Introducing Ascender: Enterprise Infrastructure Automation

it but doesn't it make it even stop trying to make fetch happen it's not gonna happen I don't know we already have Nick over here calling you the automation automation mustache so oh it's starting starting to sleep Auto stash there you go [Laughter] you're all dead to me okay you can't leave yet please talk first Michael welcome hey good afternoon everybody what's going on hello from Chicago Chicago my brother's there right now oh yeah what for he you know he he's into cards like trading cards you know I I mean I remember that when I was a kid like Garbage Pail Kids that was kind

of fun but I don't I don't I just can't even imagine like grown people being into that but apparently it's a thing it's a huge thing and he's going to a convention to trade cards I think you may have just alienated a huge portion of our audience right kidding I was I was almost offended if I had something within reach I would show you but you still have do you have Garbage Pail Kid cards though no no I don't I don't have those but that's okay why is that not I haven't heard that term in forever loved those [Laughter] it is cool it's cool it's

totally cool the coolest okay so back on track Ascender what what what is this what exactly is a sender automation platform go Greg you want to say this one first yes okay of course I'm obviously gonna do it um yeah so it's an automation platform uh Rose you kind of you nailed it it's sort of uh right there in the name right the idea being you have a bunch of infrastructure that you want to maintain something I've noticed in that uh I.T a lot of our companies that we work with there's always mergers Acquisitions they're always bringing in new stuff and guess what they don't

get new bodies to take care of all this equipment right so you gotta make do with the people you have but honestly most of the teams I run into really solid teams really smart individuals so you've got the talent in there you just need to give them some extra tools right to help them keep their hands around all of it and so this is where Ascender kind of pops in and allows you to sort of orchestrate automate at an Enterprise level right something you can scale and do big and amazing things with so I say it because it runs the stack it doesn't matter where

you sit and what Silo you sit you can take advantage of this right so if a lot of times we think of automation we're just thinking about like Cloud Engineers or you know Ops guys maintaining a bunch of Linux servers but guess what I'm a network engineer and if my caveman brain can do this stuff then absolutely anybody can and it adds a ton of value to my life as well as security people or I've even seen people on The Bu side or end users believe it or not get to take advantage of automation they just don't know they're doing it which is to me

the kind of one of the the best parts of the platform right making it easy for the masses it's fantastic so one of the things that you just mentioned coming from an operations background a long time ago we would build something handed to operations and what we built we get changed to match what they were working with so it's like we build a tool we hand it over they go build a new tool kind of eliminating the tool we had and then you would have another group that would build a tool that was supposed to be easy to support and they would take that and

have to build another tool there's never any consistency at all and it became a if we had to come back and build something new or updated we had to completely start over every time it was painful how does this fix that problem yeah for sure so this one is cross Silo as in we've got a single language we're all going to be talking right so this really is going to take your ansible playbooks and lets you kind of create them right you create them over here you put them in your git repository this pulls it in and makes it so that you can easily run

these so a term I learned from one Michael Ford oh I always point the wrong direction he's over there least privileged access right so only give people permission to things that they really need it too right don't just give them absolutely everything and so this allows me to put my automations in here so I'm the network guy I create my automations in here and then I can share my automations in this platform with people on the operations team or the security team but all they can do is execute my automations they can't they can't really look at them they can't change any of my credentials

they can't touch any of that stuff don't break my things but I allow them to run my automations easily inside this environment and safely and monitored and logged and all that good stuff right it's all kind of baked in there but we're all speaking the same language right if we're all writing playbooks then uh if I say you know module or a collection or whatever it happens to be you know exactly what I'm talking about right and I can look at your stuff I may be able to see what you're doing I may not know 100 why you're doing those things but I can tell

what you're doing in there so you don't have to be a programmer like I said if you're a caveman like me and network guy you can kind of get in there and understand what's going on to me that's one of the the beautiful things in there is that I don't have to know what everybody else is doing anymore I just get to take their Lego bricks and I snap them into my little diorama here you know I open up my my Nike shoe box that I've created this cool world in and I just get to start snapping their pieces in I don't have to think

