So let's put it all together and try to find the graphs of some functions. Before we do that, let's consider things a little bit further. Suppose f of x is a function of x. So remember that a function is a relationship between variables that has one output for any given input. So for any input value x, there's a unique output value f of x. Now if we look at the graph of y equals f of x, then any input value x gives a unique output value y. And what this means is that we can decide from the graph whether we have the graph of a function. So for example, we have a graph. Does the graph shown represent that of a function of x? And let's explain why or why not. So consider any point on the graph. How about this one? Now this particular point has a particular x value. And the thing to notice is that for the particular x value of this point, there appears to be one and only one y value, since there are no points directly above it or directly below it. So whatever determines the y values of the points appears to give a unique value of y for any x. So this is the graph of a function of x. How about a graph like this? Well again, let's consider any point on the graph. And here we see something different. For some points, there are no other points with the same x value. So for this point and this point, there are no points above it and no points below it. But for others, there are additional points with the same x value. These are directly above it or directly below it. And the important thing to recognize here is that for these points, the same x value gives more than one y value. So whatever determines y can't be a function. And this leads to an important result, sometimes called the vertical line test. The graph of a function of x can't cross over itself. In other words, we can't have a portion of the graph that's above another portion of the graph. And this leads to something called the vertical line test. And we won't tell you what that is because it's important to remember, don't memorize procedures, understand concepts. The important idea in this case is that graphs that do cross over themselves have multiple values of y for the same value of x. So let's consider this graph. We want to graph y equals f of x. Equals means replaceable, so we'll replace f of x with x plus 4 over x minus 3. And this is the graph of A. We don't know what this is a graph of. This isn't a familiar type of object. And so we should run and find out what we can. So we do know how to find the x and y intercepts, so let's find them. The y intercepts occur when x equals 0. Equals means replaceable, so we'll replace x with 0 and find y. And remember, the y intercept is a point, so we need to specify both coordinates. And if it's not written down, it didn't happen. The x intercepts occur when y is equal to 0. So again, equals means replaceable, and we'll replace y with 0. And now we have to do a little bit more work to solve this equation. Since we have this denominator x minus 3, we'll multiply both sides by the denominator, and then solve the resulting equation. Again, the x intercept is a point, so we have to specify both the x and y coordinates. The x intercept is minus 4, 0. Now, since this is a rational expression, there could also be forbidden values. Anything that makes the denominator 0. So let's run and find out what makes the denominator 0. And so we conclude the value x equals 3 is forbidden. Now, except for the forbidden values, we can use any other value for x, so the domain is all real numbers except for x equals 3. So let's start to sketch our graph. We'll plot the x and y intercepts. The forbidden value means that no point on the graph can have x equals 3. And we'll indicate this by drawing the line x equals 3, and, well, this were a real line, we'd run an electric current through it, but we'll just have to remember that the graph can't touch this line. Now, the x and y intercepts and the forbidden values are important points, but if we want to get a picture of what the graph really looks like, we have to consider what happens between those points. To find out, let's find points between the important points. It's useful to remember how we handled inequalities by picking test values. So here, to the left of this point, negative 4 is 0, we can let x equal minus 10,000. Remember, we want to either go big or go home because it's actually easier to deal with large numbers.  While we don't know the magnitude, we don't know whether this is large or small, we do know it will be positive. So again, the secret to graphing is plot first then label, so we have a point somewhere to the left that's positive. So we'll put it here. Between negative 4 is 0 and 0, negative 4 is 3, we can let x equal, how about negative 1? So we'll let x equal negative 1 and run and find out that y is 3 over negative 4, so negative 1, negative 3 fourths is a point on the graph. Between 0, negative 4 thirds and x equals 3, we can let x equal, well, how about 1? And so y will be 5 over negative 2, so 1, negative 5 halves is on the graph. Beyond x equals 3, we can let x equal 10 billion, and so y will be a large positive number divided by a large positive number, and again, while we don't know whether the result will be large or small, we do know it will be positive. So we'll graph a point somewhere off to the right that's above the x-axis. So now let's put everything together. Since the function is defined for all other x-values, there have to be points on the graph between the graph points, not crossing this line x equals 3. Since this is a function, we can't double back. And remember, we already found all the x and y intercepts, so since there are no other intercepts, we can't cross the axis anywhere we haven't already done so. So while there are many ways we could go from one side to the other, we'll sketch the simplest. Wait, that can't be right, we're crossing the x-axis again, so we've got to adjust this line, and this gives us a preliminary sketch of what our graph looks like. Now later on, we'll learn more about what the graphs of functions look like so our preliminary sketch will be refined into a better sketch later.


It actually switched names a bit so it was a bit confusing at first for people. I started by calling it SLBD for server load balancing daemon but didn't realize somebody else already used that name. So there was a little confusion. Then it changed names again and again until we reached the decision that HostedD was good and meant the HostedD daemon for load balancing. I worked on this between OpenBSD 4.0 and OpenBSD 4.1 and it was introduced in 4.1 stable and release and that's why when people were able to try it out. Reg Floater worked with me on this daemon and helped me implement layer 7 load balancing features which will be available in HostedD 4.2.  I'm going to try and introduce existing tools and concepts that I'm going to use throughout the talk. Then explain the design we want to reach with the HostedD. A little bit of the features, the tools that are provided give and we'll talk about example configurations of what people really want to do with HostedD right now and at last we'll talk about what's coming next in HostedD. So first, what is load balancing? I'm sure many of you already know that but just to give a small definition, the goal of load balancing is providing a way to spend a service across multiple machines. The typical situation is you have a web server that provides a dynamic service with PHP or Perl or whatever and this application hogs your system and you're not able to service user requests with only one web server so you're going to set up four or five web servers. Maybe you'll do the same with your databases and then you'll need something to spend a service and to have a single IP servicing all these requests. So basically it functions either as an application gateway or proxy which is the difference between layer 3, load balancing and layer 7 as we'll see later and usually you use that in conjunction with high availability which means providing a reliable service and having the option to fail over to a backup service if everything goes wrong. So HostedD didn't implement everything and relies on some of the features that were already present in OpenBSD and one of these is obviously PF which already had load balancing features. First PF provides fast access address tables that are stored in the kernel and a user-learn interface to modify those tables either through PF CTL or through a set of IO controls that you can use. PF also provides different load balancing methods to access these tables and as an example here you have the role that says let's redirect any incoming packets to this public IP on the HTTP port to these web servers that are stored in a table. Sorry. Another set of tools in OpenBSDR, so Carp and PF Sync that I use for high availability which help you share a public IP knowing which is pretty much like VRRP as some of you may know. So Carp handles the virtual addresses and PF Sync handles state synchronization across firewalls to provide a secure and transparent failover between firewalls. Some of the features we used in OpenBSDR the fact that Carp interfaces can be grouped together and that a Carp group once it is created can be manipulated from user-learn which is especially useful if you detect a software failure and you decide that the machine isn't able to provide a service anymore and then you failover to the backup posts forcibly. I'm just going to give an overview of what the real difference between layer 3 load balancing and layer 7 load balancing is since we're going to talk a lot about that later. Layer 3 happens at the packet level which means when a packet comes in on a gateway its IP is inspected and then the destination IP is rewritten so basically it's an extension of NAT and in PF it is just that it is just another form of writing NAT rules so it is pretty simple in essence and it is really fast. Layer 7 happens at the application level so it is just a proxy basically.  