when they were launched. We have a floor right now. Point. Oh five. What do you, what do you think a goats? I think I also saw recently that they were working on an updated, a roadmap or maybe a fusion or a new something. I'm going to have to look at this, but what do you think of hall of fame?Goats, funny story. Sorry, this was actually one of my first like couple of live, live mints. You know, this is one of my first live mints that I did when they launched back in July. Um, you know, the original roadmap was, I think they were going to do a festival or something like that. And I just think it got, they got lost with all the new hype coming on.They kind of got slept on, but, you know, I liked the art, you know, I, I w I'm curious to see what the roadmap is. And the thing about these NFTs is we go through cycles, right? So these goats may end up pumping a week or a month or a year from now, who knows, considering the fact that board Dave's has become successful and they have ties to the artists.That's. Yeah. I mean, definitely helps to have, you know, the artist of one of the biggest projects out there. Um, you know, the vampire one had a huge discord, a huge demand, right. Based on him being in the project. Uh, yeah, we're going to have to check out the roadmap of hall of fame, goat lodge. Um, cause there could be something there.Um, well that is just going to about do it for our show today. Coming up after the roadmap Benzinga is premiering an education video on short selling. I know that's that evil phrase right in the stock market, short selling, but we're going to give you some education on short selling and why investors should maybe look at that new avenue mass.We do not have a show on Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern time because Benzinga is hosting a healthcare conference covering health care. But I'm thinking maybe when that health care conference and should we whip up at a live episode of the roadmap at like 5:00 PM Eastern time? What do you think? You think the community out there wants that?Should we ask for some votes? Yeah, I'm curious to hear some votes. We'll ask community. Definitely. You're watching. And you want us to do a show later in the day on Thursday, thumbs up, leave us a comments. Um, you know, there's just so much going on in that empty world, Chris, that when you miss a day, it feels like you're missing so much content to talk about.So yeah, I think the community will be down for it. Yeah. So guys smash the like and press one in the. Uh, see us Thursday at 5:00 PM. Eastern time. When the healthcare conference ends, you heard mass and I talk and headlines and some of these upcoming mints, right? I said Thursday, September 30th, a couple of times.That's Thursday. If we don't do a show Thursday, you won't hear from us again until next week. So we're going to miss out on some stuff while it looks like there's a lion out there that wants to see us Thursday. So let us know, leave comments in the video. Um, after this airs as well and hit mass and I up on Twitter handles are there on the screen.Also want to bring up our roadmap. Uh, Twitter, if I can find it here as well. Um, but, uh, another great show, right? Exciting times for NFTs. There it is at the roadmap BZ our, our Twitter account, and then also follow Mazza. And I, and let us know if you want to hear more from us on Thursday. Mass happy trading out there.I know we'll be talking over the next couple of days and hopefully we will see the community on Thursday at 5:00 PM Eastern time. Absolutely. Yeah. We're always looking for new projects. I mean, me and Chris constantly talk every single day about new projects coming up. So if you know any, let us know on Twitter, uh, we're always on the search, so I'm excited and we will see you on Thursday.Awesome. Bye everyone. Take care.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-roadmap/donations

This week on Talk Recovery Radio This week on Talk Recovery Radio, 2 guests, one full hour. Kathy Moser founder of "Music for Recovery" and Peter Alessandria author of "Be Bigger Than You Think You Are" joins us on Co-op Radio 100.5fm.  Guest 1: Kathy Moser, founder of "Music for Recovery" “Music for Recovery has been providing evidence-based, clinically valuable music programming nationally in the US for over 10 years. In 2016 our work was studied by the Recovery Research Institute at Harvard Medical School, Dr. John Kelly lead researcher, and found to be beneficial to people in residential treatment. (let me know if you'd like a copy of the study) The goal of our work is to give clients hands-on experience developing recovery skills through engaging musical programming including group and individual song writing, recovery concerts, choirs, performance, beat making, and learning to play musical instruments. We offer song writing workshops, concerts, installation of music equipment and collaborate to design clinically integrated music programming that supports your facility's treatment milieu. We have worked with a wide variety of recovery clients including adolescents and adults, both SUD primary and dual diagnosis, gender specific and mixed. We have experience working in detox, short-term residential, long-term residential, sober living and IOPs. The over 700 songs we have written with clients have been streamed over 46,000 times post treatment on our SoundCloud Page. Here are some of our Greatest Hits Music for Recovery has consistently been rated by clients and staff as one of the most helpful and engaging elements of treatment.” Website | Soundcloud | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram Music For Recovery Results BACKGROUND: Carr et al. (2013) cite the need for further attention to Music Therapy's effects in inpatient settings. Drawing a link between the theoretical concepts of group therapy and data specifically evaluating Music Therapy programs seems suited to the incipient status of much of this work. Yalom's Therapeutic Factors (TFs) are a widely accepted theoretical framework for the aspects of group therapy that serve to effect change in group members (1995). Music Therapy appears to derive its therapeutic effects from an interaction of these factors. Current literature documents Music Therapy's ability to instill reconnection with previous states, companionship amongst the group, and perceived equality with the therapist unique to the music modality, as well as instillation of hope and positive expression (Ansdell and Meehan, 2010). “Music for Recovery” (MFR) is one such example of Music Therapy which is available to facilities offering services to patients with substance use disorders. The MFR program, run by a musician in long-term recovery, offers on-site recovery songwriting workshops and performances to explore how creativity can support recovery and enhance treatment experiences. A program evaluation was developed to measure the therapeutic effects of participation in MFR in patients of residential addiction treatment facilities. Guest 2: Peter Alessandria Author of "Be Bigger Than You Think You Are" I'm Peter Alessandria – and I would like to invite you to "Be Bigger Than You Think You Are!" This book will show you how to overcome your limiting thoughts and beliefs so you can finally have the life you want. In 2009, after working for nearly 20 years as an entertainment attorney, I lost my business to the Global Financial Crisis. I tried everything I could to get it going again, but nothing seemed to work. Eventually I came to a crossroads: what was I going to do with the rest of my life? Several years earlier I had fallen in love with photography. When it became clear my law business wasn't going to come back anytime soon, I decided to turn a negative into a positive and pursue my passion for photography full time. Unfortunately, things didn't go so well at first. For more than three years I struggled to get my new business going. I initially thought it was the economy. Then I thought it was my lack of formal education in art or photography. Next I thought it was the competition from all the other photographers out there. At one point, I was even sure it was because I didn't have the latest and greatest camera equipment. But it turns out none of that was the problem. What was holding me back were my own negative thoughts and beliefs about myself. I had a very negative self-image when it came to being a creative person. I was sure people wouldn't like my work, so I lived in fear of rejection and criticism. It was quite eye-opening to see that my self-image was the cause of all my problems. Making Amends As someone who spent almost 25 years in three different 12 Step Programs, I've learned that taking responsibility for our choices and actions is at the core of any recovery program. The inventory and amends process suggested in Steps 4, 8 & 9 form the basis for this. Yet I've found that taking responsibility by making an amends is not always as straightforward as it seems. Buy the book | Website | Instagram | Facebook

Today's conversation is with an incredible woman, whose posts I have followed for some time now. I had the privilege of meeting her this past year at an AMAZING retreat in Santa Barbara, California. A retreat that she is the creator of, called Heart of a Warrior Woman... What works for my family may not be what works for yours, and vice versa - yet, regardless of the approach or process, we are all in this together. The support, understanding, kindness and compassion we show one another as family's impacted by addiction is EVERYTHING that matters. In short, Kathleen Cochran has been through many of the struggle all of us have walked the floors trying to figure out. She has remained by her daughter's side through her battle with substance use disorder. Their sixteen-year path has included over 20 rehabs, IOPs, sober livings, a therapeutic boarding school and a partridge in a pear tree. After being labeled an “enabler” and “codependent”, then directed to allow her daughter to hit rock bottom, Kathleen became determined to find a more compassionate approach. She researched and read, devouring hundreds of books on a wide range of approaches and tools. She aligns with the practice of harm reduction, to keep our children alive until they can find their way to recovery and CRAFT, as a more effective approach to communicate and encourage sobriety. Kathleen is passionate about helping other mothers. She shares her experience and knowledge to lessen the angst of their journeys. Kathleen and partner Allyson Abraam together are creating a community where true sisterhood can flourish. Where women can find the knowledge, strength, joy, and compassion that is needed to endure the journey of loving their children through addiction at a retreat (I have personally attended and found to be healing and wonderful) called “Heart of a Warrior Woman.” Listen in as she tells her story and gives wisdom and insight into the path no one would choose for their family, but together we are rising strong from. Kathleen can be found on Facebook, Instagram and by logging onto https://www.heartofawarriorwoman.com/ Listen in and check her out!