about it so I really like so yeah I was going to say go ahead Michael yeah I was gonna just kind of double click on a lot of what Greg said too like especially with the different teams that are working together and Zayn you said it like everyone might be using disparate tools they might be making custom scripts what if someone leaves so what if something happens that could cause problems um and rarely do you have a situation if you're in a plane application where you have one team that's in charge of everything so what happens if you have different tasks that different teens are

responsible for then you have to tie those together to deploy something the other word I use a lot in this case is holistically you wanted to play something holistically it's great to have a shared language that everyone can depend upon use learn and use to really talk to each other and it really Bridges the gap between silent Deeds I think that's one of the benefits of a sender as well absolutely and it's something that you I you kind of sparked in my brain Michael is that um when we've talked to customers before sometimes when they're first getting into automation they'll have a team that's the

automation team and that can be dangerous because all of a sudden the automation team comes to people who have to do all of the automation right and so it all falls on their shoulders and that's not scalable either right with this platform you as the team that maybe owns the automation platform you get to start enabling other people to write their own automations right in the system you kind of you kind of put the template in there for them to you teach them to fish right instead of handing them a fish so you start helping them learn to automate and that makes you actually more

scalable right so it's it's not just one does all the automation now everybody can start become automators it's interesting you say that I didn't run across a customer one time that had an automation team and I thought it was a great idea to have that centralized automation team somebody's kind of enforcing the standard of pushing it they were six to eight months backlogged so people were trying to deploy applications and they didn't have enough people to get it done so they were they were in trouble they were trying to get other people to help but then they still had the backlog of trying to double

check it so it's I agree with you having a centralized team is cool in theory everybody's got automate their own stuff yeah yeah well it's uh it's a journey right isn't that what you call it Michael I I feel like we're using a lot of the same so what happens is like I'll say something I think regularly says it better than I do but I will say journey is one of the one of one of the words that I typically use um but yeah it's just really about that what I was getting to was the domain experts if you have an overall I mean overall

automation team that might be great for like kind of herding the cats of different teams to work together but who better to write automation for security than a security team because they know what the heck is going on who better to write um you know automation for for Rocky and Linux than the links Administration team because they know what's happening so to Greg's Point kind of teaching them how to fish letting them write their own automations they have the tribal knowledge they know what needs to be done so they can put into a format that's easy to consume and then put it into a center

and then everyone's Off to the Races yeah for sure I like uh usually we talk about Champions right like in those other silos you want to elevate people right because inevitably there's going to be some people that are better at automation than others right you know kind of pick it up a little bit quicker and and you want to like um you want to celebrate those people right create those champions in those different silos and that can be so you know we're talking about big picture here right where you've got this giant company and we've got all these different silos and we're all holding hands

and singing Kumbaya right but that's not usually how it starts generally we have what one particular area in the company is the one that brings it in and then you know theoretically can grow from there so it's it's not like you have to have everybody on board right Mike you can start like oh this is just in my department and what are some of the advantages like instead of looking so big picture let's look a little bit smaller like what's one of the advantages you can think of for like um just one Department I'm I'm an operations team or I'm a network team and we're

bringing in just to help us like how do you see it fitting in there yeah send me an examples that I usually think of or if you're the firewall team you know if you have a subset of firewalls you need to make changes too that's a perfect opportunity to do that at scale with something like a sender so you're taking care of the mundane task of making firewall changes and really focusing on the things that really require your expertise that people hire you for so that's one example that I'm thinking of um anything from in our case obviously here at ciq if you're looking at

applying simple Patches at scale that's something that's really easy to do once but it's a pain in the behind to do a thousand times overs right so just stuff like to your point great stuff as simple as that how can we take these little things that are toil tasks that we would not want to do again and again and those are perfect candidates to get started to your point I think it's fun to Greg's point also when you start looking at doing something like patching and how many different groups that actually touches to go through a patching cycle so everybody yes I have to turn