This allows packet processing and this is especially useful in environments where SSL is required because in order to provide a single certificate you need to terminate the SSL connection on the inbound. So with all these tools there still was a need for a unified load balancing solution in OpenBSD. When you load balance a service let's say you have four web servers you want to know which ones are currently running and not direct IP packets at them if they are not up so knowing when a service fails was something we needed. We needed a tool that is able to maintain address tables because when a service fails on a server I wanted to be able to remove it from a PF table and we needed a tool that can provide a solution to general failure which means I have no hosts anymore I want to switch over to a server that says sorry we are not available right now which is useful in many cases and I wanted to be able to create PF rules on the fly without relying on a set of scripts. So similar applications already exist commercial vendors of course provide such solutions F5 with big IP, Nordel with Altium and Cisco with many different types of services of course I wasn't really happy with that because I love BSD and OpenSource and there were also few Linux projects that provide load balancing solutions but which I found limited in many ways for instance Kipple-ID all of these rely on a similar thing as PF tables which is IPvS which provides more tools but in a different way. So the OpenSource offer wasn't really wide and I decided we needed another tool So these were the initial design goals of OCD First security of course because I was going to write a tool that will mess with the kernel and the firewall a tool that will check hosts at a very high rate and privilege separation was going to be needed to make sure each task runs in a CH route and doesn't do anything else that it's supposed to Efficiency since load balancer is here for efficiency and spanning your service across multiple servers and improving your request rate so efficiency was needed, simplicity because that's a concept we love in OpenBSD I wanted to provide the same kind of configuration file syntax that is found in other demons in OpenBSD and a consistent syntax too because even though in the design Layer 3 and Layer 7 are really different things from the administrator's point of view it is basically the same so I wanted a consistent syntax and last, something which I found really missing in other tools is an administrator friendly tool which would let you check what's going on and take action and we'll see later what we can do with the tools provided The actual design of Host8D is based around four types of processes There is a parent process which is used to start the demon as a whole This process handles configuration loading and reloading it doesn't do much because it runs as a route and it is thus the most important part of the security wise it's the most important attack vector so it handles only configuration file loading and reloading it handles external script execution as we'll see later what this is used for and corp demotion requests when some other part of the application thinks a corp interface should fail over the parent process handles it The other type of process is HCE which is only one process actually which is the host check engine which is a fast model process scheduler for host checks it handles a lot of different types of checks to see if a host is up we'll see exactly what type later it is fully asynchronous and it is able to schedule checks and notify another process of straight transitions There is also a PF engine which is only here to listen to incoming requests from the host check engine and take action as far as PF is concerned that is modifying PF tables creating PF rules, RDR rules, mainly it is... this is a little mishap here we have a fourth type of process which is the only one that is forked more than once and which is a really engine used for layer 7 load balancing it creates listening sockets for all services it loads SSL certificates whenever needed and it filter protocols before relaying connections and we'll see how that happens a little bit later I'm just going to go into a little bit more detail about how things happened I didn't invent anything when doing that since I took a lot of code from the existing daemons in OpenBSD, especially SPFD actually which was my main basis I took safe buffer routines found in BGPD which are also found in SPFD actually and I used the IMSH protocol that is becoming very common in OpenBSD daemons right now this protocol is just a method of communicating between different search-rooted processes all my four processes run a specific task but sometimes they need to communicate with another one and that's when the IMSH protocol comes into play so whenever HCE needs a PF role to be changed it sends a message to PFE, the PF engine and it then says with a specific type of message and a content and action will be taken by the PF engine since we were going to do a lot of SSL type stuff in Host8D, specifically checking hosts, datum, SSL services we needed a set of asynchronous SSL functions which were created to be able to check many SSL servers at once and last I used like OSPFD actually LibEvent, which was developed by Nier's provost to facilitate asynchronous socket programming LibEvent is useful in the way that it hinders the actual type of asynchronous socket routines that are used in our case it is KQ like in FreeBSD but it can also use pull or select so it was a pretty easy way to get started before we talk about the actual configuration of the daemon I'm just going to go through the different types of elements that were created for Host8D our basic element is a host which means a service provider a host is something running a service on a certain port a table will be mapped to a PF table and means a group of hosts providing a common service on a common port and then we have the concept used for layer 3 load balancing and layer 7 load balancing a service means a virtual service at layer 3 and it defines an IP to listen on and a table to use as we'll see later a relay is a layer 7 load balancing declaration and it does just the same only that the table use will be used at layer 7 and a protocol is a helper for relays to manipulate connection as they go through the layer 7 load balancer is this clear for everyone? so the typical layer 3 setup when you're running a dynamic web service is having one internet reachable host which is going to be the load balancer listening on a public IP and usually on a different network either through VLANs or different network interfaces having other web servers listening on the same broadcast domain as the load balancer and so the incoming connection will go through the load balancer across a private broadcast domain and go through the load balancer again to reach back the internet so this is what it looks like as far as configuration goes there's a simple statement to add to PF to let host ID manipulate it and then a simple configuration file hostID.conf as other demos openVSD we can have macros here we only need two concepts we saw earlier the table which we call web hosts we define the ports it listens on a check method and two hosts the check method just says for each of these hosts connect through HTTP and check that when we request slash the code is 200 we'll see the other methods that are available later and then we define a service FreeW which listens on this address and redirects requests coming in for port HTTP to this table so it can specify the interface this also runs on so once this is done and hostID is started an RDR rule will be created and a PF table will be created containing these two hosts provided their service is reachable and this is what it looks like from the administrator's point of view HostID CTL allows us to show what is going on inside and we see our free concepts here our two hosts that are marked as up since the two hosts are up the table is active and since the table is active the service is active as well so the rule is in PF and the table is populated with the two addresses before we go on this is what we can do HostID CTL we can do forcible hosts disabling maybe because we want to take a web server out of a pool to bring Apache up to this or to change something in the application and we don't want requests going to that host at this moment maybe we want to do this on a full table a full set of hosts so we can take a whole pool of hosts down with table disabled and re-enable it later with enable and of course this can also happen at the service level so this is the three types of command we can use reload reloads the configuration file re-reads the configuration file and starts up the demo again right now reload only works for layer three configurations a layer seven configuration cannot be reloaded at that time because it won't have to reload SSL certificates and right now this cannot be achieved of course we can, as we just saw we can display the status of just about everything either by specifying what kind of elements we want to show or by asking for a summary display and the last feature of Hustler CTL is the monitor mode which dumps incoming events and especially HCE the host check engine events this mode either by calling host state CTL or by directly asking for the AF UNIX sockets it runs on can allow different types of programs that might not need a lot balancing features but that want to know the status of a set of hosts they can connect through the monitor mode and use that data typically I have run several little monitoring tools that rely on this and we can talk about it later and this are the table options we can use in host state D especially the checking methods most of the time people run HTTP or HTTPS services through load balancers so there are two types of checks that are available first a HTTP code status check which is just going to ask for a just going to do a head request on the URL and see what the status code is but sometimes that's not enough because in many places you cannot rely on the status code and you want to see what a page actually outputs especially in places where you're afraid of defacement so what you can do is take a show-on digest of a page and rely on it to not change and you can ask for that and we can see later that it's really simple to implement ICMP checks can be useful if you're not able to know what data to ask for and if you just want a simple check for other types of protocols we implemented a send-expect feature that just allows you to send a string of data and expect something back on a socket for instance let's say you're running a SMTP service and you want to load balance it what you're going to do is send nothing because it is possible and expect an SMTP banner with a hostname and if you get that you can it's more likely that the service is running and the host will be in a table for more complicated scenario we didn't want to put a lot of stuff into host ID for all types of protocol and we can rely on external scripts to be executed and given the output of the script or the return code of the script we will take a host down or up this is useful if you want to have SMTP requests for instance decide whether an host is up or down and that's another set of simple tests simple TCP connections if I can connect to a specific port for instance if I want to check my SQL 4306 port I can use TCP which is also available for SSL ports other options that are available are specifying a real port specifying a timeout for a table because some pools can be allowed to response slower than other pools and the ability to start a table disabled and this is a simple use case of a modified configuration from what I showed earlier where we want to take action if we have no hosts in our pool anymore so we're just going to set up a table service server with a simple check running on the load balancer itself we are going to set up a small HTTP server on the load balancer either with Apache or another high speed web server and in the service definition we'll just have to add a backup table which will be used only if this table is empty and in that case that is what host state CTL shows it shows here our two hosts being down our table being thus empty since it's empty this table which is active is used and the service line shows it at the end so this is useful for displaying a story page but it's also useful as a celebrity when you're working on your bringing your PHP application up to date you want to take your pool down bring it up to date and bring the service back up and you can do that with host state CTL which is how we're going to do it by simply saying bring this table down by its name and then we'll see that the table has simply disappeared and its marked disabled and our service is still active using the backup table so this is the administrator friendly part of host state D and these are the layer 7 features Generic TCP relaying if we want to relay a service we don't know about yet in host state D of course HTTP and HTTPS relaying which means that it's possible to forward from HTTPS to HTTP real hosts which is useful when you want to have a fast load balancer and you have an expensive PHP application resource wise you spend it across 405 servers that are running HTTP plain HTTP and you handle the SSL termination on the