Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? I do. I'm excited to tell you about my new book, Girl Boss. Girl Boss. Welcome to the Girl Boss community. You can go into engineering, you can go into science. Success isn't just up and to the right. What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable? Where girls come just to be girls and feel good about that. Girl power. Gaslight. Gatekeep. Girl Boss. The Girl Boss, otherwise known as the Boss Babe, has become a term that has seemingly spiraled out of control. You can find the term Girl Boss plastered all over billboards, magazines, and t-shirts. The term Girl Boss is proudly used by CEOs and MLM reps alike. But what does it mean? In this video, we're diving into the rise and fall of the Girl Boss, and how it may have influenced pop culture in a pretty negative way. But first, before we get into that, if you like this type of content, don't forget to subscribe and give this video a thumbs up. And let's get into it. The term Girl Boss was first brought into the public eye in 2014. The term was used in popular books written by women CEOs, like hashtag Girl Boss, by Sophia Amaruso, founder of Nasty Gal, and Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Sheryl Sandberg argued in her book Lean In that more women gaining power in the workplace and becoming executives would help create more equality. And thus, the Girl Boss was born. After the success of hashtag Girl Boss, Amaruso went on to launch a Girl Boss media company with networking conferences, branded merchandise, and a Netflix series. Geez, that's a lot of stuff going on. I wonder what happened to her original company, Nasty Gal. Oh. Oh. Oh. The problem is, women executives can be just as exploitative as male executives. Surprise, surprise, equality. We all aren't that different after all. We all are equally terrible. And the reality is, Girl Boss is just hustle culture repackaged and resold to women. Hustle culture is yet another primarily millennial toxic ideology that if you relentlessly work or grind, and also relentlessly post on social media, about your hashtag hustle, hashtag grind, that you are indeed the superior millennial. I personally think there's many flavors of hustle culture. From my favorite, and that which I have the most experience with, there's the startup hustle culture that features eccentric startup founders bragging about how much they work and encouraging their employees to work 12 plus hours a day. If you go into any we work, you'll see plenty of hustle culture memorabilia. There's also the frat bro or stock bro hustle culture that emphasizes obtaining material goods is a little too inspired by Wolf of Wall Street and random rise and grind Instagram accounts. And from personal experience, I found most of these dudes post about hustling more than they actually hustle. In fact, I don't think they've had to actually hustle a day in their life. But maybe that's just me. Then there's the girl boss culture, which is like any other capitalist girl thing all about materialism surrounding yourself with books and podcasts and buying from girl boss companies and monetarily supporting all girl boss things. But more on that later, much of the narrative surrounding girl boss is to work hard and hustle and make something of yourself and build a career, be the girl boss, do the work. But we've also seen over time examples of girl boss being used in a very toxic way, like within MLMs who use the term to justify reps pouring thousands and thousands into products and not making much of a profit. Yeah, you may be losing money, but you're a girl boss, right? You're making something of yourself. You're building a company. You're building something of value here. Be a girl boss, empower yourself. The whole term girl boss is basically telling women that your value is based off of how successful of a career you can have. Be a girl boss. Don't just be a girl. Also, the original girl boss narrative that was created, this idea that if more women were in power, there would be more equality, which would lead to workers being treated better and more workers being treated with more equality. That whole narrative turned out to not be true at all because believe it or not, surprisingly, women are people and just like anyone who is a human being, women can be influenced by power, by greed, and other privileges and incentives of being in power and wanting to hold on to that power, which can lead anyone down a path of being exploitative. So, let's talk about the many influential women who have collectively made up the concept of girl boss. First on the list, Sophia Amoruso. Amoruso founded Nasty Gal, a women's fashion retailer that went on to be named one of the fastest growing companies by Ink Magazine in 2012. Sophia, in just a few years you've created Nasty Gal and it's something of a phenomenon. You guys have got 128 million in revenue this year more or less in a hugely profitable company. How did this all start? So, I started an eBay store in late 2006. So, you started this company? Started Nasty Gal's an eBay store 10 years ago. 10 years ago. 10 in November, it's been 10. That's incredible growth in 10 years.  You can only hope you grow a whole lot between 22 and 32. Of course. When I started Nasty Gal, I was 22 years old. I started an eBay store. I didn't have an education. I didn't have alumni of any kind. I had no idea I was even starting a business. And then I wound up with the title CEO and it exploded. In 2016, Sophia was named one of the richest self-made women in the world by Forbes. Sophia published a book titled hashtag girl boss, which really coined the phrase girl boss. And the book was so successful that Netflix ended up adapting the book into a series, which was canceled after one season. Critics saying it was a call to millennial narcissists. But the rise in success of Sophia Amaruso did not last very long. On January 12th of 2015, Amaruso stepped down as CEO of Nasty Gal due to leadership problems. And in November of 2016, the company filed chapter 11 bankruptcy with Amaruso resigning as executive chairwoman by early 2016. Sophia earned a spot as one of Forbes richest self-made women. Then just a few months later, her company collapsed after one too many mistakes. The reason for the bankruptcy is seemingly leadership changes, a toxic work culture and poor communication. Much of Amaruso's fortune left along with the bankruptcy of Nasty Gal. In December of 2017, Amaruso went on to found Girl Boss Media, a company aimed at creating hashtag girl boss content, videos and podcasts. Sophia also created girl boss rallies, which were weekend long instructional events for young entrepreneurs that ranged from $500 to $1,400. Girl Boss started with the book five years ago. Girl Boss today is creating a platform for women to do just that, where even if they're not entrepreneurs, they're