off monitoring operations that's good disable their tools then it gets handed back over to someone else to actually disable all the services make sure the traffic is not going to it anymore take it out of the firewall load balance I mean there's a load balancer whatever they have to do there's always those other touches that have to happen it seems like as people are having these conversations and they're and they're showing how easy it is for them to automate their piece other people get excited about it like well if you can do it I can automate my piece so a very complex packaging patching cycle

something that seems very easy for an individual job is it's like to Greg's point a very large overarching the big picture is not easy it's very complicated but you can make it easy so I have a question I imagine that a Playbook is something like when this happens do this if this happens go here is that like kind of the basic gist so like where I'm going with this is if that's a yes then I imagine that if you have some kind of a flow in your in your company where you actually do want human eyes on something before it goes through like you know

from beginning to end of whatever the the automation is like could you set it to stop and wait until this person okays it and then it would go to the next Department that needed to look at it and is that kind of what we're talking about here so so what you're naming is not the function of a single Playbook by itself but that's a function that's built within to a sender so all those things if you want to do error handling so the situation that I usually talk about is if you're deploying a whole infrastructure maybe the network team has to have their playbook run

first if that's successful if it's successful yes go ahead and do this next step if it's not successful maybe you send an error message to everybody in slack and says here's it failed and here's why it failed right or uh what were you saying the other part oh if you have an approval gate absolutely that's something that we can do with the sender hey in this part of things that are happening before we just go on and do the next thing or run the next Playbook maybe we want to have an approval gate so oh Greg has to bless us before we move forward Greg

sees it does says due diligence says okay this is cool those are absolute things that we can all do within a sender wow that's cool and you just said that you can get like a slack notification so I imagine that there's a lot of different opportunities to to get notified wherever right like if you want an email you could do an email maybe you want a text message maybe you want it in slack like wherever you want to get that notification you can set it up in that way I've never done a text so I want to speak to that like intimately because like but

but to your point right like what is your workflow how does your organization do those things absolutely definitely slack definitely email uh definitely other things as well if you want to fit things to your own organization's workflow we we can do that and that kind of to the other end of that too that's kind of the output side but the input side the other word that Greg and Zayn have heard me say time and again is the word consumption and you had the domain experts that are writing and authoring automation but what about the end users who made just as intelligent but they may not

be Network experts so if they have to do something to run some automation maybe they don't know what A playbook is maybe they don't know what a sender is maybe they don't care to know you know if you want to do something where you present them with an interface that they are more familiar with and so the ones that we've seen a lot in the past servicenow or jira or something else that's from the input side it can be just as um I think that we're looking for is ubiquitous so like anybody can do Automation and be none the wiser um yeah and service now

I mean that's going to be a place like an itsm where somebody's going to go and say uh request a new laptop or you know they say uh give me a new printer or something like that and in that same system they can say hey give me a firewall change give me a virtual machine and that itsm will call a sender and it'll take care of the rest for you right so a seamless interface they don't realize they're hitting automation it looks just like anything else to them which is pretty cool hmm one of the things I've always felt like when it comes to automation

it's great but there's always a group usually internal audit type folks who want to see what is taking place or want to see if an environment is in a state and it's easy to give them a Playbook and tell them to go run it right but would it be nice if there was just something easier to go look at oh my gosh are you hint hinting at something [Laughter] yeah let me um let me share my screen I think I've got one up just because I've had this ass so many times yeah how is what is the best way to do this thing and this

thing is with Ledger it's this one here so this is a way that you could do like an audit as well right well this is so weird I've never shared a specific tablet like sharing screens that way I can move around fast anyway digress here is ledger so uh Ledger was born out of exactly what you're talking about Zane how do we make this stuff easier and I wish wish uh Jimmy Connor was here he is actually one of our team members here and he wrote this and subsequently open sourced it right putting that back out in the community and I'm going to tell you