As we end a week of talking about addictions, Cinthia talks with Greg Struve, LPC, from The Way Recovery, an intensive outpatient program (IOP) in Phoenix.  They discuss the usefulness of IOPs for those who have potential to recover without going inpatient on a residential unit.  They also discuss the need to address trauma and other factors when recovering from an addiction, the importance of not judging addicts or assuming they inherently have more character defects than the rest of the population, and more.  Don't forget to listen to all the episodes from this series, and join Cinthia and Greg for the wrap-up.

Papers we love: ARC by Bryan Cantrill, SSD caching adventures with ZFS, OpenBSD full disk encryption setup, and a Perl5 Slack Syslog BSD daemon. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Papers We Love: ARC: A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8sZRBdmqc0&feature=youtu.be) Ever wondered how the ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) works? How about if Bryan Cantrill presented the original paper on its design? Today is that day. Slides (https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/papers-we-love-arc-after-dark) It starts by looking back at a fundamental paper from the 40s where the architecture of general-purpose computers are first laid out The main is the description of memory hierarchies, where you have a small amount of very fast memory, then the next level is slower but larger, and on and on. As we look at the various L1, L2, and L3 caches on a CPU, then RAM, then flash, then spinning disks, this still holds true today. The paper then does a survey of the existing caching policies and tries to explain the issues with each. This includes ‘MIN', which is the theoretically optimal policy, which requires future knowledge, but is useful for setting the upper bound, what is the best we could possibly do. The paper ends up showing that the ARC can end up being better than manually trying to pick the best number for the workload, because it adapts as the workload changes At about 1:25 into the video, Bryan start talking about the practical implementation of the ARC in ZFS, and some challenges they have run into recently at Joyent. A great discussion about some of the problems when ZFS needs to shrink the ARC. Not all of it applies 1:1 to FreeBSD because the kernel and the kmem implementation are different in a number of ways There were some interesting questions asked at the end as well *** How do I use man pages to learn how to use commands? (https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/193837) nwildner on StackExchange has a very thorough answer to the question how to interpret man pages to understand complicated commands (xargs in this case, but not specifically). Have in mind what you want to do. When doing your research about xargs you did it for a purpose, right? You had a specific need that was reading standard output and executing commands based on that output. But, when I don't know which command I want? Use man -k or apropos (they are equivalent). If I don't know how to find a file: man -k file | grep search. Read the descriptions and find one that will better fit your needs. Apropos works with regular expressions by default, (man apropos, read the description and find out what -r does), and on this example I'm looking for every manpage where the description starts with "report". Always read the DESCRIPTION before starting Take a time and read the description. By just reading the description of the xargs command we will learn that: xargs reads from STDIN and executes the command needed. This also means that you will need to have some knowledge of how standard input works, and how to manipulate it through pipes to chain commands The default behavior is to act like /bin/echo. This gives you a little tip that if you need to chain more than one xargs, you don't need to use echo to print. We have also learned that unix filenames can contain blank and newlines, that this could be a problem and the argument -0 is a way to prevent things explode by using null character separators. The description warns you that the command being used as input needs to support this feature too, and that GNU find support it. Great. We use a lot of find with xargs. xargs will stop if exit status 255 is reached. Some descriptions are very short and that is generally because the software works on a very simple way. Don't even think of skipping this part of the manpage ;) Other things to pay attention... You know that you can search for files using find. There is a ton of options and if you only look at the SYNOPSIS, you will get overwhelmed by those. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Excluding NAME, SYNOPSIS, and DESCRIPTION, you will have the following sections: When this method will not work so well... + Tips that apply to all commands Some options, mnemonics and "syntax style" travel through all commands making you buy some time by not having to open the manpage at all. Those are learned by practice and the most common are: Generally, -v means verbose. -vvv is a variation "very very verbose" on some software. Following the POSIX standard, generally one dash arguments can be stacked. Example: tar -xzvf, cp -Rv. Generally -R and/or -r means recursive. Almost all commands have a brief help with the --help option. --version shows the version of a software. -p, on copy or move utilities means "preserve permissions". -y means YES, or "proceed without confirmation" in most cases. Default values of commands. At the pager chunk of this answer, we saw that less -is is the pager of man. The default behavior of commands are not always shown at a separated section on manpages, or at the section that is most top placed. You will have to read the options to find out defaults, or if you are lucky, typing /pager will lead you to that info. This also requires you to know the concept of the pager(software that scrolls the manpage), and this is a thing you will only acquire after reading lots of manpages. And what about the SYNOPSIS syntax? After getting all the information needed to execute the command, you can combine options, option-arguments and operands inline to make your job done. Overview of concepts: Options are the switches that dictates a command behavior. "Do this" "don't do this" or "act this way". Often called switches. Check out the full answer and see if it helps you better grasp the meaning of a man page and thus the command. *** My adventure into SSD caching with ZFS (Home NAS) (https://robertputt.co.uk/my-adventure-into-ssd-caching-with-zfs-home-nas.html) Robert Putt as written about his adventure using SSDs for caching with ZFS on his home NAS. Recently I decided to throw away my old defunct 2009 MacBook Pro which was rotting in my cupboard and I decided to retrieve the only useful part before doing so, the 80GB Intel SSD I had installed a few years earlier. Initially I thought about simply adding it to my desktop as a bit of extra space but in 2017 80GB really wasn't worth it and then I had a brainwave… Lets see if we can squeeze some additional performance out of my HP Microserver Gen8 NAS running ZFS by installing it as a cache disk. I installed the SSD to the cdrom tray of the Microserver using a floppy disk power to SATA power converter and a SATA cable, unfortunately it seems the CD ROM SATA port on the motherboard is only a 3gbps port although this didn't matter so much as it was an older 3gbps SSD anyway. Next I booted up the machine and to my suprise the disk was not found in my FreeBSD install, then I realised that the SATA port for the CD drive is actually provided by the RAID controller, so I rebooted into intelligent provisioning and added an additional RAID0 array with just the 1 disk to act as my cache, in fact all of the disks in this machine are individual RAID0 arrays so it looks like just a bunch of disks (JBOD) as ZFS offers additional functionality over normal RAID (mainly scrubbing, deduplication and compression). Configuration Lets have a look at the zpool before adding the cache drive to make sure there are no errors or uglyness: Now lets prep the drive for use in the zpool using gpart. I want to split the SSD into two seperate partitions, one for L2ARC (read caching) and one for ZIL (write caching). I have decided to split the disk into 20GB for ZIL and 50GB for L2ARC. Be warned using 1 SSD like this is considered unsafe because it is a single point of failure in terms of delayed writes (a redundant configuration with 2 SSDs would be more appropriate) and the heavy write cycles on the SSD from the ZIL is likely to kill it over time. Now it's time to see if adding the cache has made much of a difference. I suspect not as my Home NAS sucks, it is a HP Microserver Gen8 with the crappy Celeron CPU and only 4GB RAM, anyway, lets test it and find out. First off lets throw fio at the mount point for this zpool and see what happens both with the ZIL and L2ARC enabled and disabled. Observations Ok, so the initial result is a little dissapointing, but hardly unexpected, my NAS sucks and there are lots of bottle necks, CPU, memory and the fact only 2 of the SATA ports are 6gbps. There is no real difference performance wise in comparison between the results, the IOPS, bandwidth and latency appear very similar. However lets bare in mind