entrepreneurial and they can share not just what they do but who they are in a world where we're not linked in Monday through Friday and Instagram Saturday and Sunday were so much more than that. Then in October of 2020, Amaruso also stepped down once again as CEO this time from Girl Boss Media Company, citing the pandemic and declining revenue as the reason she stepped away. The many failures of Amaruso proves A, maybe Sophia wasn't the best CEO. Even though she coined the term girl boss, she may have not been the best boss. But the many failures of Sophia Amaruso also makes me sad because I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you. Another prominent girl boss figure is Cheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. She joined Facebook at a time that Facebook was trying to become profitable and she was largely successful at her job and became well known and respected for her accomplishments at Facebook. This led to the release of her first book, Lean In, Women, Work and the Will to Lead, published on March 11th of 2013. The book concerns business leadership and development issues with the lack of women in government and business leadership positions and feminism. Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state, nine are women. Of all the people in Parliament in the world, 13% are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C level jobs, board seats, tops out at 15, 16%. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. I came out of college over 20 years ago and I thought that, you know, look, all of my peers were men and women, all the people above me were all men. But that would change because your generation had done such an amazing job fighting for equality. Equality was now ours for the taking. And it wasn't because year after year, I was one of fewer and fewer and now often the only woman in a room. Lean In is intended for professional women to help them achieve their career goals and for men who want to contribute to a more equitable society. The ultimate goal is to encourage women to lean into positions of leadership because she believes that by having more female voices in positions of power, there will be more equitable opportunities created for everyone. How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this, about keeping women in the workforce because I really think that's the answer. In the high income part of our workforce and the people who end up at the top Fortune 500 CEO jobs or the equivalent in other industries, the problem I am convinced is that women are dropping out. Criticisms of the book include claims that Sandberg is too elitist and another that she is tone deaf to the struggles faced by the average woman in the workplace. For example, the book has been criticized for overlooking the struggles of mothers who may not be able to lean in. Sandberg was also largely behind the movement to ban the word bossy. In March of 2014, Sandberg and Lean In sponsored the ban bossy campaign, a television and social media campaign designed to discourage the word bossy from general use due to its perceived harmful effect on young girls. There was also a website providing school training material, leadership tips, and an online pledge form to which visitors can promise not to use the word. But Sandberg did get some criticism. The New York Times published a report in 2018 detailing Sandberg's role in handling Facebook's public relations after revelations of Russian interference. There are implications that Facebook operated almost like a mob. One of the lawsuits says that Mark Zuckerberg had the philosophy of it is better to buy than compete. Facebook got WhatsApp and Instagram and the power grab. Is that the philosophy there? Did he say it? It's better to buy than compete. Well, let me start just quickly by saying thank you, Tamron, for having me on the show. We have talked about this for a long time, and I've been a fan for a long time. I've loved the success of your show, and I love that you have a female team behind you, not just you, but your executive producer. It really matters to me. So these are serious lawsuits, and I understand that there is real concern about the size and the power of the tech companies, but I think it's really hard to make the argument that we don't compete and compete hard for your time and attention. According to the Wall Street Journal, during a meeting, Mark Zuckerberg blamed Sandberg personally for the outcome of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the way that Sheryl Sandberg handled the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal was kind of shying away, not leaning in or being upfront and forthcoming about what was going on. Next on the girl boss list is Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes was the founder and CEO of Theranos, a now defunct health technology company. Elizabeth and the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing technology by developing testing methods that could use surprisingly small volumes of blood like a finger prick. This CEO is out for blood. Company is valued at over $9 billion. You've got over 500 employees, I think. 700. 700 now, okay. Can you tell us who you are and what you do, what your company does? Sure. Over the last 11 years, we've reinvented the traditional laboratory infrastructure. By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9 billion valuation of her company. But soon after, the company was exposed for being a total fraud and lying about the technology they claimed to have, defrauding people and putting people in extreme danger by claiming to have accurate blood testing results when their technology was not accurate. Holmes has been arrested and charged with massive fraud. Lately, one of the most exciting privately held companies in Silicon Valley has come under fire. I'm talking about Theranos. Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal made a pretty scathing article about the company, alleging that the company's proprietary testing devices may be inaccurate and basically accusing Theranos of deceptive practices. Thank you, Elizabeth. I have to tell you in all my years, I can't recall a private company that I can't believe many have never heard of getting this kind of attention and scrutiny. What do you think is going on here?  