right now this is version 1.0 so if you see something in here that you think would be cool to add change modify please let us know if you can contribute contribute code totally cool uh if you can't just give us ideas right we're wanting to build this change it and uh make it you know best fit your environments as well but so it was born out of we have a lot of customers that say exactly like Zayn was talking about you know we have compliance requirements or honestly we just want other folks to be able to find information out of our systems really quickly and

simply and we can do that using a sender by sending off logs right we can send it off to a logging server the only problem with that is most of the commercial logging systems are actually licensed by the number of messages they get in Ascender can generate a lot of message a manager having thousands of hosts constantly automating all the time right that's a lot of messages being sent off so Jimmy said how about we write something specifically to solve this problem and he did and so what this does is it collects all of those logging messages and does interesting things with them so first

and foremost whenever we run an ansible Playbook we can do something called Gathering facts and what that really does is it connects into your systems and pulls a bunch of interesting information right so the Linux server it can pull kind of the flavor it's running all the packages installed all your IP information your drive all that stuff has it nice and variableized well guess what in Ledger here it can pull all of that off and store it so I can go back and I can this is kind of a quick and dirty one we've got a Windows box got a Linux box but I can

pull up that specific host I can find very specific fact information that was pulled or I can just search or say ipv4 stuff I can grab all of that right so nice right and we can kind of reference things really quickly but how do we actually use that how do we deliver that to somebody we do that with a report so in here we've got Linux server right I've only got one Linux server in here one Windows server but you can see uh this is uh the default reports that are built in you can immediately see well it's nice graphical view of it but we

have all these export methods baked in right now so you can like pull this out as a PDF or what have you another really interesting thing is these reports they have a schedule option so I can run this daily weekly monthly the idea being it can generate that report in whatever format I want and deliver it to my compliance team my security team maybe I'm trying to pull a report specifically on um I don't know VLAN interfaces out of my network and I want that for me and my network team right we can see all that stuff like just have it come straight to us

right the whole idea of automation is so you don't have to touch it right why don't we make it so that it just comes to you right and so that's one reporting thing and again remember I said this is in development product if you see something you'd like different in here please tell us but uh I digress let me show you kind of how the reports are built right now very functional so filter you add something in there and you say I want ansible system equals to Linux you could add an extra filter item in here that says distro equals Rocky right you can pull

all your Rocky stuff you've got your sorting here's all of your Fields you just add a column you give it a pretty display name right based on the fact info you want you Shuffle those things around I mean it's pretty straightforward you've got the information here show me what you want the report to look like and it'll generate it but that's not all folks got my ShamWow here no um the next thing it's doing right now is it pulls in your changes as well right so whenever a task runs an ascender for each piece of automation it will and for each piece of automation each

host that will report whether it made a change or not and we can actually log all of that stuff here in ledger so for example I can click I don't know this random one right here and it's in kind of your standard diff format right like you're accustomed to seeing red means I move something I remove something rather green means I added so we can see here on the pam.d systemoff file we added these fail lock requirements right so you can kind of quickly see all this stuff so pretty useful tool for compliance for um I don't know I guess you could do some configuration

drift stuff like if you see something I mean I can in networking I can imagine having a daily run of this that's looking for any changes on my network equipment right something pops in we didn't make any changes you know we didn't expect any changes to happen and I see something come through in the report it's probably something I need to take a look at right so a lot of really interesting capabilities in my opinion already there um I can't wait to see what this turns into though but another cool thing but there's more yeah one last thing is that whenever you install a sender