load balancer side and right now well you can also do HTTPS from end to end which is required in banking environments and such and then comes the DNS relaying which is really new which won't even be available in 4.2 OpenVSY 4.2 because it came after which provides which spans across multiple DNS servers and inserts randomization in the DNS IDs to protect some DNS servers that aren't available as far as IDs go of course we cannot achieve Generic UDP relaying for other protocols and this one happens it's a stateless protocol and we wouldn't know which hosts well which session a packet is for So you mean this could be used I'm talking about HTTPS on the load balancer and sort of clear text web servers behind it's been tested with some kind of some kind of crypto accelerators so we can have a front end that perhaps like the VSE7 that are very weak in CPU but can do crypto very fast then you have sort of heavy machines behind but that doesn't do crypto Yeah, well that's what it's used for actually by some commercial products right now and I actually use that specific configuration at work where we stack a crypto accelerator in the load balancer and only do HTTPS on this machine and then have HTTPS hosts doing clear tests on the back end and yeah the high event cards work good for that for medium sized applications and certainly bring the cost down because otherwise you have to go with really high-end servers to do that So let's look at a small HTTPS relay config I left out the service parts so it's a layer 7 only configuration and we still have our tables with our two web hosts here we have the relay which looks a lot like the service definition only that here we specify a protocol and say here I'm going to relay and while I'm relaying I will open two editors that I can use in my logs to know who otherwise in Apache logs I'm not able to know who the connections come from I will also shut down things like keep alive connections to ensure my traffic is well load balanced because if if requests coming or come back with keep alive specified of course I will stick to one host and this is not the behavior I want in that case I assume you want to listen to port HTTPS and relay the listen like a relay you're right that's what I wanted to do exactly, yeah I messed up because of course the table here is composed of HTTP hosts and yes here I should be listening on 443 we have three relaying methods available right now I think the most important one is the table forwarding because it is the most consistent with the layer free configuration I just I can even use the same table actually it is also possible to use fixed forwarding so a one-on-one mapping which is a pure reverse proxy configuration and use the address specified in the service too that is also possible I'm going to try and make it fast to fill in the schedule as far as actions that can be taken while HTTP traffic goes through layer 7 load balancer I can I can work on a connection direction and take action on a specific set of things change headers I can open headers I can remove a header filter connections whether a header is present or not and I can also feed a header's value into a hash that will be used to select a host in a table when I want fixed host addressing I mean every given I'm sorry I'm going to make a clear sentence I can use headers to make sure every type specific type of HTTP traffic goes to a specific host and this is useful in one for instance you don't want a type of request to go to one host and another type of request to go to a different host I can also work on get values in the URL and look for key and value pairs in there so this is what we generally want to do with the HTTP there are some things missing right now that will be added later and we'll talk about that afterwards this is the variables you can manipulate it's pretty simple and the remote address and remote port is useful to add to a header for Apache logs I'm going to go quickly through that we have other protocol options we can specify the types of SSL ciphers we'll use the session cache the types of SSL we want to do same goes with TCP and setting options at the IP level the size of a socket buffer and this TCP backlog I'm just going to talk quickly about some things people usually want to do with load balancers like load balancing across different broadcast domains because sometimes you have a load balancer in a location and you want to move to another location and that is HostedD can cope with that by tagging traffic as it comes in on an interface and you will just have to net the traffic that is tagged by HostedD once it comes out by default HostedD configuration files already includes the tag for service definitions HostedD can also be combined with Carb because usually you want load balancing but you also want high availability for the load balancer itself the only thing that you have to do is run HostedD on all the hosts that are load balancers and that share a single Carb address which means you'll have to not use addressless Carbs which means you have a Carb address and you also need an address in the network on the underlying interface Carb uses well, I'll talk about development later and we'll just see what the future holds of course layer 7 reloading because it is a big showstopper now adding more layer 7 protocols and more importantly conditional tables conditional tables means if I see a cookie, if I see a session cookie if I see a specific type of header maybe I want to use a different kind of table all together to for instance say if I request a URL of slash static I want to go to my static pool otherwise everything that ends in .php goes to my php pool and this will be possible hopefully pretty soon and to stay consistent between layer 3 and layer 7 there are other things that I hope will soon end up being available and the more important one is weighted hosts because sometimes you have different kinds of machines in a pool and one machine cannot service as many requests as other ones so you want to weight it down so it won't be you won't get as many incoming requests as the other ones and this is also needed to implement list connections which if you want to to pull and weight down hosts dynamically based on the number of connections they get you need this weighting feature the future is these are the more complicated things we're thinking about GSLB means global global server load balancing I'm not sure it's a I think it's a commercial vendor on the world right now but basically it means when you have load balancers in different locations in different physical locations you might want to say I'm going to take that site down definitely because I don't have any service to provide anymore so you can do that through GNS and that would mean having a GNS server that accepts dynamic updates and sending requests to it when a service is completely down and for instance let's say you have two locations so you put in your GNS configuration you have a GNS load balancing address with the two IPs of your two locations and when one of the sites comes down a request to the GNS server to remove one of the addresses from the GNS configuration and this can also be done with BGPD and it's actually going to be simpler to do I guess with OpenBSD since we already have a in-house BGPD implementation and this would mean if I cannot service a request anymore I will stop announcing my addresses through BGPD and traffic won't come to my data center anymore one of the other features we're thinking about but it's actually I'm not sure it will ever end up in other state the world see about that if we can find a clean way to do it it's direct server return this feature is a little tricky it's a feature that allows you to load balance incoming requests but requests coming out of the real service go through don't go through the load balancer so what happens is you load balance at the ARP level and not the packet level and it's a little tricky and it's a little it's a clear violation of OZ layers so I'm not sure we'll do it and finally one of the things we want to see ending up in Hosted in OpenBSD as a whole is TCP splicing which means for the layer 7 load balancer once you finish treating headers and once you have decided what hosts a session goes to you just bind two sockets together and you don't go through userland again to read from a socket and write to another one you just let it come in and go out through the kernel so that's about it for us AD I hope I didn't push the schedule too much thank you and I hope you can visit OpenBSD.org again if you have any questions feel free to ask me there's nothing specific to carp in Hosted here right now if you're at layer 3 it's going to be transparent if you're at layer 7 it's not going to be obviously because since you're terminating connections even for standard HTTP you're going to have to to break connections when carp fails over because that we won't be able to recover right now I guess that's about it you're welcome thanks a lot


bit later today i just like could not wake up i'm on my period and it was so bad yesterday and whenever my period is bad i just like need my sleep and i cannot wake up like my body is just so low energy that i just need to give it its rest and that's like all the part of like listening to my body and like resting when i need to pushing myself when i need to but this morning i just needed to sleep in an extra hour and just let my body sleep but anyways i'm still gonna go to the gym i'm just probably gonna go a little bit like lighter i'm not gonna push my body too hard but i do want to get my body moving since i'm just off of the weekend and i already had a few rest days i want to at least like welcome the treadmill see if i feel like doing more today and i also need to go grocery shopping anyways so i'm getting out of the house regardless so i may as well pop in the gym and if i do full workout i do full workout and if i don't i don't i'm not gonna like put any expectations there i'm just gonna see how i feel our cycle is so important and how we treat ourselves around our cycle is so important being more in tune with your cycle is also really good and important and could probably really help you even though i have an iud for like endometriosis purposes i still get a period it's still bad and my period is just a beast you guys like it's really bad it's really really bad even with the iud i wasn't even supposed to get a period anymore and i still do i still feel pain and it's just like something that i've struggled with for years of my life it's something that i've learned to accept about myself this is just what i have to struggle with and i'm gonna do the most that i can to help my body during this time so anyways that is the tea of the morning i'm gonna get into my workout set now it's definitely gonna do an all black workout set because i'm on my period she's like a literal volcano down there you guys see am i but like it's so bad anyways okay i'm gonna get ready and then we're gonna go to the gym also you guys how freaking cute are my pajamas like are you kidding me these are the other set that my sister madison bought me from walmart from walmart are you kidding me they're so soft and comfortable and i love the little floral pattern going on and they're so comfy these are such a sleigh i am so happy i went to the gym it's like the best you fork feeling once you finish your workout and you're like yep i literally did that i went there i worked out i moved my body and then now for the rest of the day i'm a happy camper also it's feeling like summer right now it was literally i'm not even kidding you just snowing like a day or two ago i'm pretty sure was snowing yesterday as