 How are you? Yeah, we are live. It's been a minute since I've been on stream actually. I don't remember the last one. I don't say the same thing. Like, yeah, I don't think I've been on a stream for months. So it's good to be back. Yeah. You guys have been missing out on the OER open education week from that we've been having here on a Friday. I mean, you guys have been doing a great, you've been just keeping it locked down. So do you even need us at this point? I don't know. Who are you even still? I don't think so. I think we can just invite Ellen Levine to come and give us an OER preview for next week. And I think Meredith and I are actually back on this. We're reclaiming the Friday stream next week. We're going to talk about our OER session one more time. Exactly. So today, actually, I have this was a stream, a stream deferred as you will. This is a stream about reclaim edu. And the way we have imagined today's stream is that I'm going to kind of go through and give the presentation on reclaim edu. I'm going to try and present it here as clearly and as effectively as I can. And then at the end of that, we'll be discussing some of the details of that presentation. So pilot, Marin, how does that sound to you? Does that sound like something we can do together on the stream right now? That sounds good to me. Yeah. Just for quick context for anybody who has missed it or come in in the past couple months, I guess, reclaim edu is our newest offering. So we actually launched it back in January, but we've been doing it for a while before that. And the idea is that it's high performance, high availability, robust hosting for the sites that just cannot go down. Like reclaim edu.like.edu, university, homepages, type of things like that. Jim's going to give you the actual details, as he just said. So you know what you're getting into, basically. Well actually, pilot, look at this. Oh, sweet. High availability. Wordpress hosting for dot edu and beyond. So look, me and you were fused. Perfect sync. Yes. And look at this. This have to give credit out to Taylor Jaden for this great gift of the multiple wordpress instances in the cloud. So we have called this reclaim edu and you'll see a lot of Brian Mathers art throughout this presentation. All hail Brian Mathers. So I want to talk a little bit about what high availability wordpress hosting for edu means. And I am going to take you through that right now. So what is WordPress multi region? It's basically in, in essence, the hosting of two identical copies of an application across multiple servers across multiple geographic regions. So you can have a server, for example, for us in Oregon and a server in Virginia. And there are two wordpress instances that are actually syncing immediately across two very different geographical regions. And this ability to traffic dynamically route traffic across regions based on whether it's a healthy instance, whether one is slower than the other is really powerful. So for example, one server goes down and the other server gets all the traffic and you never know that region has gone down. And this is why we call it high availability for high profile sites, right? You don't want your dot edu going down for any reason. And so we've come up with a setup that allows you to keep both instances running and should there be an issue with one, the other will automatically fail over. And we have more failover beyond that, but I'll get into that. The other thing is you can get a significant performance boost because you're distributing traffic across two different servers. They can both run simultaneously. And in the event of an emergency, you have failover. So that's why you would want WordPress multi region. How does it work? Basically, we have our instances of WordPress that are hosted and reclaimed cloud across two different regions that are synced. And before it goes to the site or the user in between there, we run an enterprise grade DNS content delivery network and load balancing. For example, we use cloud flare, which is one of our alternatives, not the only one we can use, which will actually manage not only the distribution of the content across a wide variety of cash networks, but also a load balancer, which actually at the DNS level will allow us to balance loads across two different servers that are in reclaimed cloud. The final piece is DNS. DNS with hosting your .edu can be complex. You don't want to forklift your entire DNS over to reclaim cloud or to reclaim hosting or to, for example, cloud flare. So it allows you to do a subdomain, something like www.whateveryour.edu is, which solves that. And there's a lot of other benefits for cloud flare or cloud front or edge port we can talk about. But this is basically how it works. Reclaim cloud running across a CDN industrial grade DNS and load balancing provider and then comes to the site and the user. A couple of examples, we practice what we preach. We walk to walk and talk to talk. Reclaim hosting.com is in a multi region across two different regions running through at this point, a service called Edgeport, which is similar to cloud flare. We're experimenting with that and we're very happy. But we also have McAllister.edu and Trinity College.edu, which are running through cloud flare very