Elizabeth Holmes, once Silicon Valley's fastest rising star, is now under the harsh glare of a very different kind of spotlight. She's finally forced to answer to the Securities and Exchange Commission as she's investigated for an alleged elaborate years-long fraud. Do you swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I do. Elizabeth Holmes was lifted up by so many influential people as a woman to be admired in the tech industry. I believe people want to stand on their own two feet. I think they want to be empowered and that's one of the reasons I've been so impressed by your dogged determination not only to cut the Christ cost and increase the quality of lab tests but to give people who give the blood the results of their tests. Absolutely. You can go into engineering, you can go into science and you can be successful and you can build a family and we should be doing this. So having women involved with this company and building this company and leading this company because of who they are especially in the engineering and science space. I mean I was the only woman in chemical engineering at Stanford and in the electrical engineering program that I was at at Stanford and that must change. But her entire career was founded on a complete lie. Elizabeth Holmes might be facing up to 20 years in prison but she sure looks happy prancing around San Francisco. Hi Elizabeth I'm Lisa Guerrero with Inside Edition. We'd like to know if you had an opportunity to watch the documentary about you. Elizabeth a lot of young women looked up to you especially in tech. What would you have to say to those young women? Next girl boss Leandra Medine. I knew that I wanted to build a brand that would both outlive me and carry a title that allowed people to feel like they were members of this like sort of indie sisterhood. Leandra Medine Cohen is an American author, blogger and humor writer best known for man repeller and independent fashion and lifestyle website. So I launched man repeller in 2011 when I was a junior in college and it started as a site about trends that women love and men hate. It was supposed to be a call to action for us as women to celebrate what we want to wear. The blog Man Repeller became widely successful and Leandra was lifted up as a girl boss of sorts and a voice for the millennial girl boss. As I've continued working on the site the sort of ideology has become very fine-tuned and finessed and I've been saying that it's a humorous website about serious fashion, a site about trends that women love and men hate but I also very much want it to be this sort of discussion board or community where girls come just to be girls and feel good about that and that's it. That's valuable. Cute claps. Girl power. Medine even launched MR by man repeller, a line of loafers, flats, metallic booties and heels and it seemed that man repeller really became an overall brand. That is until Medine announced in June of 2020 that she would step back her involvement in man repeller after allegations emerged that she had failed former staffers of color. In September 2020 the site was rebranded to repeller and Medine is still listed as the founder on the contributor page but on October 22nd Cohen confirmed that repeller would be shutting down due to financial constraints. And last girl boss that I'll talk about today is Danielle Bernstein. Danielle Bernstein is an American fashion designer and the founder of the fashion blog and brand We Were What. My name is Danielle Bernstein and I'm the founder of We Were What. Blogging as a whole has completely disrupted traditional media and advertising itself. We have given brands a completely new outlet to reach a very specific audience that they maybe wouldn't have reached otherwise. She has collaborated with numerous fashion brands and has launched her own fashion lines. At the age of 24 Danielle was placed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Danielle Bernstein has nearly 1.8 million Instagram followers. At 25 years old she's already made Forbes's 30 under 30 list. Her brand We Were What includes a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, brand collaborations and her own clothing line earning her upward of seven figures a year. In March of 2020 Bernstein also launched a namesake brand exclusively at Macy's called Danielle Bernstein. In May of 2020 Bernstein published an autobiography called This Is Not a Fashion Story. Taking Chances, Breaking Rules and Being a Boss in the Big City. Very Gaslight Gatekeep Girl Boss. The book appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list and was featured on the business list. However the New York Times has since placed a dagger symbol alongside the book indicating its listing includes suspicious bulk purchases. But then Danielle Bernstein was exposed for copying other designers designs. In 2018 Bernstein received attention for copying the designs of various jewelry brands when she launched a series of products with Nordstrom. Bernstein subsequently apologized in a tear-filled Instagram post and withdrew the copied pieces from the collection. In 2020 Bernstein announced a design for a cloth face mask with a chain, fashion watchdog group, diet Prada. An Instagram account dedicated to highlighting instances of design copying observed the mask was nearly identical to a patent pending model created by a Latino brand called Second Wing. Bernstein had earlier requested free samples from the company. Bernstein denied that she had copied the design from Second Wind. Days later Bernstein posted an Instagram photo of herself wearing what she claimed were a vintage pair of gym shorts writing the caption that she would be remaking the shorts to sell. The shorts were actually from an Etsy shop run by an Australian brand, Art Garments. After the Etsy seller published a receipt showing Bernstein had purchased the shorts from their store, Bernstein edited the caption to read Correction. These are from Etsy and I totally thought they were vintage but they are made to order. Someone on my team ordered them for me a while back and I will not be making them. So blaming the team. In August of 2020, a Brooklyn lingerie store alleged that Bernstein had copied their signature design which they used on tissue packaging and used it on swimwear as print wallpaper. Bernstein has also been known to supposedly bully a Poshmark seller who was selling swimwear that ended up being an unpublished collection from Bernstein's collaboration with Onia and overall she's kind of been exposed as a shady person in the fashion industry who paraded and uplifted herself as a girl boss when in reality she was copying so many other people and their designs and basically putting smaller companies down and smaller sellers and businesses. The blaming the team part of Daniel Bernstein also reminds me a lot of Rachel Hollis, another supposed girl boss and motivational speaker that I did a whole dedicated video on. So I won't go too much into her career but lately she's received a lot of flak for basically being like I'm a girl boss who's unrelatable and I want to be privileged and unrelatable. I mentioned that there's a sweet woman who comes to my house twice a week and cleans. She's my house cleaner. She cleans the toilets.  