fio is a pretty hardcore disk benchmark utility, how about some real world use cases? Next I decided to test a few typical file transactions that this NAS is used for, Samba shares to my workstation. For the first test I wanted to test reading a 3GB file over the network with both the cache enabled and disabled, I would run this multiple times to ensure the data is hot in the L2ARC and to ensure the test is somewhat repeatable, the network itself is an uncongested 1gbit link and I am copying onto the secondary SSD in my workstation. The dataset for these tests has compression and deduplication disabled. Samba Read Test Not bad once the data becomes hot in the L2ARC cache reads appear to gain a decent advantage compared to reading from the disk directly. How does it perform when writing the same file back accross the network using the ZIL vs no ZIL. Samba Write Test Another good result in the real world test, this certainately helps the write transfer speed however I do wonder what would happen if you filled the ZIL transferring a very large file, however this is unlikely with my use case as I typically only deal with a couple of files of several hundred megabytes at any given time so a 20GB ZIL should suit me reasonably well. Is ZIL and L2ARC worth it? I would imagine with a big beefy ZFS server running in a company somewhere with a large disk pool and lots of users with multiple enterprise level SSD ZIL and L2ARC would be well worth the investment, however at home I am not so sure. Yes I did see an increase in read speeds with cached data and a general increase in write speeds however it is use case dependant. In my use case I rarely access the same file frequently, my NAS primarily serves as a backup and for archived data, and although the write speeds are cool I am not sure its a deal breaker. If I built a new home NAS today I'd probably concentrate the budget on a better CPU, more RAM (for ARC cache) and more disks. However if I had a use case where I frequently accessed the same files and needed to do so in a faster fashion then yes, I'd probably invest in an SSD for caching. I think if you have a spare SSD lying around and you want something fun todo with it, sure chuck it in your ZFS based NAS as a cache mechanism. If you were planning on buying an SSD for caching then I'd really consider your needs and decide if the money can be spent on alternative stuff which would improve your experience with your NAS. I know my NAS would benefit more from an extra stick of RAM and a more powerful CPU, but as a quick evening project with some parts I had hanging around adding some SSD cache was worth a go. More Viewer Interview Questions for Allan News Roundup Setup OpenBSD 6.2 with Full Disk Encryption (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/setup-openbsd-with-full-disk-encryption/) Here is a quick way to setup (in 7 steps) OpenBSD 6.2 with the encryption of the filesystem. First step: Boot and start the installation: (I)nstall: I Keyboard Layout: ENTER (I'm french so in my case I took the FR layout) Leave the installer with: ! Second step: Prepare your disk for encryption. Using a SSD, my disk is named : sd0, the name may vary, for example : wd0. Initiating the disk: Configure your volume: Now we'll use bioctl to encrypt the partition we created, in this case : sd0a (disk sd0 + partition « a »). Enter your passphrase. Third step: Let's resume the OpenBSD's installer. We follow the install procedure Fourth step: Partitioning of the encrypted volume. We select our new volume, in this case: sd1 The whole disk will be used: W(hole) Let's create our partitions: NB: You are more than welcome to create multiple partitions for your system. Fifth step: System installation It's time to choose how we'll install our system (network install by http in my case) Sixth step: Finalize the installation. Last step: Reboot and start your system. Put your passphrase. Welcome to OpenBSD 6.2 with a full encrypted file system. Optional: Disable the swap encryption. The swap is actually part of the encrypted filesystem, we don't need OpenBSD to encrypt it. Sysctl is giving us this possibility. Step-by-Step FreeBSD installation with ZFS and Full Disk Encryption (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/step-by-step-freebsd-installation-with-full-disk-encryption/) 1. What do I need? For this tutorial, the installation has been made on a Intel Core i7 - AMD64 architecture. On a USB key, you would probably use this link : ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/11.1/FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img If you can't do a network installation, you'd better use this image : ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/11.1/FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img You can write the image file on your USB device (replace XXXX with the name of your device) using dd : # dd if=FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img of=/dev/XXXX bs=1m 2. Boot and install: Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F1.png) 3. Configure your keyboard layout: Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F2.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F3.png) 4. Hostname and system components configuration : Set the name of your machine: [Screenshot](https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F4.png_ What components do you want to install? Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F5.png) 5. Network configuration: Select the network interface you want to configure. Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F6.png) First, we configure our IPv4 network. I used a static adress so you can see how it works, but you can use DHCP for an automated configuration, it depends of what you want to do with your system (desktop/server) Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F7.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F7-1.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F8.png) IPv6 network configuration. Same as for IPv4, you can use SLAAC for an automated configuration. Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F9.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F10-1.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F10-2.png) Here, you can configure your DNS servers, I used the Google DNS servers so you can use them too if needed. Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F11.png) 6. Select the server you want to use for the installation: I always use the IPv6 mirror to ensure that my IPv6 network configuration is good.Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F12.png) 7. Disk configuration: As we want to do an easy full disk encryption, we'll use ZFS. Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F13.png) Make sure to select the disk encryption :Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F14.png) Launch the disk configuration :Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F15.png) Here everything is normal, you have to select the disk you'll use :Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F16.png) I have only one SSD disk named da0 :Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F17.png) Last chance before erasing your disk :Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F18.png) Time to choose the password you'll use to start your system : Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F19.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F20.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F21.png) 8. Last steps to finish the installation: The installer will download what you need and what you selected previously (ports, src, etc.) to create your system: Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F22.png) 8.1. Root password: Enter your root password: Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F22-1.png) 8.2. Time and date: Set your timezone, in my case: Europe/France Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F22-2.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F23.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F23-1.png) Make sure the date and time are good, or you can change them :Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F24.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F25.png) 8.3. Services: Select the services you'll use at system startup depending again of what you want to do. In many cases powerd and ntpd will be useful, sshd if you're planning on using FreeBSD as a server. Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26.png) 8.4. Security: Security options you want to enable. You'll still be able to change them after the installation with sysctl. Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26-1.png) 8.5. Additionnal user: Create an unprivileged system user: Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26-2.png) Make sure your user is in the wheel group so he can use the su command. Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26-3.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26-4.png) 8.6. The end: End of your configuration, you can still do some modifications if you want : Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26-5.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26-6.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F26-7.png) 9. First boot: Enter the passphrase you have chosen previously : Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F27.