effectively in their multi regions and their .edu. Okay, this is a brilliant diagram from Brian Mathers. And this kind of takes us through the EDU 24-7, which I love. But this diagram is fascinating to me because it tries to visually capture what I've just talked about. And let's look at this a bit. This is the two reclaimed cloud WordPress instances, right? They're instantaneously sinking and they're in two different regions, right? In between them and the final EDU site, you have a couple of things. You have DDoS protection, you have CDN caching or ADN, which I'll talk about in a bit. You have failover. So should this instance go down, everything will go to this instance. And you have a firewall, which we'll talk about when we talk a bit about security. So these two different WordPress instances are sinking and should one go down, it doesn't matter. That EDU will pull from the other. Now, we look at this whole thing called secondary failover and there's a lot we can say about this and will, but should, and this is apocalyptic, both servers go down across two different regions. Well, then we also can have a completely different provider that has a static version of your .EDU site, which means there's a tertiary failover. And that really does seem to get end of days time if that happens. Why would you do it? Well, to offload your dread. I mean, this visual is amazing. Page isn't working, right? You're doing this. It's 342 a.m. And what are you worrying about is my side up. Let us offload your dread to reclaim. More on that why though is really this is for high traffic WordPress sites. Top level EDUs, regional failover, one server goes off. The other one is on traffic immediately reroutes. It's a setup that allows for read, write, failover. So this is very important in the event the primary site goes down. It's just not like the secondary site is there, but you can't read or write to it. You can do everything you could do on the primary site on the secondary site. And once the primary site comes back up, you can resync them immediately without worrying about anything. In terms of data base or uploaded files. And given that traffic can be routed and cashed through Cloudflare or Cloudfront or Edgeport. Across multiple servers, traffic is always pushed to the most responsive server or the fastest server. And that means performance is going to be better. So those are some of the reasons why you would do this and some of the reasons why you won't have dread at night. So let's talk a little bit about our standalone WordPress at Reclaim. We have a WordPress multi-region setup which consists of two standalone instances of WordPress. And they can also be a WordPress multi-site. It's not limited to just WordPress. And they are synced across two geographical regions. The syncing of the files and database tables from the primary instance to the secondary instance happens instantaneously, as I've said. And you can see that's this piece of the visual. So as you see, Reclaim has the WordPress on the right, the WordPress on the left. There are two different regions. Think about them on the East Coast and the West Coast. And they are immediately syncing as we talked about. That's this piece. This is happening in Reclaim Cloud. And this is the actual WordPress instances you're syncing. Now we have some new features for WordPress that I'm pretty excited about. We have a new WordPress management interface. This is where you can get database information, SSH and FTP information really cleanly. You can find out PHP versions. And we can give you access to this. The other thing you get access to is self-service backups. So should you want to change something on the site, although a lot of that will happen by us because it's managed, you can back it up immediately or restore any issues that you run into. You'll also notice that we have access to SSL or custom domains in this new interface. And that's pretty, pretty elegant. It does have some limits though. So should you be one of those admins that wants a more advanced WordPress interface, we also have that through our traditional Reclaim Cloud interface. And you can get a look at that here. One of the things that highlighted is the web SSH where you can get SSH access without going through keys. But you also have a more sophisticated file management than you would in the first WordPress management I showed you. So there is a lot of access should you as an admin want it, although part of running your .edu is actually offloading a lot of this to Reclaim. But we do give you access and we do work with admins as need be. Now, how do we work with the distributed DNS? And this is a really important question when we're dealing with the Reclaim.edu. As I said earlier, a lot of the edus are the main site. Let's just say McAllister.edu. That actual main website is usually not running off McAllister.edu. It's usually running off a subdomain www.McAllister.edu. And one of the things we like about Cloudflare or Cloudfront or Edgeport is that we can take that subdomain away from wherever that school is managing most of their DNS and run it through something like Cloudflare, right? And this allows us, it's called a flatten C name. This allows us to run a subdomain setup through Cloudflare, which gives us