What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable? So so many of these prominent women who had branded themselves as girl bosses making major changes in major industries ended up falling right into the status quo exploiting people not creating safe and equal workplaces and even going to the point of lying, stealing and ripping people off. But alas the term girl boss picked up traction initially for this revolutionary idea that more women should be in power or hold executive positions in the workplace because you know men in the workplace are always referred to as boy bosses so it just makes sense. But very soon after this phrase began to gain traction using the term girl boss became a strategic way to promote your business. Buy from my company because I'm a cool millennial and chic girl boss. Support a girl boss company because a girl boss company will probably treat workers better. Girl boss branding all of a sudden became synonymous with a more ethical company or a more empowered company which is just interesting in itself and a lot of companies strategically branded themselves as the girl boss clothing company the girl boss media company to tap into the millennial women niche and grow their business off of that demographic. Not only were you empowering girl bosses through buying from their company but you felt more empowered as a customer too because if they could do it why couldn't you and it was that inspirational message that so many women resonated with and why so many people chose to buy from a girl boss company statistics show that millennials are far more interested in ethical businesses and buying ethically than their predecessors. We've seen companies rise up that are way more focused on ethics or that are focused on supporting small businesses like Etsy rise to the forefront with the millennial purchase. Millennials care much more than other generations about their dollar counting towards something meaningful that could possibly help society but unfortunately that has been exploited that entire value has been exploited by companies who parade themselves as being ethical who practice greenwashing or even practice pseudoscience in pretending to be the more natural healthier options in order to get the millennial dollar. The girl boss rhetoric was used in a similar way to get purchasing power from millennials by convincing millennials that this girl boss company would somehow be a more ethical company and um yeah that worked out. The more you look into the girl boss phrase and who has historically used the term girl boss it becomes glaringly obvious that girl boss was never a very inclusive phrase and seemed to be reserved solely for cis white women. All of the girl bosses are white women marketing the girl boss concept to more white women. For example two former employees of refinery 29 told cnn businesses Carrie Flynn that girl boss barbridge of refinery 29 would reject photos of black or plus sized models deeming them off-brand and this is something barbridge basically admitted to cnn telling cnn that the brand's shortcomings came at the detriment of black women and women of color in particular. Okay then fix it maybe if you're already aware of this shortcoming. Another girl boss founder of the company man repeller issued an instagram apology on the lack of diversity in her company so this whole inclusion girl boss empowerment thing. How is that working out? Another girl boss CEO of band.do was investigated by buzzfeed to foster a racist mean girls environment in the company. So wow surprise surprise the inclusion of one woman at the top of a company does not mean the inclusion for all.  The wing is part co-working part social club part community space exclusively designed for women. This is the wing part pseudo sorority part co-working space part instagram fever dream articles recounting stories of racism low wages and the failed promise of a feminist workplace began popping up left and right at the start of this year. One particular instagram account at flew the coop is gathering stories of former space staff who were mistreated and underpaid during their employment at the wing. With a non-disclosure agreement in place this account gives former employees a platform to speak about their experiences with anonymity. These employees were sold on the same feminist utopia as the one you saw me enjoying earlier but instead of the opportunities they were promised they were just taken advantage of. Even Reformation a brand I used to love but could never afford basically the cool girl clothing brand was exposed by former employees for a racist culture that pushed out black employees. What the heck?  These company practices got so bad that by mid 2020 eight female founders had to step down from companies they were leading because of these issues literally what the fuck but as this corporate girl boss facade was beginning to show cracks the phrase was simultaneously taking off and soon after more and more brands got a hold of it and realized the potential it yields and the term girl boss was even further commodified by influencers and instagram brands that all wanted to sell you the idea of women empowerment not the real thing just the idea of it it was like this trickle down effect like a pyramid of sorts where at the top you had women CEOs who kind of coined the phrase girl boss and used it to sell books and build media companies then you had companies built by women parading the term girl boss as a way to brand themselves then after that you had influencers using the term girl boss and instagram brands and then at the very bottom bottom of this pyramid you had pyramid schemes using the term girl boss and that's when things really hit rock bottom if you will MLMs and MLM reps have notoriously adopted the term hashtag girl boss as a way to brand their MLM companies as for women because women are targeted by a lot of MLM companies for recruitment even though we know most people in MLMs lose money by adopting the hashtag girl boss or hashtag boss babe these companies could basically convince MLM reps you are indeed a boss babe you are indeed empowering yourself through purchasing our starter kit and cold messaging people on social media i personally feel like the girl boss rhetoric has helped the MLM industry exponentially because it has basically allowed MLMs to convince their reps that they are empowering themselves through involving themselves in a network marketing company their whole team or upline or downline is filled with mostly women so we're all a girl team we're all boss babes empowering one another they're told to target and recruit more women depending on what MLM it is but a lot of MLM companies like unique doTERRA monay all target majority women so by using the term boss babe you feel like you're empowering other women too through recruiting them at this point boss babe was not only commodified but turned into an exploitative phrase as a way to exploit women's desires to feel empowered and successful for the benefit of the companies that they're buying into but additionally this rock bottom began