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F28.png) & Screenshot (https://blog.cagedmonster.net/content/images/2017/09/F29.png) Welcome to Freebsd 11.1 with full disk encryption! *** The anatomy of ldd program on OpenBSD (http://nanxiao.me/en/the-anatomy-of-ldd-program-on-openbsd/) In the past week, I read the ldd (https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/libexec/ld.so/ldd/ldd.c) source code on OpenBSD to get a better understanding of how it works. And this post should also be a reference for other*NIX OSs. The ELF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format) file is divided into 4 categories: relocatable, executable, shared, and core. Only the executable and shared object files may have dynamic object dependencies, so the ldd only check these 2 kinds of ELF file: (1) Executable. ldd leverages the LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS environment variable in fact, and the code is as following: if (setenv("LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS", "true", 1) < 0) err(1, "setenv(LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS)"); When LDTRACELOADED_OBJECTS is set to 1 or true, running executable file will show shared objects needed instead of running it, so you even not needldd to check executable file. See the following outputs: $ /usr/bin/ldd usage: ldd program ... $ LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS=1 /usr/bin/ldd Start End Type Open Ref GrpRef Name 00000b6ac6e00000 00000b6ac7003000 exe 1 0 0 /usr/bin/ldd 00000b6dbc96c000 00000b6dbcc38000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/lib/libc.so.89.3 00000b6d6ad00000 00000b6d6ad00000 rtld 0 1 0 /usr/libexec/ld.so (2) Shared object. The code to print dependencies of shared object is as following: if (ehdr.e_type == ET_DYN && !interp) { if (realpath(name, buf) == NULL) { printf("realpath(%s): %s", name, strerror(errno)); fflush(stdout); _exit(1); } dlhandle = dlopen(buf, RTLD_TRACE); if (dlhandle == NULL) { printf("%sn", dlerror()); fflush(stdout); _exit(1); } _exit(0); } Why the condition of checking a ELF file is shared object or not is like this: if (ehdr.e_type == ET_DYN && !interp) { ...... } That's because the file type of position-independent executable (PIE) is the same as shared object, but normally PIE contains a interpreter program header since it needs dynamic linker to load it while shared object lacks (refer this article). So the above condition will filter PIE file. The dlopen(buf, RTLD_TRACE) is used to print dynamic object information. And the actual code is like this: if (_dl_traceld) { _dl_show_objects(); _dl_unload_shlib(object); _dl_exit(0); } In fact, you can also implement a simple application which outputs dynamic object information for shared object yourself: # include int main(int argc, char **argv) { dlopen(argv[1], RTLD_TRACE); return 0; } Compile and use it to analyze /usr/lib/libssl.so.43.2: $ cc lddshared.c $ ./a.out /usr/lib/libssl.so.43.2 Start End Type Open Ref GrpRef Name 000010e2df1c5000 000010e2df41a000 dlib 1 0 0 /usr/lib/libssl.so.43.2 000010e311e3f000 000010e312209000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.41.1 The same as using ldd directly: $ ldd /usr/lib/libssl.so.43.2 /usr/lib/libssl.so.43.2: Start End Type Open Ref GrpRef Name 00001d9ffef08000 00001d9fff15d000 dlib 1 0 0 /usr/lib/libssl.so.43.2 00001d9ff1431000 00001d9ff17fb000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.41.1 Through the studying of ldd source code, I also get many by-products: such as knowledge of ELF file, linking and loading, etc. So diving into code is a really good method to learn *NIX deeper! Perl5 Slack Syslog BSD daemon (https://clinetworking.wordpress.com/2017/10/13/perl5-slack-syslog-bsd-daemon/) So I have been working on my little Perl daemon for a week now. It is a simple syslog daemon that listens on port 514 for incoming messages. It listens on a port so it can process log messages from my consumer Linux router as well as the messages from my server. Messages that are above alert are sent, as are messages that match the regex of SSH or DHCP (I want to keep track of new connections to my wifi). The rest of the messages are not sent to slack but appended to a log file. This is very handy as I can get access to info like failed ssh logins, disk failures, and new devices connecting to the network all on my Android phone when I am not home. Screenshot (https://clinetworking.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/screenshot_2017-10-13-23-00-26.png) The situation arose today that the internet went down and I thought to myself what would happen to all my important syslog messages when they couldn't be sent? Before the script only ran an eval block on the botsend() function. The error was returned, handled, but nothing was done and the unsent message was discarded. So I added a function that appended unsent messengers to an array that are later sent when the server is not busy sending messages to slack. Slack has a limit of one message per second. The new addition works well and means that if the internet fails my server will store these messages in memory and resend them at a rate of one message per second when the internet connectivity returns. It currently sends the newest ones first but I am not sure if this is a bug or a feature at this point! It currently works with my Linux based WiFi router and my FreeBSD server. It is easy to scale as all you need to do is send messages to syslog to get them sent to slack. You could sent CPU temp, logged in users etc. There is a github page: https://github.com/wilyarti/slackbot Lscpu for OpenBSD/FreeBSD (http://nanxiao.me/en/lscpu-for-openbsdfreebsd/) Github Link (https://github.com/NanXiao/lscpu) There is a neat command, lscpu, which is very handy to display CPU information on GNU/Linux OS: $ lscpu Architecture: x86_64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 32 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-31 Thread(s) per core: 2 Core(s) per socket: 8 Socket(s): 2 But unfortunately, the BSD OSs lack this command, maybe one reason is lscpu relies heavily on /proc file system which BSD don't provide, :-). TakeOpenBSD as an example, if I want to know CPU information, dmesg should be one choice: $ dmesg | grep -i cpu cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor) cpu0: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz, 2527.35 MHz cpu0: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM, PBE,SSE3,DTES64,MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,SSE4.1,XSAVE,NXE,LONG,LAHF,PERF,SENSOR cpu0: 3MB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache cpu0: apic clock running at 266MHz cpu0: mwait min=64, max=64, C-substates=0.2.2.2.2.1.3, IBE But the output makes me feeling messy, not very clear. As for dmidecode, it used to be another option, but now can't work out-of-box because it will access /dev/mem which for security reason, OpenBSD doesn't allow by default (You can refer this discussion): $ ./dmidecode $ dmidecode 3.1 Scanning /dev/mem for entry point. /dev/mem: Operation not permitted Based on above situation, I want a specified command for showing CPU information for my BSD box. So in the past 2 weeks, I developed a lscpu program for OpenBSD/FreeBSD, or more accurately, OpenBSD/FreeBSD on x86 architecture since I only have some Intel processors at hand. The application getsCPU metrics from 2 sources: (1) sysctl functions. The BSD OSs provide sysctl interface which I can use to get general CPU particulars, such as how many CPUs the system contains, the byte-order of CPU, etc. (2) CPUID instruction. For x86 architecture, CPUID instruction can obtain very detail information of CPU. This coding work is a little tedious and error-prone, not only because I need to reference both Intel and AMD specifications since these 2 vendors have minor distinctions, but also I need to parse the bits of register values. The code is here (https://github.com/NanXiao/lscpu), and if you run OpenBSD/FreeBSD on x86 processors, please try it. It will be better you can give some feedback or report the issues, and I appreciate it very much. In the future if I have other CPUs resource, such as ARM or SPARC64, maybe I will enrich this small program. *** Beastie Bits OpenBSD Porting Workshop - Brian Callahan will be running an OpenBSD porting workshop in NYC for NYC*BUG on December 6, 2017. (http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=10429) Learn to tame OpenBSD quickly (http://www.openbsdjumpstart.org/#/) Detect the operating system using UDP stack corner cases (https://gist.github.com/sortie/94b302dd383df19237d1a04969f1a42b) *** Feedback/Questions Awesome Mike - ZFS Questions (http://dpaste.com/1H22BND#wrap) Michael - Expanding a file server with only one hard drive with ZFS (http://dpaste.com/1JRJ6T9) - information based on Allan's IRC response (http://dpaste.com/36M7M3E) Brian - Optimizing ZFS for a single disk (http://dpaste.com/3X0GXJR#wrap) ***