Jimmy has put all this together where install is a sender you have the ability to also Auto install Ledger at the exact same time and it will pair the two together so that it's all taken care of and it's ready to start accepting messages right out of the box so I am super stoked for this one Craig I feel like we're in an infomercial a little bit just for a second but wait there's more [Laughter] uh let's do this stuff gets me so tweaked because it's like we have been asking for this specific thing for so long like can somebody please uh make this happen

of course Jimmy did it like in a weekend as Jimmy's want to do so I was gonna say he's super new and you're like and he made this yeah and then it's just it's so beautiful it's really really really nice so Jimmy Kudos man yeah well I mean you know there's always compromises he's super smart but his sense of humor is terrible it's awful his jokes are the worst and stuff you know no person is probably the worst they're usually pretty funny and they're usually directed at Justin so it makes it fun to suck a little life out of me every time he tells one

of his puns it's just a little but they're great they're great aliens into it I'm sorry you're not here make some more fun to talk about you okay so this is just the beginning I mean not only for Ledger but there are other things coming that will we will talk about as they come out that uh Greg and Michael and Jimmy and team are working on to put into this that we've been hearing from customers recently we need this we need to be able to do this it would be nice if we had this so we're working as fast as we can to get this

stuff in there um we do have some questions let's see that Mr Rush is here thanks for joining Dave we love questions do you see natural language AI being integrated to handle the creation of playbooks go ahead Michael yeah no it's funny because I I'm very intermittently play with chat GPT so other people probably have better experience with this than I do but I was shocked I think someone told me it might have been saying he told me like ansible he can create animal playbooks I'm like really what are you talking about he's dropping a prompt to say gradients will Playbook to do XYZ and

it was doing it and is it was it giving me 100 something that I might write myself no but usually I don't write a Playbook from scratch anyway I usually start from something chances are someone to tackle the job before I did so it gets you maybe 80 of the way there and I've also seen other tools that are not automation related but are still embedding uh some flavor of chai CPT for lack of better phrasing into the tools and we can do that so that's absolutely something what I like to see that absolutely and I think this is what when Greg was saying like

if you want to give any feedback to what we can do um I think this is a perfect example of that so I don't want to over promise and deliver but I would love to see this as part of the product yeah you're really excited to see this to Michael's point he said he very seldom um starts like from a blank slate and anytime I'm trying to do anything uh within a Playbook I'll type you know ansible Playbook and the thing I'm trying to accomplish I'm probably going to find 15 versions that people have already created and something somebody told me before is don't reinvent

the wheel steal the wheel so somebody's already done it it's already out there in the public get reposits where I put all my stuff in public repo grab it and just go from there AI for everything else I thought that um chat GPT only had uh like information from a few years ago are they are they updating like it's knowledge base and it's information continuously depends on the version the chat gbt4 is actually more current yeah so if you're willing to pay you can get a newer language model what's surprising is even the old one they cut off in 20 was it 21.

is really good at at generating playbooks scary good I think we have another question is there another question yeah oh David David's back hi David um report templates to perform standardized audits so I would say I can't speak to the that's probably going to be a better TV question for the for the Ledger piece but absolutely if you want to just have standardized report standardized templates templates are actually like a key word when you're talking about answer um so the short answer is yes we can use with if it's Leisure or otherwise we can use jinja2 templating to create standardized reports uh in whatever format

that you want so 100 um without more context of this question I would say the answer that as an enthusiastic yes let me pause and see if Greg has any better thoughts again I'm going to say something Greg's going to say it better probably no no no no no no no it's different I'll dumb it down that's what I try and do make it I make it for the masses Michael for people like listening too smart for for the likes of me that's what it is you're too highbrow you only get your pinky up too fancy um wow no um no talking about uh standardized

audits I also uh was thinking about how um in Ascender now we are pre-baking in a whole bunch of playbooks so we have a ton that are out there we're going to be continually maintaining continually adding in again give us feedback what do you want to see in there we're going to have that stuff baked in so that uh you know you just instead of having to get all the ingredients and make the cookies you know you just open up the box in there you are and they're delicious so we do have a lot of hardening stuff in there um the ones for fat gathering

for Ledger already in there that's right so if you wanted to like do that you can just immediately like right out of the box just go in there and schedule that have it run on whatever interval you want keep all that stuff up to date so there is a bunch of stuff that can be used for audits as well and just compliance whatever buzzword you want me to throw in there right we have some of those in Michael doesn't eat sweets so cookie reference doesn't work oh I'm sorry I don't know maybe he is a room we'll still make some [Laughter] so on that note