a new wave of what i would probably call girl boss cringe which even the phrase cringe itself i feel like is silly to use because whom i to say what's cringy and what's not cringy if you're doing something in your life that's making you happy go for it post about it all that but why i would call this era of girl boss the MLM rep era of girl boss girl boss cringe is because so many MLM reps begin posting on social media using the hashtag girl boss or boss babe basically taking the phrase and not actually attributing any further or deeper meaning to it besides look at this flashy life that i'm living look at this girl boss life look at my girl boss team look at my girl boss trips look at my girl boss car and all of a sudden girl boss became completely intertwined with materialism so here are some posts of what i would personally call girl boss cringe better together what do flight attendants chiropractors financial analysts bloggers career women influencers virtual assistants stay-at-home moms and hairstylists have in common they're all working this business with me this community is unreal with its support and encouragement if you're thinking your current friends are talking about you as soon as you leave the table well then girlfriend it's time for a new table and you can sit with us today's forecast 100 chance of winning as i close out my sixth month in this business i've looked back at where i started and i'm amazed at what this business has given me in such a short time i've gained more confidence in myself i'm better at time management and prioritizing than i've ever been i've built so many new relationships and found the most supportive and inspiring group of women yes we sell shampoo but we also help people regain confidence in themselves and impact people's lives i know it's hard to understand or believe in something you've never tried so you just have to trust me we are in the business of gratitude and i'm filled with that every day because of this opportunity hi beautiful souls let me tell you a little bit about my story yada yada yada blah blah i'm a boss babe moe money moe money with having a side business i don't feel guilty taking those random shopping days i get paid every Friday on the 15th i get a bonus trek that's five times i'm getting paid a month on a job that i enjoy and have fun doing it do you need extra cash do you need a community of women behind you ask me how to join my team i'm here to answer questions you may have ask yourself if what you're doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow on Friday i found out our team is currently ranked number 52 out of 450 thousand other teams in our company if you've been on the fence considering joining our team and starting your own online coaching business i'd love to help you get started click the link in my bio interested in coaching and fill out the form this could be the thing that completely changes your life for the better like it has for me and so many other incredible people it's social media posts that basically overly play into the girl boss persona and the repercussion of this is that girl boss pretty soon after although it was already on its way out just lost all meaning now the term girl boss is basically meaningless and an internet meme and a joke now people make fun of women who call themselves girl bosses even if the movement started out from a positive intention at this point it's been so overly commodified and it's been made into this materialistic and performative hashtag the train in the background sorry if you can hear it so soon after the wave of girl boss cringe the hashtag girl boss trend began to die down so what is the girl boss movement really the girl boss movement is woke capitalism there was nothing more meaningful and deeper about the movement there was no true focus on change it was all kind of just performative feminism about taking an individualistic approach to achieving some sort of monetary success and i also have to point out the term girl boss girl boss was used for CEOs isn't that a little demeaning are we not like a little sketched out by that same thing with boss babe i don't think it's that much better how many men call themselves boss bros in fact i would love to see that actually the hashtag boss bro so the end of girl bosses is actually a pretty good thing and let's hope in the future women can be bosses without having to put the label girl in front of it and that's all i have to say on the evolution of the girl boss and the rise and fall of the boss babe trend if you enjoyed this video don't forget to subscribe and give this video a like and if you made it this far in the video comment gaslight gate keep girl boss to confuse a lot of people who haven't made it this far and i will catch you in the next video bye


Heaven and Earth, make our spirit spacious enough for hope, for confidence in your vision of love. But brothers and sisters, the house is on fire and it's time to wake up and get bold. Religious liberals and religious conservatives have something in common. They're nostalgic for days that are never coming back. In almost every congregation, there's a small number of people who are holding everybody else hostage with some money. And what happens is everybody's afraid that if we offend one or two people, one or two families, if we say something they don't like, then we're going to go out of business. Can I tell you something? No one who's walking on eggshells has ever been bold. What does your local church need to be more effective in its ministry? We need to be a little more daring. I think that the social interactions and the conversations that can happen in safe places are so much more powerful than what you can just do inside your own head and in your own spirit. Not that those aren't important things too. They are, of course, but real power and real impact can come from a community. So to talk about the differences and learn from those in a cosmopolitan approach, to really reconcile our differences and learn even more what to do next, how can we create safe and brave spaces? Because being just a safe space isn't enough. It doesn't require us to do anything that we don't want to do. So how can we transgress from a safe space to a brave space? And so, again, you can say we got a lot of older people. That's really a hindrance. Hindrance is in your mind. You get some older people who get bold. Older and bolder is a good combination. Ask God, how could I be bolder?  What stands in our way? Write down on the piece of paper whatever it is that hinders you.