well and today it's like i feel the heat it's sunny it's feeling like summer and it's kind of hot like i when i was walking out of the gym i didn't even need my jacket because it's warm but anyways when i could put the sunglasses on that's when you know it's a good day just at the grocery store i'm gonna go in and i just need to get a few things for dinner i'm gonna stop at this grocery store and then a different one because i like to get my meat from a specific grocery store i love meridian meats they're like grass fed local and all of that versus like if you just get a generic meat from the store usually they have like antibiotics in them and they're not local so i really like making sure that when i have like my meat and when i'm eating meat it's like very clean and local and i just really like to prioritize that so i'm just gonna get like the bulk of my groceries here and then go to the meat shop but i'm thinking this week for dinner to make taco salad because that was so freaking good last week when i made it it was just like hit the spot and it was so easy i love a good hearty easy dinner. Taco bowls are so good for that so i'm gonna get stuff for taco bowls and then i think for the rest of the dinners this week i'm just gonna do like a meat and a fish and then salad and rice just to make it easy and i don't have to think too hard on making recipes that is the vibe i already pre-wrote my grocery list in the gym i always forget to do this when i go to the gym but today i was like no i'm going to the gym and i'm gonna figure out what we're having for dinner because like well i'm in between my sets i like need to keep myself busy so i'm like i'm gonna think about what i'm gonna make for dinner and write out my grocery list so i got my grocery list here i'm gonna go and quickly don't have to get much today so it's nice i'm hoping to be in and out of there in 20 minutes so let's see if we could do it i'm gonna set a timer because i have to get home make my smoothie shower and then get ready to go back out because i have a nail appointment with madison today so that is the vibe and the plan for today and right now i also want to make my march goals today because it's already march 5th i haven't set like new goals recently and i feel like i've been really called to do that recently so i really want to do that tonight or like sometime this week so anyways let's go quick overview grocery haul so i just got some bananas some mushrooms for this week's dinner cucumbers and i really wanted to try these salad kits they're organic just to spice things up um some mushrooms more mushrooms actually didn't even realize i got two then i just got some pork chops some chicken wings and then some ground beef for this week's dinners got some strawberries just because i love having a fruit and i really am excited to try these chips they're made with olive oil and the ingredients are pretty impressive so i'm excited to try these they're made with brown rice flour and then i already showed you guys these amazing burritos from amy's i just need a restock to put in my freezer got some coconut sugar got some zivia and then just got some nacho chips and then i also got this organic chocolate cereal this is like my guilty pleasure it's gluten-free and it's just like so good for a quick little bowl of cereal for dessert so love that little grocery haul i'm gonna put this all away i was totally rushing out of the door but these are the last glance at these nails because madison and i are just about to go in to get them done they buy to the cutie valentine's day heart nails and i'm gonna get french chips so i'm really excited but these nails coming to an end is kind of sad because i really really liked them but anyways i'll show you guys when i'm done just got our nails done look at how cute they're like the same but different i will always go back to french tip because it's just so cute but anyways um i'm gonna head or we're gonna head to the mall now because we need a birthday dress we're celebrating our birthdays next week mine's on the 17th madison's is on the 7th so hers is literally in a couple days but we're celebrating like we're going out together for them and we have been in a bit of a panic because we looked at one mall couldn't find anything looked online i couldn't find anything like i just don't know yeah what the heck to get so we need to scour this mall right now and if we don't find anything i don't know what i'm gonna do we'll see what we find we usually never do anything except for my 19th birthday i saw that was the last time you did something to wait do you i don't remember your attitude but anyway so gonna go to the mall let you guys know what we find hopefully we could find something stressing me out because ordering stuff from online you never know how long that could take like we need to express ship if we're gonna do that at this point girl you're saying it like it's like in three days we have 10 days yeah but if we're ordering from like somewhere like princess poli that takes like two a good two weeks to come in so you need to express ship that pray for us pray that we find something let's go and kind of ready ish for the day you guys yesterday and today i have been like i said i think i told you guys on my period and it has affected me so much like my mood is just not it and like i have just been getting frustrated and stressed and worried and just like anxiety for no reason that's what happens when i'm on my period like i just get these hormones that literally make me feel like shit it's just so horrible and i know it's just purely my period because this happens every single time sometimes it's better sometimes it's a bit worse but right now like my stomach hurts i had to kind of force myself to go to my workout this morning because i knew it would make me feel better if i went like for the long term you know and i just like was not feeling it this morning i just really didn't want to go and i could have stayed home but i also was like you know what let's go let's bring some good vibes because i do love my power core class ended up going and it actually made me in a way better mood and so i'm really really glad that i went to that this morning but anyways y'all i have been going through it i don't even know what to describe it it's like i just feel like pure shit that's basically what it is and i just don't feel like doing anything this littlest thing that happens i just get so aggravated and i just want to go laying bed and curl up and just sleep all day but anyways i don't mean to come on here be a debbie downer i just wanted to be real with you guys because like i struggled like i said with my period it just sucks sometimes i get really just suck anyways i have quite a bit to do today i have a lot of editing to do i was going to upload a video today and i wanted to do twice a week this week start like the new schedule but with a sponsorship things like didn't end up working out so i actually have to save the video i was gonna post today and post it on sunday and then going forward from there then i'll do like my new schedule so that was like very disappointing but it's okay everything happens for a reason when i have a mindset like this when it's around this time of the month and i'm just feeling so shit about everything i just let myself feel that i'm like it's gonna pass it's fine also everything happens for a reason it's chill i'm gonna feel better soon and i know like as soon as my period ends i'm like wait it's lifted i feel amazing again like it's just so annoying anyway so yeah i have to finish editing a video i need to film something submit it get that video done and then i have to also edit my swarm form content to put up and i need to figure out what to get madison for her birthdays it's her birthday tomorrow and i'm gonna be spending the whole day with her and i don't know if i feel like going out today to be honest to get her a gift i just like i'm not feeling it but i don't really know what to get her anyway she doesn't have anything that she specifically wants i know she wants us to be surprised so i'm thinking of potentially ordering something online or maybe i'll go into the mall today we'll see i know she doesn't care if i give her her gift like next week like it's the same thing to her like i know she won't really care but anyway so i need to figure that out because i have no idea what to get her anyways that's the vibes for today i thought that i would get myself ready because i need to film today and obviously i want to look presentable this top is from garage i actually bought it recently how freaking cute is it i'm actually obsessed i'll link her down below it comes in pink and black it's just so so cute but yeah so i definitely feel better than i got like myself ready today i think right now i'm gonna make a matcha because i don't think coffee is going to sit in my stomach okay like i think i'll die if i have coffee right now so trying to avoid that i'm gonna have a matcha then get to work get my to-do list done for the day i'm just like feeling so overwhelmed right now because like helmet very makes me feel but i broke down what i needed to do today i just gotta get it done i also figured out what i'm gonna do for my birthday dress so that's like a weight off my shoulders ordered that anyways i just wanted to be real with you guys because like us women we go through it our bodies go through so much on a month to month basis like we have a whole cycle like that is actually insane and i feel like it's not like talked about enough especially with women who struggle with it that is like crazy to me that we go through this every single month i just feel like it's such a normalized thing if you can relate now that you're not alone so anyways okay let's make a matcha and get our stuff done for today even though i literally don't feel like doing anything cheers to this matcha making me feel better matcha literally never disappoints cheers let's go do some work hey guys so i just got a bunch of work done which just feels like a weight lifted off my shoulders like a lot of the times that i'm stressing about stuff that i need to do i just need to do it i just need to sit down and do it and then the stress will be gone thinking of it is so daunting sometime but once you actually do it it's not as daunting as it was in your head and it's funny how that works i realized like what really has been helping me lately it's not only making it to do this but time blocking like i time blocked today and yesterday and what i basically did was i just wrote down like roughly in my notebook i also have just like this notebook sitting on my desk for whenever i want to write something like it's so handy it's just like a scrap notebook that i write anything on so i basically was like okay from 11 to 12 i'm gonna do this from 12 30 to 1 i'm gonna do this you'd be surprised what time blocking can do when you work a job or when you have to do things that doesn't really require specific timing it doesn't have like an end date like you don't need a clock in it's really really helpful to give yourself that schedule if you're somebody that can get off track and sidetracked like me so making that kind of time block schedule literally i got so much done because i was like so focused and also it prevented me from going on my phone because i had like little goals to finish something within the hour so i'm like nope i gotta work i gotta get it done and then obviously like scheduling little breaks in between but like oh my gosh if you guys struggle with time management time block it literally helps so much even if it's like the stupidest thing like i had to pull dry my hair i put that