This week on BSDNow, we have a variety of news to discuss, covering quite the spectrum of BSD. (Including a new DragonFly release!). This episode was brought to you by Headlines my int is too big (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/my-int-is-too-big) “The NCC Group report (http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=146853062403622&w=2) describes the bugs, but not the history of the code.” “Several of them, as reported by NCC, involved similar integer truncation issues. Actually, they involved very similar modern 64 bit code meeting classic 32 bit code” “The thrsleep system call is a part of the kernel code that supports threads. As the name implies, it gives userland a measure of control over scheduling and lets a thread sleep until something happens. As such, it takes a timeout in the form of a timespec. The kernel, however, internally implements time keeping using ticks (there are HZ, 100, ticks per second). The tsleep function (t is for timed) takes an int number of ticks and performs basic validation by checking that it's not negative. A negative timeout would indicate that the caller has miscalculated. The kernel panics so you can fix the bug, instead of stalling forever.” “The trouble therefore is when userland is allowed to specify a timeout that could be negative. The existing code made an attempt to handle various tricks by converting the timespec to a ticks value stored as a 64 bit long long which was checked against INTMAX before passing to sleep. Any value over INTMAX would be truncated, so we can't allow that. Instead, we saturate the value to INT_MAX. Unfortunately, this check didn't account for the possibility that the tick conversion from the timespec could also overflow and result in a negative value.” Then there is the description of the kqueue flaw: “Every kqueue keeps a list of all the attached events it's watching for. A simple array is used to store file events, indexed by fd.” “This array is scaled to accommodate the largest fd that needs to be stored. This would obviously cause trouble, consuming too much memory, if the identifier were not validated first. Which is exactly what kqueue tries to do. The fdgetfile function checks that the identifier is a file that the process has open. One wrinkle. fdgetfile takes an int argument but ident is a uintptr_t, possibly 64 bits. An ident of 2^32 + 2 will look like a valid file descriptor, but then cause the array to be resized to gargantuan proportions.” “Again, the fix is pretty simple. We must check that the ident is bounded by INTMAX before calling fdgetfile. This bug likely would have been exploitable beyond a panic, but the array allocation was changed to use mallocarray instead of multiplying arguments by hand, thus preventing another overflow.” Then there is a description of the anonymous mmap flaw, and the “secret magic” _MAPNOFAULT flag *** FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report Q2 2016 (https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.html) It's time for another round of FreeBSD Quarterly Status Reports! In this edition, we have status updates from the various teams, including IRC/Bugs/RE/Ports/Core and Foundation We also have updates on some specific projects, including from Konstantin on the on-going work for his implementation of ASLR, including the new ‘proccontrol' command which provides the following: > “The proccontrol(1) utility was written to manage and query ASLR enforcement on a per-process basis. It is required for analyzing ASLR failures in specific programs. This utility leverages the procctl(2) interface which was added to the previous version of the patch, with some bug fixes.” Next are updates on porting CEPH to FreeBSD, the ongoing work to improve EFI+GELI (touched on last week) and more robust Mutexes. Additionally we have an update from Matt Macy and the Xorg team discussing the current work to update FreeBSD's graphic stack: > “All Intel GPUs up to and including the unreleased Kaby Lake are supported. The xf86-video-intel driver will be updated soon. Updating this driver requires updating Xorg, which in turn is blocked on Nvidia updates.” The kernel also got some feature status updates, including on the new Allwinner SoC support, an update on FreeBSD in Hyper-V and VIMAGE In addition to a quick update on the arm64 architecture (It's getting there, RPi3 is almost a thing), we also have a slew of port updates, including support for GitLab in ports, updates on GNOME / KDE and some additional Intel-specific networking tools. *** Vulnerabilities discovered in freebsd-update and portsnap (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2016-July/009016.html) There are two vulnerabilities discovered in freebsd-update and portsnap, where an attacker could place files in the portsnap directory and they would be used without being subject to having their checksum verified (but this requires root access), and the second where a man-in-the-middle attacker could guess the name of a file you will fetch by exploiting the time-gap between when you download the initial snapshot, and when you fetch the updated files. There are a number of vulnerabilities that were discovered in libarchive/tar as well There is also an issue with bspatch. A security advisory for bspatch has already been released, as this vulnerabilities was also discovered by the Chromium team, which uses this same code. The patch discussed in this mailing list thread is larger, but secteam@ believes at least one of the additional checks introduced is incorrect and may prevent a valid patch from being applied. The smaller patch was pushed out first, to solve the main attack vector, while the larger patch is investigated. Automated fuzz testing is underway. Great care is being taken fixing bspatch, as if it is broken installing future updates becomes much more difficult secteam@ and core@ would like to emphasize that the FreeBSD project takes these issue very seriously and are working on it > “As a general rule, secteam@ does not announce vulnerabilities for which we don't have patches, but we concede that we should have considered making an exception in this case” Work is underway to re-architect freebsd-update and portsnap to do signature verification on all files before they are passed to libarchive/tar, to help protect users from any future vulnerabilities in libarchive. However, this requires changes to the metadata format to provide these additional signatures, and backwards compatibilities must be preserved, so people can update to the newer versions to get these additional security features There is also discussion of using HTTPS for delivery of the files, but certificate verification and trust are always an issue. FreeBSD does not distribute a certificate trust store by default. There will be more on this in the coming days. *** OpenSSH 7.3 Released (http://www.openssh.com/txt/release-7.3) OpenSSH 7.3 has landed! Primarily a bug-fix release, the release notes do mention the pending deprecation of some more legacy Crypto in the future, including denying all RSA keys < 1024bit, and removal of SSHv1 support. (Already disabled via compile option) On the bug side, there was a security issue addressed in sshd: “sshd(8): Mitigate a potential denial-of-service attack against the system's crypt(3) function via sshd(8). An attacker could send very long passwords that would cause excessive CPU use in crypt(3). sshd(8) now refuses to accept password authentication requests of length greater than 1024 characters” Also a timing issue was resolved in regard to password auth, which could possibly allow an attacker to discern between valid/invalid account names. On the feature side, we have the new ProxyJump option (-J flag) which allows you to do simplified indirection through various SSH jump hosts. Various bugs were fixed, and some compile failures resolved in the portable version to auto-disable some ciphers not supported by OpenSSL. News Roundup OpenBSD Ports - Integrating Third Party Applications [pdf] (http://jggimi.homeip.net/semibug.pdf) A talk from Josh Grosse, presented at SEMIBUG (South-East Michigan BSD Users Group), about OpenBSD Ports It opens by explaining the separation of the ‘base system' from ‘packages', as is common in most all BSDs It explains the contents of OpenBSD package tar file, which contain some metadata files (+CONTENTS and +DESC) and then the actual package files The talk goes on to explain the different branches (-release, -stable, and -current), and warn users that there are no official -stable packages from the project Then it goes on into the development model, including what new contributors should expect Then it walks through the entire process of creating a port and getting it contributed *** NetBSD removes last RWX page in amd64 kernel (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2016/07/27/msg076413.html) NetBSD has purged the last holdout RWX page on the amd64 platform > “Use UVMPROTALL only if UVMKMFEXEC is given as argument. Otherwise, if UVMKMFPAGEABLE is also given as argument, only the VA is allocated and UVM waits for the page to fault before kentering it. When kentering it, it will use the UVMPROT flag that was passed to uvm_map; which means that it will kenter it as RWX. With this change, the number of RWX pages in the amd64 kernel reaches strictly zero.” Break out the party favors! Hopefully any last stragglers in any of the other BSD's gets retired soon as well. *** DragonFly BSD 4.6 launches with home-grown support for NVMe Controllers (http://linux.softpedia.com/blog/dragonfly-bsd-4-6-0-launches-with-home-grown-support-for-nvme-controllers-506908.shtml) Softpedia picked up on the release of DragonFlyBSD 4.6, specifically about their new home-grown NVMe driver. > “We now have a NVMe driver (PCIe SSDs). It currently must be kldloaded with nvme_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf. The driver uses all concurrency features offered by the chip and will distribute queues and interrupts across multiple CPUs to maximize performance. It has been tested up to around 1.05M IOPS @4K, and roughly 6.5 GBytes/sec @32K (random read from urandom-filled partition, physio, many threads), with the 2xE5-2620v4 (xeon) test server 78% idle in the IOPS test and 72% idle on the bandwidth test. In other words, we maxed out the three NVMe devices we had plugged in and the system still had plenty of suds left over. Please note that a machine's ability to boot from an NVMe device depends on the BIOS, and not DragonFly. Most BIOSes cannot boot from NVMe devices and those that can probably only do it through UEFI. Info on device state is available with the new utility nvmectl.