Good evening, everyone. We're very happy that you chose this hour session. It's last session of last day, but thank you for coming. So our topic is using CFCR to manage Kubernetes cluster. If you come here for using Kubo to manage Kubernetes clusters, don't freak out. Project has been renamed this September after we submit talks, so now the new name is Cloud Foundry Container Runtime. And a little bit about me. My name is Alexander Stinko. I work at Pivotal. I work on this project since it started. So last year in December, we started it, and we named it Kubo that time. And then this September, we got renamed, and it got split to open source, only part, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime and commercial part, Pivotal Container Service, which I'm working right now. Hi, I'm Brandon Nolan. I'm a principal software engineer at Pivotal. I joined Pivotal about six months ago and started working on the Kubo project. And I've currently transferred with Alexandra onto the PKS team. So here's our agenda for today. The demo is quite involved a lot, so I'm just going to get straight into it. So for those of you who do not know what CFCR is, it's the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime. It's an open source software project, which is part of Cloud Foundry, and allows the deployment of vanilla Kubernetes clusters using Bosch. The major, the initial founders of the project were Pivotal, Google, and VMware. And we've since been joined with a dedicated developer from Swisscom, but it is an open source project, and we are looking for contributors, people to commit issues, and PRs. So some of you may be familiar with the Cloud Foundry application runtime. And I think initially, when in Pivotal and within Cloud Foundry, people started to talk about supporting containers. There was a decision, well, is this the end of the application runtime? And it's not. The application runtime, we don't see it as an or, it's an and situation. So application runtime and container runtime still fit together. So we have a lot of Cloud Foundry customers who've been using the application runtime to deploy cloud native applications. But it's a very highly opinionated framework. They're very happy working within that framework. But it's not suited for all types of workloads. You have a lot of legacy applications that people don't want to port to new code. And then you have third-party applications that are delivered by containers, and you want to be able to run them in applications that have very complex networking or persistence requirements. And they don't fit within the highly opinionated framework of the application runtime. Why Kubernetes? So for the types of workloads that we're looking at, Kubernetes is the obvious choice. It's the de facto container orchestration engine. And then why part of Cloud Foundry? So we have customers that love the Cloud Foundry operator experience. They're very happy with how they can manage their elastic runtime application runtime instances within Cloud Foundry. And they want the same experience operating Cloud Foundry app or container runtime for Kubernetes. So they want a simple way to deploy, simple way to upgrade, a simple way to apply security patches, and a simple way to maintain the health of their VM infrastructure. So the problems we're trying to solve with CFCR. So I think we've all seen that the installation of Kubernetes has become pretty straightforward. We saw Kelsey the other day create a cluster from this phone. But day two is not so easy, particularly if you're managing your own Kubernetes clusters, that how do you upgrade those clusters? How do you deal with CVs on the underlying operating system? And what Kubernetes keeps your applications up and running? What keeps Kubernetes running? What's monitoring the VMs that your master's, nodes, and etcd is running on? And high availability doesn't come out of the box still with Kubernetes. It's left up to yourself under a lot of patterns. So as I said, we are powered by Bosch. So Bosch is a Cloud Foundry project. It's quite a mature project. I think it's been around for five years. It's based on the Google Borg idea of something that manages infrastructure. So we've got Borg, Kubernetes together. They want to be mates. And that's where we get the Cloud Foundry container runtime. So as I said, Bosch is a tool for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of these distributed systems. So teams can create their own software releases that are deployable in a very repeatable fashion. And the operators can deploy these software releases very consistently in a reproducible manager. They're going to do so very, very quickly. Via the CPI, the Cloud Provider Interface in Bosch, it has multi-IaaS support. For CFCR, we have support at the moment for four IaaS. It's GCP, AWS, OpenStack, and vSphere. And then it uses this OSM outsell infrastructure, which is a very base-level operating system, which I'll talk a little bit more later on, which helps to standardize deployments across all of these Cloud platforms. So operation teams find they're incredibly efficient when they're using Bosch. So for CFCR, CFCR is actually just a Bosch release of Kubernetes. So it's made up of three particular component parts, the NETCD release, the standard Docker release, which is already part of Cloud Foundry and OpenSource Docker Bosch release, and then the Kubernetes Bosch release, Kubo release. Each release is for a specific version of Kubernetes. The CFCR plan to keep up to date with each of the Kubernetes releases were currently on 184. It plans to track the Kubernetes version in use by GKE. One of the ideas when Google came on board was that they wanted something where people could run containers in a platform that was very, very similar to what was running in GKE. It has high availability in VM healing through Bosch and ED scaling of the VMs. And there's a very defined release upgrade pattern from Bosch. So we're going to jump into the demo now. And what I had intended to show was an initial installation. But as I said, initial installation is very easy. So I've actually pre-installed a Bosch deployment here. And I'll run through how I actually did that Bosch deployment. As you can see, it took about nine minutes to do. So we thought it might be kind of a little bit of a waste of time for the demo. So it's a bit awkward. So this is using the Bosch CLI where we're deploying a deployment called KubeCon. We're using an initial YAML, which is a deployment manifest which describes the Kubernetes cluster we want to deploy. In our particular instance, this Kubernetes cluster is a single SD node, two master nodes, and three worker nodes. It also takes a variable, which is the Kubernetes master host, which is a value that is just put on the SSL certificate that is serving the API server on both the master nodes. Bosch will try to deploy this. Since there's actually no change in deployment, it'll just say, oh, everything is the same. Your VM infrastructure looks like the deployment as it already is. So just a second. Now I have a script here where when I created the cluster, we use an internal thing within Bosch called credit, which, again, I'll talk a little bit more later on, to store the SSL certificate, the credentials. And this is just a script that extracts those bad out and uses kubectl config to set them. So we set a Kubernetes configuration. We see we've got our cluster here. So I've just split the screen here at the top. We've got a Kubernetes cluster. And then at the bottom, we just have something that's showing the version and the node. So three nodes, as I said. And I'm going to attempt now. No. Oh, gee, sorry. Yeah, could you just grab that for a second? For some reason, it's hard to type. It's hard to type. I'll put one hand here. So I'm just going to deploy an application here. Thank you. So here's a simple EngineX application in Kubernetes. We're going to deploy this. So we're going to kubectl apply. We're going to hope it rolls out, depending on the network now. Please stop. It may not roll out. Stop all Wi-Fi. But while that's rolling out, I'm going to start an upgrade of the version of Kubernetes. So a new version of Kubernetes has come out.  