in the time block and i'm like from this time to this time blow dry hair this time to this time do this and it's like so helpful because then you don't get sidetracked and you know exactly what you need to do and then you plan your day so that you get everything done within the timing anyways i thought that i would share because it's actually really really really helps me and it's like literally a game changer so but i actually had some of a Celsius because i had no energy i had a matcha but matcha is really low caffeine and when i'm on my period i am like extra low energy like i can't do anything so the days when i need to get work done if i'm on my period i can't have coffee so um but yeah anyways i got the majority of things that i need to get done done right now i just need to film a little tiktok hall for garage i need to make a thumbnail a couple other things before i'm done for the day and the sun is coming out which is really really beautiful at night so i'm gonna continue working and i'll talk to you guys later you guys i'm so excited because i finally got a new water filter if you guys didn't already know drinking filtered water is actually so important and can really have so many health benefits so this is the water drop mega electric water filter and it has an ultra large capacity of up to 27 cups so it can be used in a household with multiple people no problem and as you can see it's also super easy to set up this water filter reduces 30 plus substances in your water including things like chlorine and lead definitely things we want to keep out of our bodies the filter itself lasts for 200 gallons which will give you about three months which is a super long time for a filter it also has a 30 day battery life on a single charge so you don't need to worry about constantly having to plug it in it's super super portable you can bring it from room to room you could bring it literally camping or even stored in the fridge and you won't have a problem its water tank is also bpa free so it's super safe and it's also super easy to use with its one key control and within a second the water starts dispensing and you guys the water tastes so good and purified but yeah i will have the link to this water drop filter in my description and it's actually so much more affordable than you would think thank you so much to water drop for sponsoring today's video but seriously you guys should be drinking filtered water because it makes such a big difference just chilling watching vander pump rules if you guys haven't watched it i know it's like all the hype right now but like it's actually pretty entertaining it's like such like a stupid show and like there's so much drama i question if these people are real because it's actually that crazy the stuff that goes on in the show is just i didn't know there were human beings like that so it's actually crazy but it is very entertaining so i do watch it i just finish mostly everything that i need to finish for today so that's just like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders i didn't figure out a birthday gift for madison yet but i think i'm just going to give her a late birthday gift which i know she won't mind so i definitely want to put thought into it so i'm not going to like just buy something to buy it like i want to actually you know find something good to get her so i'm not going to stress about it one of the things that i was like thinking recently and talking to with a friend is it's so important to just like surrender to god surrounded to the universe surrender to just like the flow of your life and i feel most aligned in my life when i just completely surrender myself and by that i mean like obviously take action on what you want but at the same time don't put so much pressure on everything don't micromanage everything don't worry don't stress about like the little stupid things that don't need to be stressed about and just completely have the knowing and just surrender yourself to the unknown to god to the universe and know that everything is going to be taken care of i feel like that's so important and that's when i feel most aligned is when i don't care about anything i tend to micromanage my life a lot and i tend to worry about the stupidest things that really don't need to be worried about and i feel like a lot of people can relate like for example money is just like a huge thing that people stress about but at the end of the day like money is not even real money is something that we created and money does not come with us when we die like it has no relevance to our soul so many things can be thrown at us in life and things may not go our way but at the end of the day like surrendering yourself is just so important because i feel like that's when you really just receive all your manifestations in the book called asking it is given that's what they say in the book you just have to surrender and open yourself up to all possibilities and just trust and that is when you get the abundance and everything you retract is going to come to you because you are aligning yourself with the most positive best frequency and basically you're just kind of in a state of meditation at that point so things can easily flow into your life and when we worry and we stress we block a lot of things out that we don't even realize if you're manifesting something right now you're worried about it and you keep thinking about it and you're stressing about it the manifestation is not going to come into your life because you have a block towards it and you're resisting it but when you completely surrender yourself you are opening yourself up to that manifestation and it will flow into your life that's something that i've been trying to work on surrendering to the present moment surrendering to god and just leaving it up to the universe and that's it it's just the best way to live because obviously still gotta take action like i said but like there's no need to worry everything works out in the end guys think about any hard time that you've been through and look at you now you went through it you came out better and you're on the other side like everything always ends up working out no matter what so stressing about it does not change anything if anything is just going to delay you and make things worse so anyways my mind has just been so crazy these past couple days the hormones like i've been saying so crazy but so i thought i would share my thoughts that is truly how you level up your state of consciousness surrendering is the word for the month i'm gonna continue watching bander palm rules just like chill probably for another hour and then i'm gonna go up at like seven and get ready for bed a little bit early tonight because i love my time in bed but i'm excited because tomorrow we are going out for my sister's birthday we're gonna take her to breakfast and i'm gonna spend the day with her so i'm really excited so i want to get a good night's rest tonight i will talk to you guys later so i'm just kind of wrapping up things for the night because i came on my computer this computer in this office has been a game changer for me i am in this room all the time now and i never really used to use this room before but i love this room so much now and i just come in here for fun to work it's amazing it's the best thing i've done but anyways i am so random but if you guys are looking for new pens get these sharpie ones um i'll have them linked down below got them off amazon they're the sharpie felt tip and they are such good pens like you know when pens you write and then sometimes it's like blotchy like these are not spotchy these are my journaling pens like i use these pens for everything they're my favorite and they don't transfer through the paper they're amazing anyways so random but i'll have them links i got this journal at the dollar store literally for like four dollars now that i think about it the dollar store should not be four dollars anyways but it has like a little magnet clasp here and this has been my 2024 journal i have been really actually keeping up in with writing in it and i want to continue to do more and more and more but i really just want this to document like my year and be the place where i just write my goals in my rants and then like at the end of the year i can have this kind of diary for 2024 that's my vision with this journal and i've been keeping it on my desk and i get really inspired to write in it especially at night time i just feel like that's when like everything comes to me so yeah i keep it on my desk and sometimes i'll like bring it to my bed to write but i really just want to make sure that i make a point of writing in it when something happens when i just want to round so that i can have this little time capsule because i feel like my videos are great it's a time capsule obviously but this is like inside my head type of time capsule you know what i mean thoughts and feelings personal stuff i just plan on making this like a manifestation slash 2024 journal just like this year wrapped into one book is gonna be this i was thinking about potentially wanting to make it like all cute and like scrapbooking like but i feel like i i'm gonna put off doing that rather than just like being able to write in it freely whenever i want but i might do a couple things like loose and photos and later whatever but i just want to make sure that i'm not putting too much pressure on it to make it look perfect i'm just gonna do whatever i'm feeling in the moment but i can't wait i'm putting like a pin board behind my computer here so i can really make a big vision board for myself i actually have it right here Joel just needs to help me hang it anyways yeah i've been in my journaling era i just wanted to say and i am usually like not really want to journal i feel like i do the five minute journal but like other than that it's not something that i do very frequently but i've made a point of starting this this year and it's been great so i would definitely recommend getting a journal because then you can really look back into your year like time flies you guys time literally flies and my memory is so bad like when i want to think back to what i was thinking just a month ago i don't remember and it's funny how you can forget multiple things that you've been through multiple things that you've thought you can like easily forget it if you don't document it and write it down so i just feel like having this is going to be so freaking cool to look back on and i've never done anything really like this because i've never kept up with it like i've never kept up with it but this year we're keeping up with it yeah it is 8 30 i need to get to bed i need to get sped i've just been feeling extra chatty today okay good morning you guys about to pop out of the house but i just wanted to show you my outfit super casual oh my gosh i need my passport because we're going across the border good thing i remembered that but i will take you guys along with us today but i'm just wearing these jeans from white fox and then this crew neck from i actually got from a brand and i'm just wearing a tank top underneath and i'm going to bring a jacket the weather is so weird it's like sunny but cold but also warm so i kind of wanted to do a little bit of a layering situation and i'm just wearing my neckies and my thrifted purse that's the bit for today just super casual i'm gonna go for breakfast first and then we're going across the border but i will take you guys along today that is a little outfit up the day so madison and my siblings and my mom we all went for breakfast for her birthday and then we made our way down across the border to the states and now