Michael I would love for you to tell the story of pulling information off the switches and creating an S3 bucket delivering in his HTML page because that was fine oh yeah yeah I mean so I always think about like what are the different ways that people may choose to consume information and if you're looking at something like you know Greg already talked about a PDF talked about slide we talked about emails but one of the things that I would do is you know S3 has an option now to just create a static web page within an F3 bucket and I was just thinking to myself

what might I do to get basic information gathering that those facts from network devices in order to show uh maybe like Cisco iOS version or some other information that might be you know just good to have or in my case I was using it to show like hey we can see what's out of compliance and that's exactly what I did I used to count to David's question earlier it was a standardized templated audit for lack of better phrasing but it was using gender templates to both grab information and generate an HTML page drop into that S3 bucket and we can run it on demand or

you can run it on a schedule kind of to create an earlier point but that was a great way to show value to you know maybe people that want to get information and the other great thing about that too is you're not even exposing yourself to a lot of risk because you're not Maxi making changes yet you were allergic to capturing information to show current state of your devices and I think that's one of the great ways to get started with automation because it might be daunting to turn around and try to make changes at scale that'd be really scary I'd be scared to do

that to start with in an organization because I feel like that's a resume building opportunity if you do it wrong but just capturing information to start with and put it into that three bucket it's a great way to start and easily to visually consume thank you for telling the story Michael yeah absolutely Rose I think you had a question so I was just thinking about the different you know customers and people that we talk to and um Greg actually put out a great little like I think it's like a five or six minute video on our YouTube if you want to check that out but

he actually shows how to use a sender to automate your like long-term stable versions of um of your Rocky lining so like say for instance somebody wants to stay on 8.6 which is pretty common right because their applications and stuff need to just be on that stable version so you can automate like back ported security updates like however you want them to be automated daily monthly whenever it is um so it's a really cool video but one of the things that comes up for oftentimes when we're talking to people is well how do I then use this this tool in my air gapped environment right

we're like I'm not connected to the internet so maybe can you guys um speak to do you have to have internet to use this or is this one of those things that you can download have your security check out and then I don't know put on some kind of a disk and bring it into your place or however they do that pretty much how they do that that's how they do that so that's all good though right like it will work in that environment yeah if you have a yes remember that Michael take the actual question the answer is yes so I mean honestly if

you're and I've had a couple of clients want to do this already if they want to just test it out in their own kind of sandbox um we're actually we can use something just kind of a stripped down kubernetes called k3s to install it and that could be definitely on your premise um I've read it on a VM in my house right now so like that's an example of how I can do that if if clients have um some flavor of kubernetes that's within their environment that doesn't touch the outside internet and that's that's absolutely something they could do but it literally could be just

as small as a VM with the appropriate memory and storage and compute maybe if you want to run it like that you can and why you mentioned it Rose and it popped in my head you said there's a video for the LTS I think they just dropped a blog post on it as well that does the full walkthrough breaks down the playbooks how to actually get it into a cinder all that stuff it's in there awesome I think it's also on on the aircraft environment stuff so we got asked to build Mountain for our Gap environments first so tying the two together so being able

to actually put content in to Mountain and access it with Ascender it gives you a lot of flexibility and the ability to do a lot of things in air gaps environment without internet access and it actually for sure the customers that we had actually takes a server bring it out they update it make sure everything's verified validated by security if they can move it and they actually take it and walk it into the air gaps environment plug it back in so then it's updated it's been verified it's secure it has all everything that it needs from container images patches playbooks everything's on there they have