So here's the operation file. So an operation file is just a patch mechanism that Bosch uses to patch a particular deployment manifest. You could go in and just edit the manifest, but I'm just selling this operation file for this particular reason. It's easier. Don't have to type and go into VI. So what I'm doing here is I'm taking the Kubo version, and I'm changing the Kubo version from 0.8.0, which was the release that had Kubernetes 1.801 to Kubo 0.8.1, which is the release that has Kubernetes 1.8.2. I'm running the same deploy command we had earlier on, where I'm targeting the same deployment, the same initial deployment YAML. But I have an operations file, which is my upgrade operations file. Bosch will now tell me that the difference between my manifests or what's going to happen is that you're going to upgrade the Kubo version from 0.8.0 to 0.8.1. So I'm going to start that off. And if the demo gods are with us, we're going to see that the timeout did fail, but maybe in the background it's actually. So it's container creating still. What I'm going to do is I'm going to run this command, which won't start at the moment, but in a few seconds after it's downloaded, the nginx container should start. And what that's going to do is it's going to pull the nginx server every five seconds and just print out the HTTP status and the date. Alex is going to take over now and show the capacity, how we scale a cluster. So he's a cluster in GCP. What we'll look for when we come back here is that the server version will upgrade to 1.8.2, and the node versions will start to roll to 1.8.2 as well. Yes, so let's see. Now on GCP, on BystronBox, and let's see what do I have. I have two deployments. So one I call production, Kubo, and one is staging, Kubo staging. So one production runs with four workers, staging with three workers, and this is fine. And let's see what happens. So I have QCTL running, checking something. And actually, I get one bonus demo for you because I will also delete a node on staging. So I choose this node, OK, gcloud delete, but gcloud GCP deletes VMs for three minutes. So it will start deleting. And also, I want to scale production because why not? Everyone wants to. I anticipate a huge load. I won't show any applications because each one's application is going to stop. It's not our job, but it's from 4 to 10. And then I do Bosch with deployment and Kubo, deploy production. And you see similar output at branch out, but I scale working assets from 4 to 10. Yeah, scale. And we'll be able to see it. I will think how to show the QCTL with nodes brought later. And for now, it will just run. So let's go back to Brandus node. So I can see that application is running. And you can see it's getting every second. It's getting new request, HTP OK. Everything is fine. Master is updating. And while master is updating, I will talk a little bit more about Bosch and all primitives that parts of the Bosch. So one thing that Bosch is based on. The summer's Kubernetes is based on work. And they are two very close systems. But Kubernetes manages containers. Bosch manages VMs. And they have similar primitives. And some names are the same. So like Kubernetes has deployments, Bosch has deployments. By trying in node containers, it's trying VMs. And so it's running system. The same as in Kubernetes. Deployment is running system. But here it's VM with this, some network configuration, some releases that's running on top of it, and some process running on top of VMs. And it's all mounted by Bosch. So Bosch checks if it's running. If it's not running, it will try to restart. If it's not restarting, it will try to restart VM. And does its magic. And while I was talking, I could see that master got upgraded to 1.8.2. And deployment is defined by deployment manifest that we saw. It's declarative. The same as in Kubernetes, it's declarative. You have to specify what you want to achieve. I want to achieve 10 nodes in my production cluster and some specific versions. It also has some VM layout. But it's cloud agnostic. So you don't have to say, for example, in AWS, it has a variability zone. And it's all principles across every IS. And bare metal as well. So you just say some Bosch primitives, network, availability zone. And it will do everything for you. And it runs version packages called releases. And it runs on top of base images called stem cells. And some parameters that you can configure how the series will run. For example, authorization mode for Kubernetes, RBAC, or AIBAC. And let's talk about releases. So releases, it's versioned packages which contains software binaries. And everything, actually, every binaries is required to start class. And it's not only software binaries, but also Docker releases, for example, for Kubernetes, like KubeDNS. And software packages, like Kubernetes itself. Then definition of properties for all these jobs. And then it self-contains. So at any point, you can download this big turbo and upload to any cloud. And if it doesn't have access to internet, it will still run correctly. Because it all has everything with it. And one more important thing is that you can actually rebuild it at any time. It has some definitions. And all those software packages blobs uploaded to the S3 or GCS. And you can rebuild at any time and reproduce this deployment. And a while was talking. No started to be updated. And schedule disabled. Not got codonned. So now it's starting. It started <IP_ADDRESS>.2. And other nodes are getting updated. And let's take a quick look here. So we see that this VM died. Work is starting. And I will try to close this and see if it's coding. I will focus later on the keepsitl context part that will start VMs. And one more thing that I forgot to mention that, as you can see on production, I run 1.0.2. And here I run <IP_ADDRESS> on staging. And it's important because everything is self-contained. So