access to a lot of things like backup SSL certificates so that your SSL never expires, right? Also, it gives us access to load balancing, whether it's in Cloudfront, whether it's in Edgeport or whether it's in Cloudflare. We can now run a load balancer through that instance and that allows us to access to two different regional servers on Reclaim Cloud. Very cool. And as you can see in the visual, this is where we get some of the things of the CDN, cache, failover, etc. And I'll show you that now. Other benefits for industrial DNS, such as Cloudflare or Cloudfront and Edgeport, as I talked about, you get DDoS protection, right? Prevent attacks from taking you offline. You get a web application firewall, which can block malicious traffic. You get privileged traffic lanes. So Cloudflare, for example, has something called Argo, which allows you to pay, but you can get a faster connection should you pay. It gives you less network latency. One of the big things, one of the more amazing things is caching and CDN. This creates a broad international network where your files are stored across that network. And Cloudflare is an international operation, or so is AWS or Edgeport, so that you can actually download or access that site much quicker depending on where you are in the world. And a final thing, which I find really interesting, and there is actually, I should have mentioned the always online with Internet Archive. This is through Cloudflare. And that's an interesting thing, although it's not always so fast to load and it is static files. But another instance that I'm just learned about and I find very fascinating is ADN. So you have CDN, which is a content delivery network, and then you have an ADN, which is an application delivery network. And an application delivery network actually caches the entire application. So should both servers go down, the application is cached within this global network and allows you to run it. You can't change anything, you can't access the database or load a new page or create a new page. But the actual site will never go down because it's stored within the application delivery network. And that's something offered through Edgeport. And it's pretty amazing. I've been experimenting that with my own sites and it works cleanly. So it takes CDNs to the next level. This is the additional insurance part. We talked about that static copy, right? So we will use a different service provider for this. We wouldn't use Reclaim Cloud. We would use something like DigitalOcean, for example. And we would run and regularly update every night a mirrored copy of your site. And it would take all those files and run it as a static site off of a completely different service provider. So should both servers in that dynamic load balance instance go down, this is what would fail over to the final tertiary failover site, which is the static site. And as you see it in the visual, this is the final secondary failover beyond the load balance sites. And this is, you know, kind of, again, everything went wrong. The zombies are crawling through New York City. Your site is still loading if there's electricity. Why Reclaim? I think there's a few reasons that this visual gets to. We know education. That's where we focus. That's our expertise. We know WordPress. It's also our expertise and we've been hosting WordPress and big WordPress hosting multi sites for years. And we're people. We're trusty humans behind this. It won't be a big multinational organization where you can't get access to a person. Actually, we're there. We're working through the migration. We're working through every element of getting your site up and running in this situation. So I think that's the difference is not only we get it, but those trusty humans are what make us special. And you can always be up with Reclaim.edu, which I think is a pretty exciting development for us as a company and running your campus in the cloud and knowing that it will always be up is a pretty exciting thing. Not only for you, but also for us. So thanks. That's Reclaim.edu for life. Yeah. Thank you, Jim. That was great. Hold on. Let me get rid of this. Yeah, there you go. I got you. Perfect. All gone. No, I also love that final image. Shout out to I think that was Taylor's idea. He was when we were talking to Brian Mathers about sort of the imagery that we were thinking about and imagining Taylor mentioned Castle in the Sky that 1980s Studio Ghibli movie of the campus in the clouds type thing. It's a great metaphor. I really like it. I also just like that movie. I think it's good. Yeah, I do. I think the visual art that Brian supplies for this is really great. There's another one I didn't use where it has like sunshine and rain, which is really awesome. That was good. Yeah. My favorite one is the one with the trusty humans on and, you know, given how much like, I don't know, we all submit requests to, you know, big faceless companies where you're kind of like six months later you're still in an endless loop of chatbot, you know, Nirvana or oblivion rather. And I think, you know, that that trusty human piece isn't so much of a given. Is that now nowadays, particularly like with AI coming in and kind of, you know, I definitely know that if something urgently goes wrong with a high level project or domain, I don't want to be talking to a chatbot. Yeah. I'm very clear on that. Yeah. And I think part of that whole, you know, AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, all of them, they do amazing work with what they have, but it expects that you have an entire team on your campus that knows and can run that. And they're your support. And that's not the case for a lot of campuses, right? And so that's one of the things I think where we fit a clean niche and that we are people and that, you know, sometimes, you know, a lot of our schools, that's what they appreciate most about Reclaim is they can get us on the phone almost immediately and work through that problem or via email. I guess I should not say on the phone. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things is actually Marin posted about this the other day is also Jim sort of just gave you guys the spiel, the presentation, but we also know like it's different for every single campus. And so we do want to be able to talk to you guys about what you need. So part of the idea is, you know, hearing what each individual school or campus or setup might need, what the situation is like. And, you know, Marin posted about this like a week or two ago, but on the blog. But, you know, we want people to talk to us and reach out and see what's up. Right, you're absolutely right by that. You know, and I think that's where the kind of tech expertise that we bring to the table and that kind of, you know, over a decade in this game, like where that kind of comes to the fore because I think, you know, translating technical requirements into what will make sense for faculty and students kind of on the ground. You know, that's kind of like a tricky piece. You know, and I think that's what, you know, our colleagues in our team like Amanda and Taylor and you yourself pilot with everybody so good at is to kind of sit down your folk and say, okay, you know, tell me about your academic project and what you want to achieve for your faculty for your students. You know, what is important about this campaign or the setup for you and then translate that into, okay, you know, here are the open source tools. Here is the whole portfolio of things. Here is why we recommend that. And I think the piece I'm really excited about, and Jim, you mentioned this as well, is the kind of, you know, the transparency that, you know, we are able to articulate to you things that you can really get to grips with. And I think the visuals really help because this is complex stuff, right. And this is very technical stuff. And not everybody has like, you know, a degree in, you know, computer science or information technology, or, you know, not everybody is basically like our wonderful colleagues on the infrastructure team, like an expert. And I think what's so exciting about Reclaim EDU is that you can really grasp what this is about without having to, you know, have a degree in the subject. So I think, yeah, curious to you, Jim, I think you brought across the key points in a really relatable way. 100%. And there's also that great diagram of Brian Mathers that I always think about that you talked about it. And you showed a couple of times that's the different parts of the system connecting together. Maren, it's also funny that you mentioned infrastructure because one of the things that we're working on as part of just getting Reclaim EDU all set up and ready is there's this, the idea of a formal systems diagram, which is the infrastructure part. And I looked at sort of that on the, on the to-do list for the project and I looked at Brian Mathers art and I went, I'm going to ask the infrastructure to maybe be the ones to take it past Brian's diagram. So one of the things to, I mean, it goes back to the idea of us being, you know, almost boutique in our ability to reach out and work with people for their specific means. That's why we have Cloudflare, Cloudfront and Edgeport is because we're not just saying, oh, you have to use Cloudflare or you have to use Cloudflare. Like, for example, certain things work a lot better in Cloudfront than they would in Cloudflare. Like if we're running, you know, resources in an S3 object storage and we need to have permissions around that. If we're also offloading that, then that's where Cloudfront would become really powerful. And then maybe you'd run a run some of that through AWS's DNS or maybe not. I mean, that depends Cloudflare is really good when you have that www dot. But for other schools, a subdomain might be a very different kind of obligation. For example, you might have a sub-subdomain with a CUNY school like Baruch dot CUNY dot edu. And then it's not just like something McAllister dot edu. It's a different level of DNS that possibly Cloudflare can't control or CUNY's not willing to put that stuff in Cloudflare. However it works, like those three different tools actually represent us trying to work with specific schools and actually solve specific issues. And I think that's kind of, you know, without getting too much into the detail, but like that's exciting for us. And that's also what we do pretty well is we find solutions for people who want to do this, but may have a very unique setup that won't fit into a box that you