“ In addition to this improved support, 4.6 also brings in the improved graphics support, matching what is in Linux 4.4 and support for Broadwell/Skylake. SMP also got some love: > “SMP performance was already very good. As part of the NVMe driver work we revamped the buffer cache subsystem and a number of other I/O related paths, further reducing lock contention and IPI signalling overheads. We also put topology-aware cpu cache localization into the kernel memory allocator (primarily helps multi-socket systems and systems with high core counts). The network subsystem also continues to receive significant improvement, with modest machine configurations now capable of handling upwards of 580K conns/sec.“ +Full Release Notes (https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release46/) *** The powerd++ daemon monitors the system load and adjusts the CPU clock accordingly and is a drop-in replacement for FreeBSD's native powerd(8). (http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/powerdxx/) As mentioned in our EuroBSDCon 2016 rundown, Dominic Fandrey will be giving a presentation about his powerd replacement, powerd++ The source code is already available on github, and is in ports The major difference is the newer design handle many-core systems much better. The original powerd was written at a time when most laptops only had a single core, and maybe a hyperthread. The new design decides which CPU frequency to use by looking at the busiest core, rather than the average across the cores, resulting in a more meaningful result. It also supports averaging over a longer period of time, to avoid jumping to a higher frequency to quickly powerd++ also avoids ‘slewing' the cpu frequency, ratching it up and down one step at a time, and instead jumps directly to the target frequency. Often times, you will use less battery by jumping to maximum frequency, finishing the work, and going back to a low power state, than trying to do that work over a longer period of time in low power mode *** Beastie Bits Hyper-V: Unmapped I/O improves userland direct disk performance by 35% ~ 135% (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=303474) One does not simply remove FreeBSD (https://imgur.com/a/gjGoq) A new BSD Podcast "BSD Synergy" has started (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBua6yMtJ6W5ExYSREnS3UQ) KnoxBug - Next Meeting - Aug 30th (http://knoxbug.org/content/2016-08-30) Feedback/Questions Daniel - Root/Wheel (http://pastebin.com/8sMyKm6c) Joe - IPV6 Frag (http://pastebin.com/r5Y0gbxf) Paul - ChicagoBug (http://pastebin.com/iVYPYcVs) Chris - SSH BruteBlock (http://pastebin.com/597m9gHa) Todd - Jails (http://pastebin.com/xjbKwSaz) ***

This week on BSDNow, we will be talking shop with Josh Paetzel of FreeNAS fame, hearing about his best do's and do-nots of using ZFS in production. Also, a quick iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** FreeNAS Logo Design Contest (https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-logo-contest/) Rules and Requirements (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-logo-design-contest.39968/) For those of you curious about Kris' new lighting here are the links to what he is using. Softbox Light Diffuser (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OTG6474?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00&pldnSite=1) Full Spectrum 5500K CFL Bulb (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00198U6U6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00) *** This episode was brought to you by Headlines A Brief look back at 2015 (http://fossforce.com/2015/12/bsd-brief-look-back-2015/) As we start the show this week, we begin with a brief look back at BSD in 2015, brought to us by Larry at FOSS force. Aside from his issue with tap-to-click on the touchpad, his PC-BSD experience has been pretty good. (Larry, if you hear this, jump on #pcbsd on FreeNode and we will lend a hand) He mentions that this really isn't his first time running BSD, apparently back in ye-olden days he got NetBSD up and running on a PowerBook G3, until an update brought that experience to abrupt ending. He gives a shout-out to the FreeBSD Foundation as being a great go-to source for wrapup on the previous year in FreeBSD land, while also mentioning the great 4.4 release of DragonFly, and some of the variants, such as RetroBSD and LiteBSD He leaves us with a tease for 2016 that work is ongoing on Twitter to port over Mopidy, a python based extensible music server *** A look forward at BSD events throughout 2016 (http://www.bsdevents.org/scheduler/) After a quick look back at 2015, now its time to start planning your 2016 schedule. The BSDEvents site has a calendar of all the upcoming conferences / shows where BSD will have a presence this year. There are quite a few items on the agenda, including non BSD specific conferences, such as SCALE / Fosdem and more. Take a look and see, you may be able to find something close your location where you can come hang out with other BSD developers. (or better yet), if a linux conference is coming to your town, think about submitting a BSD talk! Additionally, if getting BSD Certification is something on your 2016 resolutions, you can often take the test at one of these shows, avoiding the need to travel to a testing center. *** The 'Hidden' Cost of Using ZFS for Your Home NAS (http://louwrentius.com/the-hidden-cost-of-using-zfs-for-your-home-nas.html) An article was recently posted that seems to be trying to dissuade people from using ZFS for their home NAS It points out what experienced users already know, but many newcomers are not strictly aware of: Expanding a ZFS pool is not always as straightforward as you think it should be ZFS was designed to be expanded, and it handled this very well However, a ZFS pool is made up of VDEVs, and it is these VDEVs that provide the redundancy. RAID-Z VDEVs cannot be changed once they are created. You can replace each disk individually, and the VDEV will grow to its new larger size, but you cannot add additional disks to a RAID-Z VDEV At this point, your option is to add an additional VDEV, although best practises dictate that the new VDEV should use an equal number of disks, to avoid uneven performance So, if you started with a 6 disk RAID-Z2, having to add 6 more disks to grow the pool does seem excessive For the best flexibility, use mirrors. If you had used 6 disks as 3 mirrors of 2 disks each, you could then just add 2 more disks at a time. The downside is that using 2TB disks, you'd only have 6TB of usable space, versus the 8TB you would get from those disks in a RAID-Z2 This is the trade-off, mirrors give you better performance and flexibility, but less space efficiency It is important to note that the diagrams in this article make it appear as if all parity information is stored on specific drives. In ZFS parity is spread across all drives. Often times, the data written to the drive is not of a size that can evenly be split across all drives, so the data actually ends up looking like this (http://blog.delphix.com/matt/files/2014/06/RAIDZ.png) The errors as I see it in the original article are: It notes that the hidden cost of ZFS is that if you add a second RAID-Z VDEV, you will have a whole second set of parity drives. While this is a cost, it is the cost of making sure your data is safe. If you had an array with more than 12 drives, it is likely that you would to be able to withstand the failure of the larger number of drives The article does not consider the resilver time. If you did create a configuration with a very wide RAID-Z stripe, the failure of a disk would leave the pool degraded for a much longer time, leaving your pool at risk for that longer period. The article does not consider performance. Two RAID-Z2 VDEVs of 6 disks each will give much better performance than a single VDEV of 10 or 12 disks, especially when it comes to IOPS. *** ZFS Boot Enviroments now availble in the FreeBSD bootloader (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293001) It's been in phabricator for a while (and PC-BSD), but the support for Boot-Environments has now landed upstream in -CURRENT This work was helped by cross-project collaboration when an IllumOS Developer, Toomas Soome, started porting the FreeBSD loader to IllumOS to replace GRUB there This gives Beastie menu the ability to