we're going to crumble cookie for the first time in our lives guys we have never been unfortunately i am like 99% gluten free so i couldn't have a full cookie to myself but i did have a little bite and oh my gosh it was so good it was so hard not to devour all of those cookies but wow were they ever good and apparently they're opening a location in vancouver so we're really excited and after we did that we just kind of drove around went to a few stores that madison wanted to go to went to the gas station because they have really good energy drinks here that they don't have in canada so that was fun strawberry prime i'm tempted to try her because i really like primes but didn't know they had strawberry watermelon i feel like this is not in canada there's so many drinks here all we're getting flaming hot cheetos because i was watching the flaming hot cheeto movie yesterday and i've been craving them what can i'm getting uh disney bless and i'm getting the strawberry strawberry mango ghost and the sour pink lemonade birthday okay bomb medals then we obviously had to hit up all of the united states stores that we don't have we went to hobby lobby goodwill trader joe's got a couple of things that will give you guys a haul in a bit and then yeah we headed home and then had a cake for madison and that was basically our day okay guys so i just got home from my family's house because we went to go have cake and dinner there and it's currently 10 40 i have to work out class at 7 a.m tomorrow which means i have to be about like 5 35 45 so i'm gonna get to bed soon but i just want to show you guys a little bit of a haul from the states i didn't get much but i did spend like a hundred dollars or so we're there for like five hours it feels like we were there for like two times when flying by so fast recently i don't know what has been happening but it's been actually crazy this day has just like literally snap of the finger it's gone like this whole week actually this whole this whole past few months snap of the finger like what is happening so we popped in ross because we don't have a ross in canada but it kind of gives winners and i'm so excited because i got this painting and i love the gold frame on it like i think it's so pretty and the painting is also really really pretty and i love the vintage vibe and it was only 17 dollars so you can't really go wrong with that and i think i'm gonna hang it up in our bedroom because i've been looking for a painting to put in our bedroom so i got this one and then i also got this one as well so they're kind of matching like the frames are the same the painting so just a little bit different or completely different but they're like the same style and i'm thinking of either hanging up one in the bedroom or putting them side by side not sure exactly what we're gonna do yet but i think that they're so cute and i've been looking for art to hang in this house because we have like nothing on the walls and so we need to spice it up a little bit and so i'm really happy i found these and i've just been looking for like a perfect you know picture frame and stuff to hang in the house my mom is gonna paint us a painting for the living room here or i mean the dining room over there on that wall because my mom is an artist and she just got back into painting and so she's gonna paint this one for here but i don't want to make her paint like a million paintings so i just got these for now and i can all switch off the paintings and keep the frames so that's the sleigh and this is so random but also at ross i got this cute little makeup bag and it has a little bow here i don't know if you could tell but like check blue checkered pattern and oh my goodness i just love it so much with the inside it's like striped black and it's just so cute i've been looking for like a sturdy makeup bag because right now all the ones i have are like floppy and this one is just perfect and this is like the exact size that i would need from my makeup because i don't even have much but i got this and like the bow are you getting it's just so freaking cute and it was only like seven dollars and then i also got this which is kind of matching to it it's like the same brand with the bow it was only like five dollars i just saw a little mini little mini case for like my brushes or whatever and i just like how the material is super sturdy it's not like one of those flimsy ones so i don't know where i'm traveling to hopefully i'm traveling somewhere soon but i think these are so cute you're kidding me look at these look at the pattern and the little bows i just couldn't help myself it's so vintage-esque kind of like girly but also just like timeless i don't know i think that they're so freaking cute and then so random but i got these sunglasses they're from steve matted and they're like a bigger square type of sunglasses i'll put them on so you guys can see so that is the vibe i had a pair just kind of like this but they fell in the ocean when i was in portugal i was in the ocean they were i think i was wearing them and then they fell off and i went to go grab them and the wave just swept them away completely so it was like whatever so anyways i love myself a good big chunky pair of sunglasses or just like in the summer and then last things i got is just so random we went to hobby lobby and i just got this pack of 50 cream cardstock pack just because i want to start kind of doing writing my goals out on something big and like putting it up on my pin board that i'm gonna hang about my computer and i just need like paper because i don't really have any arts and craft supplies in my house so i just wanted to like start my collection with that kind of stuff so i just got this huge stock of paper and was 40 off so sleigh and then i got some scrapbooking paper whatever and it's vintage floral 20 designs are you kidding me 12 1299 40 off and there's just like a bunch of like cute floral designs in here so i can like write stuff on here write my goals on here i'm a very visual person and like i think i'm just missing that in my life right now so anyways growing my little arts and crafts collection i guess you could say that is pretty much the haul but yeah anyways i will see you guys tomorrow morning i'm gonna be so tired but i'm gonna get ready for bed real quick and get to sleep as fast as possible because today was a long day but it also felt really short i don't know i was flying it's grouping me out talk to you guys tomorrow see you in the morning hey you guys i'm so tired so tired right now for some reason i feel sick i felt like i drank last night i in fact did not drink one drink so i don't know why i feel sick maybe it's because of the lack of sleep sometimes i do feel sick when i have to wake up early but i kind of remember waking up in the middle of the night and i feel feeling a little sick kind of like throw up sick which is weird so i hope that doesn't get worse i'm still gonna go to my workout so hopefully this passes but like what the hell i also had the most vivid weird dream you guys i literally had a dream that the world ended and it was like this virus going around like a zombie virus and oh my god it was just so weird like i had that dream the whole entire night it was so long is it raining i literally hear the rain oh my gosh i just want to stay in bed and sleep but it's okay because it's friday happy friday you guys happy friday i can't wait to sleep in tomorrow happy weekend oh my gosh anyways i gotta go i'm already running latest new smile arm twice because i am just so tired of my i'm like a eight to nine to ten hour early of sleep not a seven to six potentially i got six hours of sleep no five and a half no six it was six okay i'm gonna be ready for my workout i'll see you guys there love you so i have been just like working and editing all day and i woke up feeling so hungover like i wasn't just tired but i felt hungover even though we had nothing to drink last night it's so weird because i know different pains from different pains like when i have my period cramps i can differentiate that between like a stomach ache and like when i'm hungover it's such like a distinct feeling like i know what that feels like and this morning i felt hungover and i'm like what is happening and i was like i even told jola i was like i just feel so shitty this morning i feel hungover like i don't know why like we didn't even drink then madison texted me this morning and she's like oh my gosh i feel so hungover for some reason and i was like what like i didn't even tell her i felt hungover and she just told me and i'm like you're actually kidding me like what did we eat yesterday or drink that made us sick because like we both felt sick and like dizzy in the morning and that's never happened in my life like i've never woken up and said oh i feel hungover when i happen drinking so that's why it's super weird i was trying to like retrace our steps yesterday and be like okay what the heck did we eat what did we do that would make us sick like this and i don't know i mean i feel fine now i feel like i sweat it out after my workout and like i drink a bunch of water but like it's just so weird like that it's never happened that's never happened before and madison also said like this is her distinct hungover feeling at the end of the day alcohol is pretty much poison so i'm like did we get like poison yesterday or something by something i don't know anyway so i'm just wrapping up work for today soppies friday jola and i are gonna go out to eat tonight and just like have a chill little date night but i just got a package so i wanted to show you guys i bought some new shoes because i have been in my shoe era recently like i've been wanting to like up my shoe game because i haven't bought in a new pair of shoes and like who knows how long and i just need to up my shoe game so anyways let's give you guys a little haul so i got these um i ordered off footlocker i got these black and white with the tan base i think they're called sam bays because they're like the platform ones but they're sambas but platforms a little bit and how freaking cute you're kidding me i can't wait to make outfits with this like even just this with a pair of jeans i'm a size seven and a half i'm actually obsessed and i got one more pair so these are just the original sambas how cute are they these are like super trendy and in right now but like i feel like they're just such a good staple shoe but anyways so that is the tea of the day um i just don't feel the best still like i took an hour and a half nap this morning and that made me feel kind of somewhat better but like i'm still not 100 so i'm like did we get poisoned yesterday it's just like super weird my period is also coming to an end so i feel like a lot better in that sense too which is nice i also just got a package from this company called sniff and i just wanted to share it with you guys they sent me a bunch of pr how sweet this is their little card that they gave to me with the package so proud to bring fine fragrance to the laundry room with clean non-toxic and non-irritating formulas how freaking cool is that you guys know i'm like really picky on you know toxins and stuff and i try to be as clean as possible but first impressions look at how cute their packaging it's like i'm all about the aesthetics when it comes to packaging and like companies branding themselves right but let me unbox so i can show you guys the like actual products oh my gosh this is just so aesthetic have you ever seen a laundry detergent this aesthetic i don't think so this is their old money laundry detergent are you kidding me now i'm like actually excited to do my laundry this is the most aesthetic laundry thing i've ever seen in my entire life and they're non-toxic how can you even compare that's so amazing then they also have their scent boosters liquid scent booster which is super cool so let's take a look at that okay cute it's just a little version but this is gonna look like organizing this in my cabinet i'm so excited i love the aesthetics but anyways check them out if you guys are looking for like a new laundry detergent because this is such a sleigh thank you so much to snip for sending me this that was so sweet i'm gonna end off today's vlog here i love you guys so much thank you so much for staying till this point in the video you guys literally mean the absolute world to me and i'm so excited for what's to come within the next few months and there's a lot to come and i'm really excited and thank you so much for sticking with me and i'm always open to chat on my instagram dms or down below in the comments and i love you guys so so so much i will see you guys in my next video


Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Riverbed Disrupt, brought to you by Riverbed. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to New York City. Everybody, we're here at Riverbed Disrupt. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Paul O'Farrill is here as the Senior Vice President and General Manager at Riverbed. Paul, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Coming on. Networking needs a fundamental rethink. Why? Well, if you think about it, there's been so much change in the IT industry and technology over the last, you know, five, 10 years, however far you want to go back. And somewhere along the line, networking just got stuck in the time warp. And if you think about sort of every aspect of your daily life, whether it's, you know, the kind of hackneyed examples from the consumer world like ordering an Uber or using something to order food or whatever it is you do every day, all of that has changed. But for network administrators, life looks pretty much the way it was back in the, you know, 10 years ago, maybe even 20 years ago when the first writers sort of really went mainstream. And it's really taking a lot of that technology and bringing it into the cloud era that we think is what the industry needs right now. So you're responsible for the Steelhead, the SteelConnect, and the SteelFusion portfolios. That's right. Which is the vast majority of the company's portfolios. Yeah. And we're just through them because many people in our audience aren't familiar with the product set. Everybody knows Riverbed and you're familiar with the company but talk about the products a little bit. Yeah, so Steelhead, which was our original product is kind of the flagship product of the company. And Steelhead was, we sold the first Steelhead back in 2004. And that product was really designed around helping enterprises to consolidate their IT infrastructure out of remote locations and consolidate it into the data center through a variety of different optimization techniques. And that product really caught on and it's deployed in, I don't know the latest stats, probably about 97% of the global 2000 companies. They've been very successful company, a very successful product. And what we've done is we've evolved that set of technologies over time. We created a new product in 2012 called SteelFusion. SteelFusion is a product that's designed to allow you to all of the things you could do with the Steelhead but also allow you to run applications locally in the branch. So while having your data physically resident in a data center in the cloud. So there's a certain family of applications that for a variety of reasons still need to run in the remote location in the branch. And it's enabling that in a highly secure fashion that also has some benefits around efficient ways you can run a branch office. So if an application goes down you can recover it very fast. If you wanna provision new applications you can do that essentially instantly as well. So this is SteelFusion product family. And then finally the latest addition to the product family is the SteelConnect product which has started off as this concept of a software defined wide area networking offering. And then it's really evolved particularly with the acquisition we did with an acquisition of a small but highly innovative company based in Germany at the beginning of the year called Oceto. And they not only accelerated our entry into this new market of software defined WAN they also gave us a much broader and more expansive vision around what we could do with networking which includes an entirely new way of thinking about how do you manage networks with a single management console for managing LAN, WAN and cloud. So Oceto allowed you to eliminate that manager of managers that you talked about. Yeah that was part of it. I mean I think we were already quite far down the path of building our own software defined WAN solution. And what Oceto did was not only did they accelerate us in that effort but they gave us a very powerful management console. They gave us a cloud based management console that you could use to manage every aspect of your network and do that centrally with either one or a very small number of trained professionals. You really be able to design, deploy and operate your network without ever touching a box. And you can imagine drop shipping a box be it a gateway, a switch, a wifi access point into a remote location, have it authenticate itself and just start passing traffic. So yes the management console is really key part of the story. So Paul one of the things that resonated with me that you said this morning is it's a cloud centric workflow is what we need. So can you talk about how not just you're putting things in the cloud but how kind of the cloud operations model goes across your whole portfolio? Absolutely. If you think about what's happened since Amazon Web Services was first launched 10 years ago. And obviously there's plenty of other players in the market people like Azure and IBM and all the large tech companies have some form of cloud offering. And you think about what you can do now as an IT professional. So an IT professional can be asked in the morning to spin up servers, storage, and an application in multiple countries and have it done by the afternoon. You can ask an IT professional to, you couldn't have done that 10 years ago that would have said you're completely crazy I can't possibly do that. But you can do that with platforms like AWS with Azure with Google. What you can do is spin up your network or manage your network or configure your network with that ease at least you couldn't do that before we launched the SteelConnect product. So a lot of what we're about is really taking that cloud-centric workflow, the type of workflow that people have gotten used to whether they're using consumer products or whether they're using some of these more modern cloud-based IT solutions and really mimic that and make it feel like the same type of intuitive way to configure things the same type of sort of simple centralized approach automated approach, policy-based approach managing the network. And when you talk about kind of the buyer of it because networking, I think when SDN first came out one of my critiques was it solves networking problems. It doesn't necessarily solve business problems. It's advanced beyond that, but talk about kind of the business buyer and the applications and how you focus on that. Sure, I mean I think the old joke about SDN was that it really was something in search of, technology in search of a ballroom. It did, I mean the SDN really got in many ways did provide some benefits to data center architectures. So people who really implemented the SDN approach in the data center were able to benefit from some streamlined operations of their environments. But that really got, there was no attempt really to apply that thinking until today really to the white area network or to the world where most of the network administrator's time is actually spent, trying to ensure that the right type of connectivity is available in the branch. And so a lot of what we're talking about is really trying to extend that thinking and paradigm to the white area network, to remote locations, to the overall interest network. You talked a lot this morning about the branch and how that's transforming and the different models that you pursue with the branch. So give us some color on that. Sure, so the important thing to remember is when Riverbed talks about branches, we don't mean something small. We really mean about the place where you run your business, where business gets done. So whether you call it a branch, a site, a location, and network, it doesn't really matter. It can be a factory, it can be an oil rig, it can be a retail store with half a million square feet of retail capacity. So what we've recognized is that obviously there's different flavors of branches, the different sets of requirement, there's different types of infrastructure footprint in those locations. And what we've tried to put together in the solution we announced today, solution set, which is the Cloud Ready Branch solution set, is an attempt to bring the richness of all of our technology across the different products and really combine that in a new packaging that addresses specific needs of different types of branch. So the quick examples would be you've got internet branches. These are branches that are the most evolved state of cloud adoption, where they've really moved to all cloud-size-based applications. They really don't have any need other than internet access or cloud access for networking. And then, of course, you need some visibility there, too. There's a second generation of branches, which are what we call hybrid branches, which have more dependence on traditional applications, client server applications that are still served out of the data center. And that's where we would add the ability to do some one-optimization. And the third category is where you still have the heaviest infrastructure footprint. And that's where we call that our desire is to turn that into something called a stateless branch, where you can run that in a way that doesn't constrain you in any way in terms of the types of applications or the type of workloads or the way you consume those applications, but can all be managed in a software-fine manner that is centrally administered and policy-based and automated. I want to ask you about this whole trend toward hyper-converged. Many of the hyper-converged players are very storage-heavy. They're essentially storage companies, and they do some partnerships with networking and server companies, and they say, OK, you can eliminate all this complexity and boom. How, what's your point of view on that whole hyper-converged infrastructure? You participate in some way, shape, or form there. You're kind of storage-light, if you will. Give us riverbeds point of view. Yeah, so hyper-converged infrastructure, again, it's kind of like SDN is very much trapped in the data center right now. If you look at most of the players, whether they be the big vendors like EMC or others, IBM, or Cisco, it really is a data center play. It's about combining in a new form factor in a slightly more integrated manner, storage, server, and network infrastructure. What we think is it's really about extending some of that value of hyper-converged infrastructure out to the edge, out to the branch where we really turn a lot of our focus, and being able to do that in a way that still allows you to manage that branch. We like the idea of a stateless branch, so you can manage a branch with a fully hyper-converged stack. So we have a solution around storage, a solution around server, or compute power, and then some networking as well. But deliver that in a way that doesn't require you to have any IT expertise on-site. So all of that can be centrally managed. All of your data is physically resonant in a data center or a cloud, but is made available to applications working on the edge. So it's kind of like a smartphone. So if you think about a smartphone, we think this is probably the best analogy.  