get when you go to just one of the providers rather than being able to pick and choose amongst them to solve DNS issues. DNS is crazy. DNS remains still one of the things that I worry about at night. I think about it's complicated. It's always DNS. It's always DNS, right? And so I think that's why it's interesting to be able to kind of separate ourselves a little bit from one product and say, no, what we're giving you is our expertise and we'll give you advice across several products and we'll work through to make sure that works out for you. And that's been a fun part of doing the Reclaim EDU. Originally I was just like, Cloudflare, Cloudflare, Cloudflare. But then people would come to me with a unique problem and I'd be like, well, Cloudflare is not going to solve that, but maybe AWS will, or maybe Edgeport will. And that's been fun. I was going to say, I remember the three weeks where you found out Edgeport and then it just blossomed. Well, Edgeport still fascinates me because like I said in the presentation, this application delivery network stuff is of next level from CDNs or content delivery network. So it's not just static content, it's actually the application running across a global network of computers. So should anything happen? And I turned the BAVA off. I turned both servers off for nine or 12 hours, I think. And the site ran fine across the global network of servers. So it's actually, Edgeport actually pushes into the idea of do you even need a static backup because you already have essentially a static application in a global network. And that stuff blew my mind, kind of like you were saying, Pilot, because I was like, that is like really... It's cool as hell. It is cool. And it's like, it's an admin's dream to have that. I love the fact that you use your blog as the example of that because obviously, you know, blogging is for life and you can't have that go down. I was going to bring us back. Like, I think this is really, really related to the conversation we had on here a couple of weeks ago with Anne Marie Scott. We were talking about open source technologies as infrastructure. And, you know, I think one of the things I really love about this, having these types of conversations and sharing that kind of insight, is that when, you know, when we talk to someone else and Anne Marie used this example of, you know, how lots of big box vendors repackage open source software and then sell it to you as a proprietary, you know, tool or product that they can then say, you know, it's very unique. And kind of there is a tiny nice little dashboard that shows you what you need to know. And I don't think you really get a sense of, you know, how do other people experiment with this? What goes wrong? How is it not a good fit? And that's what I love about this approach to kind of, you know, working with clients and having all that expertise in the tech space inform the kind of approach. Because I think it's amazing to be able to say to people, you know, this might be a good fit, but actually for what you want to do, this might be a better fit. And that's why I think it's like a really nice, it's not one size fits, or it's kind of, you know, much more nuanced than that. Yeah, we're actually talking about this a little bit in the chat. But the idea of making sure people know what's available to them and that they have options and also listening to people when they say like, no, this is the thing that you're describing is not going to work for me. What this is the problem that I have and this is why it doesn't work and how do I, what else do I have? What else is there? Is there anything else? And being able to say, you know, there might be, let's check on that is, I think, really important. And also, you know, it's just like a fun little puzzle. It's just fun to learn and to figure it out and to see what works. It's also interesting too, because, you know, at our schools that we usually work with, whether it's for Debate of One's Own or, you know, managed hosting, or in this case, WordPress hosting at a very kind of high level of, I'd say, pressure, because it can't go down. You know, we often have liaisons and admins and techs at the school who know more than we do about their instance and who need a certain amount of access and control to do what they need to do. They just want to make sure the site stays up. And I think, you know, sometimes when you offload everything, you lose a lot of control internally at your school to do anything to your site. And I think Reclaim has always tried to walk that balance between giving people a fair amount of control and independence with their site based on trust, knowing that where there should anything go wrong, but we're also making sure that your stuff stays up and we're monitoring at 24-7, and anything comes up where the first to know. So I do think that's that, you know, it's not an easy balance, but it's the balance we walk. And I think, I don't know, when Tim showed me the Reclaim Cloud ability to run these, you know, basically synced WordPresses, I was just like, that's so cool. Like just on an admin infrastructure level, I was like, how cool that we have the infrastructure now that can immediately sync a database and should anything go wrong in one, the other one stays