look at the ZFS disk, and dynamically list boot-environments that it finds. (Much nicer than GRUB, which required a pre-written configuration file) This work was extended further, when Toomas Soome also ported the Beastie Menu to the UEFI loader (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293233) which is now enabled by default for UEFI (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=293234) All of these changes are scheduled to be merged back in time for FreeBSD 10.3 as well. There is also a patch being worked on to support booting from ZFS in UEFI (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4515) This is exciting times for doing neat things with ZFS on root, these plus Allans forthcoming GELI support (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4593) will negate the necessity for GRUB on PC-BSD for example (Kris is very happy) *** Interview - Josh Paetzel - email@email (mailto:email@email) / @bsdunix4ever (https://twitter.com/bsdunix4ever) ZFS Support *** News Roundup RetroBSD being tested on ESP32 (http://retrobsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=37470) More hardware news for RetroBSD and LiteBSD I don't know much about this hardware, but there is a lot of discussion in the forum threads about it Not sure what you are supposed to accomplish with only 400kb of ram LITEBSD Brings 4.4BSD to PIC32 (https://hackaday.com/2016/01/04/litebsd-brings-4-4bsd-to-pic32/) It is interesting to see these super-small boards with only 512kb of memory, but will crypto offload support It is also interesting to see talk of 140mbps WiFi, can the processor actually handle that much traffic? BSD Unix-like OS is Resurrected for Embedded IoT Market (http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/bsd-unix-os-resurrected-embedded-iot-market) Related to the above stories, we also have an article about BSD making a resurgence on various Internet of things devices, which mentions both RetroBSD and LiteBSD The article mentions that this is an exciting development for embedded vars who now have an alternative licensed open-source OS to potentially use *** HardenedBSD's new Binary Updater (https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2015-12-31/introducing-hardenedbsds-new-binary-updater) It looks like there is now another way to update your FreeBSD(hardened) system The post by Shawn Web, details how the new updater will work in future releases of HBSD Right now it looks fairly straight-forward, creating both the base.txz and kernel.txz, along with some data for etcupdate It includes a nice option for the kernel name in the update, allowing different kernels to be installed / updated at will Everything is cryptographically signed and verified using the base system openssl The build system is fairly simple, only requiring “sh/git/openssl” to create the binary updates Planned features also include updating of jails, and ZFS boot-environments *** Sometimes, processors need (BSD) love too (http://functionallyparanoid.com/2016/01/02/sometimes-processors-need-love-too/) We have a blog post from Brian Everly, talking about his long journey into legacy processors and the plans for the future to work on better supporting them on OpenBSD ports He begins with the story of his UNIX journey to today, and why this fostered his love for many of these old (and not so old) architectures, such as Sparc64, PPC32, i386. This journey ended up with the purchase of some legacy hardware (ebay is your friend), and the creation of a database listing the major port blockers on each platform This is the great kind of thing folks can do to step up and help a project, even as a weekend hobby it's great to run some hardware and help test / fix up issues that other developers maybe don't interact with as much anymore. *** Beastie Bits The standard MWL disclaimer (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2510) PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENTJAN2016 Available (http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testing/2016-January/010350.html) NetBSD pkgsrc-2015Q3 statistics (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2015/12/28/msg016193.html) NetBSD pkgsrc-2015Q4 released (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2016/01/01/msg016213.html) First Reproducible builds conference in Athens (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/reproducible_builds_conference_in_athens) The creator of the original ThinkPad design passes away (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/06/thinkpad_designer_obituary) Feedback/Questions Andrew - High Contrast (http://slexy.org/view/s213iCKLwn) John - FreeNAS followup (http://slexy.org/view/s21ClGePLP) Giorgio - Custom Install (http://slexy.org/view/s21527pkO1) Don - ZFS Slowdowns (http://slexy.org/view/s2jOlCsjkU) Fred - Dual Boot PC-BSD/Linux (http://slexy.org/view/s21uaB0FDU) ***

Coming up on the show this week, we've got an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix. He's got a lot to say about performance tuning and benchmarks, and even some pretty funny stories about how people have done them incorrectly. As always, this week's news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Even more BSD presentation videos (https://www.meetbsd.com/) More videos from this year's MeetBSD and OpenZFS devsummit were uploaded since last week Robert Ryan, At the Heart of the Digital Economy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc9k1xEepWU) FreeNAS & ZFS, The Indestructible Duo - Except for the Hard Drives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1C6DELK7fc) Richard Yao, libzfs_core and ioctl stabilization (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIC0dwLRBZU) OpenZFS, Company lightning talks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmbI7F7XTTc) OpenZFS, Hackathon Presentation and Awards (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPbVPwScMGk) Pavel Zakharov, Fast File Cloning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lGOAZFXra8) Rick Reed, Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TneLO5TdW_M) Alex Reece & Matt Ahrens, Device Removal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs6MsJ9kKKE) Chris Side, Channel Programs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMTxyqcomPA) David Maxwell, The Unix command pipeline (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZHEZHK4jRc) Be sure to check out the giant list of videos from last week's episode (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_11_19-rump_kernels_revisited) if you haven't seen them already *** NetBSD on a Cobalt Qube 2 (http://www.jarredcapellman.com/2014/3/9/NetBSD-and-a-Cobalt-Qube-2) The Cobalt Qube was a very expensive networking appliance around 2000 In 2014, you can apparently get one of these MIPS-based machines for about forty bucks This blog post details getting NetBSD installed and set up on the rare relic of our networking past If you're an old-time fan of RISC or MIPS CPUs, this'll be a treat for you Lots of great pictures of the hardware too *** OpenBSD vs. AFL (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&w=2&r=1&s=afl&q=b) In their never-ending security audit, some OpenBSD developers have been hitting various parts of the tree (https://twitter.com/damienmiller/status/534156368391831552) with a fuzzer If you're not familiar, fuzzing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing) is a semi-automated way to test programs for crashes and potential security problems The program being subjected to torture gets all sorts of random and invalid input, in the hopes of uncovering overflows and other bugs American Fuzzy Lop (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/), in particular, has provided some interesting results across various open source projects recently So far, it's fixed some NULL pointer dereferences in OpenSSH, various crashes in tcpdump and mandoc (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_11_12-a_mans_man) and a few other things (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=141646270127039&w=2) AFL has an impressive list of CVEs (vulnerabilities) that it's helped developers discover and fix It also made its way into OpenBSD ports, FreeBSD ports and NetBSD's pkgsrc very recently, so you can try it out for yourself *** GNOME 3 hits the FreeBSD ports tree (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=372768) While you've been able to run GNOME 3 on PC-BSD and OpenBSD for a while, it hasn't actually hit the FreeBSD ports tree.. until now Now you can play with GNOME 3 and all its goodies (as well as Cinnamon 2.2, which this also brings in) on vanilla FreeBSD Be sure to check the commit message and /usr/ports/UPDATING (http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/ports) if you're upgrading from GNOME 2 You might also want to go back and listen to our interview (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_02_26-port_authority) with Joe Marcus Clark about GNOME's portability *** Interview - Brendan Gregg - bgregg@netflix.com (mailto:bgregg@netflix.com) / @brendangregg (https://twitter.com/brendangregg) Performance tuning, benchmarks, debugging News Roundup DragonFlyBSD 4.0 released (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release40/) A new major version of DragonFly, 4.0.1, was just recently announced This version includes