a priest blessed it throw throw some holy water on it exactly turn around three times off but if there's something wrong with it they're going to get fired and yeah sign in blood laughs oh man this is cool this is really this is really great you guys everyone who's been working on this uh I mean it's it's amazing it looks so it's so such so clean right like when you were showing that ledger it just it looks very nice it's inviting so I don't know if that means anything but I've been fighting I love it it is but it is all right so what other

things do we want to talk about here guys you talked about The Ledger we took some questions are there any other questions um from you guys out there anything that you want to know about Ascender or automation where we are right now so I believe that if you guys do reach out to us on our website or send us an email if you're already you know on our list and you want to talk about automation you want a little demo something that um you know is is more specific to to your needs and you know we'll show you how to do it and you're like

yes we want to go ahead with this are you Greg or somebody on our team going to like help them set it up at first like what kind of like hand holding do we do at ciq to like make sure that people are set up properly if automation is a completely new thing for them yeah for sure for sure yes oh yeah yeah yeah yeah let's go let's go Rose squaring off with me here we are um no we uh as Michael talked about we have different uh several different ways of installing it so basically we're going to be able to get it in your

environment one way or the other um Jimmy actually has gone a long way to making the install very simple it's basically a script that we run and magically all the infrastructure is is built for us so uh somebody like I said as dumb as me can even do the install uh and help a customer through all of those pieces I love you're gonna stop saying that well now like I mean to me that's one of the magical parts right when I came in from being a network engineer to automation it was terrifying I'm not gonna lie right it is for a moment I had a

bit of an existential crisis like does this mean the end of Greg you know like do you not need me anymore but no I learned you still have to be a subject matter expert you still have to know the thing you're doing right you still have to understand what it means to be a network engineer right and you are still valuable you are still needed so don't worry about that um but then learning how easy it was actually for me to start writing these playbooks and integrating these things was transformative for me especially in like I would write automations where I started writing out flows

right so if I was going to do in a task step one step two I'd write it all out and then I would start brainstorming like this is something I didn't traditionally think was ever possible to automate could actually do that and so I had ones where and I have a demo where I'm monitoring a remote site it goes down well it actually calls a sender right a sender connects to my phone system puts a call Handler in place so our phone stopped ringing off the hook right and so it's letting customers know hey what's going on and also guess what I get to concentrate

on what I'm trying to to work on here then it goes and collects all the information just like a human would creates a ticketing service now and then sends it to my engineering team in slack right so it basically does all those human steps now it's going to be happy to do that three in the afternoon but more importantly it'll do it at three in the morning and that Junior engineer who's first on call will get this big triage list of what is probably wrong and guess who gets to sleep right guess who gets to go on vacation and I'll get that call guess who

doesn't have to miss that birthday party or that Christmas I don't know if you can read between the lines but I've missed all those things and automation stuff while it was scary at first actually made my life better so I'm a huge proponent and I will I will get off my soapbox now no I'm glad that you said that honestly because that was kind of on my mind too right I mean people get nervous I mean all you know the world being automated right there's a lot of talk out there of like oh well like you know what are humans gonna do then and I

real I just I appreciate because I know that's got to be something on some you know some people's minds of like well do I really want to push this um but it does save people time and money right like as as the engineer and as the company um but it's in a in a different kind of way so thank you for explaining that I appreciate that I've seen a lot more people by doing a lot more work with a lot less it's pretty amazing I was gonna say too like what did you get hired for meaning something interesting you want to come to work and

be excited about it I started that phrasing off wrong but like if your job is to you know like okay if I gotta patch servers but but yeah like you know one of the things that really excites you about your job what are the things that literally cannot be automated that really require your expertise which Greg has allowed to play with despite whatever he says but you know like if you free yourself up to do those exciting and fun and business changing things by having some automation take care of those mundane things that are just as important but kind of monotonous and prone to human