up and no one knows it's off. And we've actually had several instances and unfortunately chances to experiment with this with our daddy to use. Like we've had database servers or hard nodes that were serving one of the two sites go down. It happens. Like it happens, but no one knew because unless we told them, which we did, because there was no downtime. It just was switched over. And I think I got in a call with a school and the school was like, you know, they were being promised by a vendor like, yeah, we don't have downtime. And then they got off the call and then three hours later, the site was down for three hours. And it's just like, how can you promise that knowing, you know, that's always a possibility. But I think what reclaimy to you is about is limiting that possibility to as many nines to quote Taylor as you can imagine. Things can always go wrong across all fronts. But when you have a setup like this across various regions with backup, whether it be the application delivery network or the tertiary, you know, separate vendor through digital ocean or something else, you really are kind of, you know, covering yourself with as much insurance as possible. And I love that. I just think that is super cool. And it puts reclaim, which is not a gigantic company in a very different situation to offer gigantic solutions for people in education. And that's, that's cool. It kind of helps us join that and be confident that we can do it well. Yeah. I think so too. That sounds awesome. And I also think I love the idea of that kind of, you know, independent piece as well. Like, I guess up to now, you know, we haven't been able to offer that. And, you know, people in our community who are looking to kind of post with an independent company like reclaim for that high level are going to look for certain things. And they are going to need the kinds of things that we can now offer. So I think that's exciting. Like, you know, sometimes you get to a certain scale of project or a certain scale of school and you're like, actually, we have to now go with, you know, whatever is not independent in terms of companies. And now there is a there is a new option. I'm really excited about that. Yeah. And, you know, you're, you're kind of flirting with, you know, something that we're talking about some more Brian Mathers art, but you saw in one of the screenshots that I took for this presentation. There was a elegant WordPress interface for admins, which is actually using reclaimed press, which is our dedicated WordPress hosting provider, which some of this runs on. And there's a great image. I don't have it offhand that Brian Mathers created, where it talks about passion project to, you know, empire. And one of the things with our cloud offerings, whether it's reclaimed cloud or reclaimed press is, you know, we can scale these instances, these containers, right, to whatever you need. Like you said, if you're a school that's starting a small project, but you know, you know, at a certain point it's going to have tens of thousands of visits, because, you know, that's when you're going to unleash it on your community. That wouldn't be an issue. It would just scale. And that's always what was so amazing about, you know, early entries into the cloud market like AWS, when you said what the server can scale. Like, it's not just 16 gigs like it can scale to 32 or 64 or whatever you need. I mean, that was hard to imagine. You know, it was it was kind of a complete shift in the way the market goes and probably that was 2010 2011. That's what made companies like Canvas and Instructure such a big deal in the LMS field. It wasn't that the LMS was particularly better. It was that the LMS was using a completely new infrastructure that didn't go down because it's scaled. It wasn't something you were hosting on your campus community. And that was radical. And I think it's been enough time that that technology now has kind of trickled down that you can provide it in very different ways. Even smaller companies can access it like ours. And I think with that comes the technology of a gigantic company with the touch of a small business, which is a very nice combination, I think. But I want to give a shout out to Meredith because next week, not next week, in a week's time, I think in 10 days' time, we'll be talking about Reclaim EDU at the OER conference. And if I haven't mentioned it before, next Friday, if you want to learn a bit more about what we're going to talk about. Jim, I think you're going to join us, aren't you? For that stream, for Meredith and I are going to talk about that sweet spot between community and small company and expertise. And we're going to talk about both Reclaim EDU and Reclaim Press. So big shout out to Meredith. Yeah. Yeah. Meredith's the best. Well, look, I did think we did a, you know, I'm always one to congratulate myself. I have no problem. I think we did an amazing job on this stream. I'm 100% agree. I agree completely. 6 out of 10. 6 out of 10. Taylor's not on this stream. I got to represent Taylor. Come on. And we're under, look, if we, if we're smart, we'll do it under 40 minutes. If we can get off in the next 38 seconds. We got, we're golden. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Thank you everybody. Bye-bye.