support for Haswell GPUs, lots of SMP improvements (including some in PF) and support for up to 256 CPUs It's also the first release to drop support for i386, so it joins PCBSD in the 64 bit-only club Check the release notes for all the details, including networking and kernel improvements, as well as some crypto changes *** Can we talk about FreeBSD vs Linux (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8645443) Hackernews had a recent thread about discussing Linux vs BSD, and the trolls stayed away for once Rather than rehashing why one is "better" than the other, it was focused on explaining some of the differences between ecosystems and communities If you're one of the many people who watch our show just out of curiosity about the BSD world, this might be a good thread to read Someone in the comments even gave bsdnow.tv a mention as a good resource to learn, thanks guy *** OpenBSD IPSEC tunnel guide (http://www.packetmischief.ca/openbsd-ipsec-tunnel-guide/) If you've ever wanted to connect two networks with OpenBSD gateways, this is the article for you It shows how to set up an IPSEC tunnel between destinations, how to lock it down and how to access all the machines on the other network just like they were on your LAN The article also explains some of the basics of IPSEC if you're not familiar with all the terminology, so this isn't just for experts Though the article itself is a few years old, it mostly still applies to the latest stuff today All the tools used are in the OpenBSD base system, so that's pretty handy too *** DragonFly starts work on IPFW2 (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/ipfw2/) DragonFlyBSD, much like FreeBSD, comes with more than one firewall you can use Now it looks like you're going to have yet another choice, as someone is working on a fork of IPFW (which is actually already in its second version, so it should be "IPFW3") Not a whole lot is known yet; it's still in heavy development, but there's a brief roadmap (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/ipfw2/#index6h1) page with some planned additions The guy who's working on this has already agreed to come on the show for an interview, but we're going to give him a chance to get some more work done first Expect that sometime next year, once he's made some progress *** Feedback/Questions Michael writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2NYgVifXN) Samael writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s21X02saI3) Steven writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s21Dj7zImH) Remy writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s218lXg38C) Michael writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20SEuKlaH) ***

Coming up this week, we'll be showing you how to chain SSH connections, as well as some cool tricks you can do with it. Going along with that theme, we also have an interview with Bryce Chidester about running a BSD-based shell provider. News, emails and cowsay turkeys, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines PIE and ASLR in FreeBSD update (https://www.soldierx.com/news/Position-Independent-Executable-Support-Added-FreeBSD) A status update for Shawn Webb's ASLR and PIE work for FreeBSD One major part of the code, position-independent executable support, has finally been merged into the -CURRENT tree "FreeBSD has supported loading PIEs for a while now, but the applications in base weren't compiled as PIEs. Given that ASLR is useless without PIE, getting base compiled with PIE support is a mandatory first step in proper ASLR support" If you're running -CURRENT, just add "WITH_PIE=1" to your /etc/src.conf and /etc/make.conf The next step is working on the ASLR coding style and getting more developers to look through it Shawn will also be at EuroBSDCon (in September) giving an updated version of his BSDCan talk about ASLR *** Misc. pfSense news (https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1347) Couple of pfSense news items this week, including some hardware news Someone's gotta test the pfSense hardware devices before they're sold, which involves powering them all on at least once To make that process faster, they're building a controllable power board (and include some cool pics) There will be more info on that device a bit later on On Friday, June 27th, there will be another video session (https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1367) (for paying customers only...) about virtualized firewalls pfSense University (https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1332), a new paid training course, was also announced A single two-day class costs $2000, ouch *** ZFS stripe width (http://blog.delphix.com/matt/2014/06/06/zfs-stripe-width/) A new blog post from Matt Ahrens (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_05_14-bsdcanned_goods) about ZFS stripe width "The popularity of OpenZFS has spawned a great community of users, sysadmins, architects and developers, contributing a wealth of advice, tips and tricks, and rules of thumb on how to configure ZFS. In general, this is a great aspect of the ZFS community, but I'd like to take the opportunity to address one piece of misinformed advice" Matt goes through different situations where you would set up your zpool differently, each with their own advantages and disadvantages He covers best performance on random IOPS, best reliability, and best space efficiency use cases It includes a lot of detail on each one, including graphs, and addresses some misconceptions about different RAID-Z levels' overhead factor *** FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 released (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2014-June/078959.html) The third BETA in the 9.3 release cycle is out, we're slowly getting closer to the release This is expected to be the final BETA, next will come the RCs There have mostly just been small bug fixes since BETA2, but OpenSSL was also updated and the arc4random code was updated to match what's in -CURRENT (but still isn't using ChaCha20) The FreeBSD foundation has a blog post (http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/06/freebsd-93-beta3-now-available.html) about it too There's a list of changes (https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/9-STABLE/relnotes/article.html) between 9.2 and 9.3 as well, but we'll be sure to cover it when the -RELEASE hits *** Interview - Bryce Chidester - brycec@devio.us (mailto:brycec@devio.us) / @brycied00d (https://twitter.com/brycied00d) Running a BSD shell provider Tutorial Chaining SSH connections (http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/ssh-chaining) News Roundup My FreeBSD adventure (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/*bsd-17/my-freebsd-adventure-continued-4175508055/) A Slackware user from the "linux questions" forum decides to try out BSD, and documents his initial impressions and findings After ruling out (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/*bsd-17/pc-bsd-10-0-is-now-available-4175493047/page2.html#post5142465) PCBSD due to the demanding hardware requirements and NetBSD due to "politics" (whatever that means, his words) he decides to start off with FreeBSD 10, but also mentions trying OpenBSD later on In his forum post, he covers the documentation (and how easy it makes it for a switcher), dual booting, packages vs ports, network configuration and some other little things So far, he seems to really enjoy BSD and thinks that it makes a lot of sense compared to Linux Might be an interesting, ongoing series we can follow up on later *** Even more BSDCan trip reports (http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/06/bsdcan-trip-report-li-wen-hsu.html) BSDCan may be over until next year, but trip reports are still pouring in This time we have a summary from Li-Wen Hsu, who was paid for by the FreeBSD foundation He's part of the "Jenkins CI for FreeBSD" group and went to BSDCan mostly for that Nice long post about all of his experiences at the event, definitely worth a read He even talks about... the food *** FreeBSD disk partitioning (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2096) For his latest book series on FreeBSD's GEOM system, MWL asked the hackers mailing list for some clarification This erupted into a very long discussion (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2014-June/045246.html) about fdisk vs gnop vs gpart So you don't have to read the 500 mailing list posts, he's summarized the findings in a blog post It covers MBR vs GPT, disk sector sizes and how to handle all of them with which tools *** BSD Router Project version 1.51 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsdrp/files/BSD_Router_Project/1.51) A new version of the BSD Router Project has been released, 1.51 It's now based on FreeBSD 10-STABLE instead of 10.0-RELEASE Includes lots of bugfixes and small updates, as well as some patches from pfSense and elsewhere Check the sourceforge page for the complete list of changes Bad news... the minimum disk size requirement has increased to 512MB... getting pretty bloated *** Feedback/Questions Fongaboo writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s21X4hl28g) David writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20DELplMw) Kristian writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2tmazORRN) ***