error you know that's a really great way to look at these kind of right kind of kind of solutions so anything that you are doing repetitively right where it's like you want to set it up so that it's done correctly but you don't necessarily need to be doing the same thing over and over and over again so when you have something like a Playbook that can say okay you know when this happens this is triggered do this because that's exactly what I would do yes these are known processes right that maybe your organization knows hey we are the tribal knowledge to do x y z

and that's it like how yes if you can standardize that and put into an ansible Playbook then absolutely 100 and it means you're making less mistakes and all that yeah I love it so this sounds really powerful and amazing and every time I ask Greg here Mr stash if it can do this he says yes and what about this yes and what about that yes so this sounds like it might be super crazy pricey I know we got a question on price I don't know Alex if you want to put it up there but I'm going to make you do it Zayn I'm gonna make

you at least give it a little bit of an overview of like how ours at ciq we've modeled things in a way that we think is like the best for us and the community absolutely so this is something one of the reasons I really came here is I was excited about is looking at how people do support differently we view the community differently we want to give everything to the community we want to support the people so just like everything else that we do here it is a by the person so we're not here to make sure you're staying within the number of things you

paid for with the number of nodes or number of network devices we just want to make the admins who have to go automate things successful so we are doing a by the person model way it's very simple yeah thanks Mark for that question absolutely it is important so I mean obviously it's going to be you know a little bit tailored to your situation because like you come on our side you guys it is wild the variety that we see so it's gonna yes it is right everyone's a unicorn that's what Zayn says you know it's like that's all we have is unicorn so it's kind

of hard to um automatize the pricing part so definitely reach out to us we we want to talk to you cool thank you Mike appreciate that I think there was one more was there another question Mario thanks for being here ma'am I would like if there is some code AS example maybe with varent or Alexi I'm assuming they're asking if you can well I guess we're talking about vagrant are you asking can you spin up bigger images and play with it like we don't have a baked in bigger image yet question mark yeah foreign if there's a way we could elaborate on the question I

want to make sure we're answering it correctly now could you automate spending up vagrant images with a sender absolutely because making a system call you could do it make sure vagrance installed you can do that too if you're talking about managing Linux containers you can do that as well yeah this code as an example as well like the playbooks we create we're putting all those in public repositories which the playbooks for those that are uninitiated are really just human readable text files that are scripts that inform uh Ascender like what automated steps you're supposed to perform and we're putting all that stuff up like all

the everything associated with the blog post any demo we ever do those are always going to be in in public repositories for you to see thank you for the question hope that I hope that answers the question I think that we've covered everything I know see a ledger okay yeah we talked about Mountain yep we've got over so we've done a lot of talking is there just just to close that Loop what's the best way because I know there's ways to contact us but let's say for the sake of argument we didn't answer that question thoroughly what's the best way to reach out to us

through the primary web page or the website yeah ciq.com okay go to ciq.com there's a little nice little chat guy you can chat with someone or you can send us a note leave us leave us your email contact info get back with you send an email at ciq.com that will go nowhere but thank you that's so fun all right so that that's very exciting you guys thank you so much for all of the incredible work that you do we are definitely ascending to higher Heights we are going up this mountain there's just an incredible amount of amazingness that you can do with this we want

to talk with you if you were at all curious of like is this right for my business is this right for me is this right for the company is this right for my position like how does this all work we want to answer those questions so if you have any curiosity at all go to our website ciq.com make sure that you go into the chat just as Zane said there's like a million places to get a hold of us I think every single page has you know some success questions was yes by the way just to make sure yes exactly and we'll get back with

you so make sure that you like and you subscribe we're here every Thursday 11 Pacific time with live webinars with more information and just like we said but there's more so every week there's always more that we are adding to what we're doing here at ciq and before we go you have to throw up David's last comment what where is it oh it's fantastic we would rush Greece is the word we're you're Rocky the one that I want you're Rocky the one that I get it the one that I want [Laughter] that was fantastic [Laughter] thank you everyone just to keep coming back we will

be talking more and more about what we're putting into this thing so we really appreciate the time thanks guys [Music]