You can get out the other end of your business trip, be it in another city. And you can go into your local service provider, AT&T, Verizon, and you can basically be up and running. It'll be $700 poorer afterwards with all of your applications, all of your data, as long as you backed it up to the cloud. And that's the way we believe branches should operate, too. You shouldn't require the existence of any of the traditional sort of server storage, backup infrastructure, and you should be able to provision them and recover them as if they were a smartphone. So branch is a location, and it can be anything. It was a factory, an oil rig, it could be a windmill. So we talked a lot about digital transformation this morning. IoT never came up, at least not that I heard, but a lot about the edge, and the edge is critical for IoT. Is that just not a market that you're ready to pursue yet? Is that sort of a couple years out? Sure, I mean, I think that we've set ourselves sort of a near term mission of transforming the way enterprise networks are managed, and really bringing, as we said earlier, enterprise networks into the cloud era. That's a pretty big and bold goal for us. We're competing, we're competing, I'll chew on that for a while, that's a good way of thinking about it. So we're going to be competing with some of the biggest tech vendors in the world. People have been at this for 20 years. So it's going to keep us busy for a while. There is absolutely no reason why, we talk a lot about scalability because enterprises need scalability, particularly in data centers. But there's no reason why you can't take our technology and then apply it also in a different scale in the branch. And so go to the level of having thousands of access points to capture IoT information. And that's something we're definitely interested in doing. It just hasn't, it's just not on the immediate roadmap. But IoT is definitely one of the reasons why you need a centralized cloud-centric approach, an automated policy-based approach to managing your network infrastructure. If you're going to have, you know, literally, you're not talking about hundreds or thousands of branches now, you're potentially talking about the equivalent of tens of thousands of location sites, nodes on your network where you're going to have to be managing traffic, so. Paul, this morning Jerry said that the SteelConnect 2.0 will be the diamond in the crown of the Riverbed portfolio. So I know you had the engineers working, you know, no vacations to get from the 1.0 in April to the 2.0 that's launching soon.  What do you expect from the SteelConnect 2.0? You know, what does it become a billion-dollar product on its own? Well, I think it definitely has the potential to do that. I think we talked a little bit this morning about how much initial demand we've seen. We've been very encouraged by the fact that, even though we went out with a limited availability launch, not something Riverbed's done before, but we're going into a new market and we're kind of trying to make sure that we really understand the use cases and customer requirements. But based on that, we've seen huge interest and what really sort of was a pleasant surprise, a lot of that interest is coming from some of the biggest corporations and organizations in the world. So there's a lot of pent-up demand for a new approach to networking. 2016 was really about, you know, getting the product to a point where it is scalable, it is robust, it is fully featured. And we think that certainly by the end of this year, we'll be well along the path of doing that. And we have a very much competitive product that can go up against some of the new startup PurePlay SD-WAN vendors, but more importantly, up against the traditional networking incumbents. Next year is really about taking that to the next level. We talked a little bit about how we're beginning down the path of really tight integration with our visibility suite. There'll be a lot more of that going forward. Extending the platform to support third-party services. So we had Nier Zürich, the founder of Palo Alto Networks on stage this morning at the event. And that's a partnership we're very excited about. There'll be a lot of other partnerships like that where we have the concept of a service chain of different services from third parties, either on cloud or on box going forward. And then it's really about sort of further integration of the overall platform into sort of bite-sized pieces that our customers can consume in a simple manner. Paul, when you're a one-product company, you can have very high net promoter scores, your engineering resources very focused, your sales team is focused. When you shift to a multi-product platform company, what are some of the challenges that you face and how have you navigated those? Well, I think RiverBand is a company, so we're 14 years old now, we started in 2002. We've already gone through that cycle at some level. We are kind of RiverBand 2.0, so as you may know, we went private last year and as part of going private, we kind of rationalized our portfolio. So we had already shifted from being a single-product company some time ago. Our first real diversification into a new product area was back in 2007, 2008 when we did our first acquisition. What we found that was challenging as you become a multi-product company, as you make that shift from a single-product company, all the things you talked about. The real challenge, though, was if you start off with a blockbuster first product, then the expectation is everything else will be like that. And that still, it really was a blockbuster first product. It's a product that, as we mentioned earlier, was adopted by just about 85% of the global 2000, I think, is our latest stats. And so I think what happens is you end up in a situation where if you're not careful, you can defocus yourselves for us. You can spread your R&D investments too thin. But I think we've already experienced the challenges of that. We're coming out of that original attempt to diversification in a much tighter, with a much tighter organization and a much more focused strategy. And the products that we're bringing at now, whether it be the evolution of Steelhead so that it's better suited to the cloud environment, whether it's bringing the SteelFusion product to more customers and making it a more mainstream offering, or whether it's this new product SteelConnect, they're all linked around some basic concepts. And part of launching this cloud-ready branch initiative today was really to give us a simpler way of talking to our customers about our technologies and weaving them into one coherent story that makes it easy for people to understand them and to make the maximum use of them.  Although early on, you were under the spotlight of the public markets and you got a lot of scrutiny there. You feel like you're perfecting that M&A model and you guys look at yourselves as aspiring to be one of the top acquirers in the business. Yeah, so I personally have a long history of acquisitions. I did acquisitions at Cisco and the Hay Day. I was at Cisco when we were doing two acquisitions a month. I did acquisitions also at NetApp for some period of time. I think at Riverbed, I've seen probably the most focused and successful acquisition strategy of all of the companies I've worked at because we have a very sort of focused vision around where we want to be as a company and the markets we want to go after. And I think we're going to get better at that. It is a little bit easier as a private company to do these things because you're not on that constant quarterly treadmill where one missed step is it causes sort of a major change in your market cap and causes people to question the logic of some of your strategy. Being private makes it a little bit easier. It allows us to make some of these changes to our strategy to expand into new markets in a controlled manner, in a thoughtful manner without being constantly second gas by Wall Street Analyst. So I think it's a little bit easier. It doesn't really remove any of the, we still need to hit our number every quarter and we still need to be gain market share and win in the market's rim, but it definitely helps us from just that quarterly constant pressure. Well, but if you miss, it's not as much of a distraction. And if you blow it away, it's not as much of a distraction either. Exactly, you're absolutely right. It's really the distraction factor more than anything else. It's not that we necessarily changed our strategy that much even as a public company based on quarterly results, but it was very distracting if you have analysts constantly second guessing what you're doing. And it's just an easier way to operate, at least for the time being as we sort of evolve the company a little bit further. Okay, last question out of time, but so look out a couple of years, two, three years. What should we expect Riverbed to look like? Well, I think you're going to see a company that has a diversified product portfolio, but a product portfolio that's presented the market in a very integrated, it's part of a very integrated story. I think we'll keep our vision around how do you manage and how do you support highly distributed organizations? I think we do really believe that there's an opportunity, a huge opportunity for Riverbed and for its customers to really rethink enterprise networking. We think that if we're successful, there'll be a much more powerful way to manage networks that is much more in tune with the way people have grown to manage or learned how to manage other parts of the IT infrastructure stack. And that's really what our SteelConnect strategy is all about. And all of that will be supported by a single visibility, sort of end-to-end, click-to-disk type of visibility capabilities very embedded. I think that's going to be a big force in the technology industry. And I think it's going to be an exciting place to be for us and for, we hope, our customers and partners as well. All right, we'll leave it there. Paul, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Okay, keep it right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest. We're live from New York City. This is Riverbed Disrupt. This is theCUBE, right back.


As we celebrate the numbers today, we have to realize that these majestic animals are facing dire challenges from an ever decreasing and disturbed habitat and illegal trade and traffic. India is committed to doing whatever it can to further animal protection and conservation. I would express, and personally I would request, heads of government of the tiger range countries and bring them together in an alliance of global leaders to erase, demand and to firm the cup poaching and illegal trade in Asia. Let me once again congratulate you on this World Tiger Day. Let us all pledge to create a green and environmentally sustainable country. Let the tiger be that symbol of sustainability. I would like to say that the story of the one and only tiger is alive and it has not stopped there. Only the tiger is alive and it will not work. We used to say that the tiger is alive and it has not stopped there. The tiger is alive and it has not stopped there.