 Hello folks, I am Vjoy and I am here to talk about how a mesh has tremendous psychological value. But before I begin, if you haven't read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, please get your copy today. That book starts with the protagonist Arthur Dent, waking up to realize that his world, planet Earth, was in the path of an intergalactic highway. The monolith that was planet Earth had to be suddenly blown up and Arthur had to deal with a composable interplanetary viewpoint and a very large distributed system. It was in this distributed system that he was made aware of the benefits of a towel. Arthur learns that in the large distributed system that is the galaxy, a towel is the most useful thing a Hitchhiker can carry with him. It can do all of these wonderful things and help him in so many situations that you see here. Now let's focus your attention to our world of Earthly apps. Our monolithic application viewpoint on the left, whether it be bare metal based or VM based, is similarly being blown apart in favor of a composable, large scale distributed application. In this new world of modern distributed apps, the physical picture on the left is definitely convoluted but the logical dependency graph shown on the right of API's services and RPC calls is even more convoluted, leaving our developer overwhelmed, lost and confused, like Arthur Dent was after planet Earth was blown apart. And I say this with profuse apologies to Douglas Adams. It is then that this developer realizes that a mesh is the most massively useful thing a cloud native developer can explore. It has many, many practical use cases. So what practical uses does a mesh, any mesh have? If you think about what just happened, a monolithic got split apart into composable elements. So the first problem is of discoverability. What was all in one blob now needs to be discovered across a distributed environment. So value number one is providing this discoverability across various component providers. Once you have discovered these elements, you need to create something with it. So consistency of policy and the consumption layer becomes important as value number two, especially in a heterogeneous environment. Now that we have discovered these elements and created something, value number three is enabling the data flow or the flow of information between those elements securely and then sprinkle performance attributes on that flow, such as scale and availability. Finally, observability across all of these elements and up and down that distributed stack becomes critically important for SLO adherence, debugability, and reduction in mean time to resolution. And the only way to manage a large scale distributed system is where a declarative paradigm. Since most people are familiar with layer seven service meshes, let's use those as an example. Here the monolith that used to be the app with APIs that were probably internal library calls is now a modern app where the distributed components are services with application level RPCs, GRPCs on other HTTPS based calls. In this situation, most layer seven meshes that we all know and love allow for discoverability of these app level or layer seven service endpoints. Consistency of policy and consumption, most layer seven meshes do a great job of layer seven data flow connectivity, especially within their own domains. And most are on par when it comes to observability and declarative management. Now just as not everyone in the universe can speak Vogan, not every distributed component is a layer seven service endpoint. So let's explore a few other types in the next few slides. For starters, let's go a little lower down the networking stack. The monolithic, virtual or physical, router, switch, firewall, some network app is being split apart and distributed into cloud native network functions. The network service mesh, which is a CNCF project, allows for the discoverability, consistency of consumption, secure data flow connectivity, and deep observability of layer three services across a large distributed system. Shifting gears a bit, let's not ignore streaming media. For one, they're the future of traffic on the internet and the biggest consumer of bandwidth on the network. We at Cisco are just about starting work on a new media stream mesh, looking into UDP based streaming media sources. Using the same design patterns we have discussed so far, the media stream mesh allows for the discoverability, consistency of consumption, secure and scalable data flow connectivity, and deep observability of the performance of all streaming sources across a large distributed media system. Now let's look at something completely different. Monolithic data lakes are undergoing a similar architectural transition into thinner data sources. Therefore, there is the need of a data mesh to discover these data sources from any provider anywhere, provide consistent policy of access and consumption across these various data sources, be able to connect and route the information flow between these data sources, and finally be able to provide observability around access, policy compliance, and everything done declaratively. We at Cisco are proposing one such mesh, the public health data mesh, for the healthcare use case in the Linux Foundation for Public Health. So summarizing a bit, whenever we go from an architectural monolith to a composable large-scale distributed architecture, there is a critical need of a mesh to help us discover, consume, connect, and observe your interconnected components. Now as a community, we have put most of our efforts into the layer seven service mesh space. My ask of our community is to start exploring the bigger universe of meshes out there. Finally, in case you didn't know, Doug Adams fans have nominated May 25th to be the International Tower Day in his memory. I propose that we seriously consider May 25th to also be the International Mesh Day as we expand our horizons beyond the world of layer seven meshes into other meshes. Thank you. Please visit us at the Cisco booth to view demos around the world of meshes, API networking, API security, and full stack observability, and please let's keep the conversation going. See you on International Mesh Day.