you can run multiple versions with Bosch. No problems. It's Bosch keeps all the software packages. So if it has a system running and you scale it, it will use existing packages that you already uploaded. Let's go back to this. Come on. Still running. Still running. And jobs are part of the release. It describes single running service, like Kubelet, or Kubernetes API, or Docker. And it has some life cycle scripts, like pre-start script, and start-stop script, obviously. But Bosch expects that you can just kill minus nine any service and it will restart it. And drain scripts. So for example, for Kubelet, it's Cardon and Drain. Also, it's monitors using Monit. So most of the releases just use PID files. But you can use something more complicated with Monit. And it has some configuration, again, defined by property. So like kubeconfig, something else. And stem cell. So you use the same release to upload to any cloud or bare metal. And stem cell, the images are defined by the cloud, but impose it as a version. And each version has the same software on each cloud. So for example, you have stem cell 3, 4, 4, 5, and it has the same software, like base software core, on each cloud. And Bosch team manages it. And in case of CVE, they release update version in 48 hours, in up to 48 hours, which is they released quicker. So you got this new stem cell update immediately. And this leads to same manifest. As I said, manifest can be the same for each cloud, except some cloud-specific things like cloud provider for Kubernetes, but for other releases, it can be the same. And credit hub, which Brandon mentioned. So you need to stock some credentials. And some credentials, you don't even care. Some passwords, they're generated for a CD password. You don't care about this password for a CD. You just care that it's there. What are the certificates for Kubernetes for KubeStl? You don't care what is there. And what is the certificate for Kubernetes API? You care about CSR, but not about certificates. So credit hub manages all of it. It generates credentials for each new deployment. So you deploy new deployment, it will generate credentials. If you update deployment, it has the same credentials, which are defined in manifest. You can set credentials manually. And not only credentials, you can store everything. It's config storage. And you can easily rotate credentials. So you, for example, generate a certificate, and it will restart KubeStl certificate. It will reset only KubeNet and not Master, because Master doesn't care about certificate. It cares about CI. And one more thing that it's actually provided by a community face called Bosch. I don't know exact name, but it's Bosch config server. And it's possible to use your own implementation of this config server. So someone uses Svolt, but credit hub serves our things perfectly. And updating is still going. I see that it's scheduled and disabled. We'll wait for one minute. OK. And yeah, maybe I'll check quickly my GCP. Oh, no. But, yeah. Yeah, something went wrong. The important part is that you can always restart it, and the system is still running. It's some problem with scripts. I, some time out. Come on. I. Yes, quota. I forgot about quotas. Shouldn't have scales that much. So, sorry, sorry. But let's see. It's, class is still running. And, yeah, it still runs. It was able to run nine, but not 10. What a mistake.  So as I said, you can proceed with it. Maybe delete some instances, request quotas, run in different zone, like, multiple ways. Yeah, demo guts, demo guts. I forgot to mention them. That was my mistake. OK, let's proceed. So, vision for class foundry container runtime. We focused on making operators happy. Kubernetes makes developers happy. They can develop their workloads, and no problems with it. But operators, they have some problems, and we want to make them happy. They want to, they don't need to think too much about day two. It's Bosch will match it, and it will be very simple. And it's simple. And we wanted to keep developers happy. We wanted vanilla Kubernetes. So one way was, maintain compatibility with GKE. If it can run on CFCR, it should be able to run on GKE. Unless you don't have load balancers on your ISN, or maybe change volume type, but in general, it should work. And then, when it's conformals was announced, we passed conformals test. We found one bug in conformals test, and there was some issue. It has been fixed since then. And Steam, right now, working on RISD-R10. It's not 1.0. They still have some issues in self-automation. And this is going to be RISD today, or maybe next week. I don't know. Exactly. So they worked on search catalog integration. And the important part was that they need to configure. Something was missing in Kubernetes configuration, maybe. And they just run in pipeline. So in pipeline, we deployed each startup of the cluster. We deployed search catalog, and see that everything deployed successfully. Then guarantees RISD upgrades. Again, add this to pipeline. So we can upgrade from 0.9 to 0.10. No problems. It's tested in pipeline. And test resurrection in pipeline as well. Bosch does it for you, but does it for everyone. But we want to test it and see that it's every commit passes and we hand-broke resurrection in this configured cluster. Should we come back to? You're back, maybe, June. Hey. Explore it. So we can see our upgrade of Kubernetes has completed. Our applications continued running. We're now at version 1.8.2. So we're going to do a very, very similar process. And we'll probably come up with where we're going to upgrade the stem cell this time. So as Alexander mentioned, the stem cell is kind of a base OS image. We have a 48-hour turnaround agreement, generally managed by Pivotal, where any CV will be patched within the 48-hour period. So our stem cell, we have an operations file here again, which, again, is just changing the version number stem cell. I've got the same upgrade operations file. And I'm going to apply both of these to the initial deployment YAML. So normally what would happen is when you make a change to a deployment, you'll save that old deployment locally. But just for the demo purposes here and for scripting purposes, I'm just applying the same operation files again and again and again. But when we look at what happens in the deployment, the only change between this deployment now is that the stem cell version has been upgraded. Now, that's going to go and roll all the bits of the components of the system with that new version of the OS image. There's nothing to really see in terms of the actual demonstration here, but it's just to show that that's the functionality you get. It will shut down node, then start node again with new OS image. Okay, let's go back to the future. So what CFCR focuses after 0.10, they focus on security, availability, so multi-AZ. I know that some customers run in multi-AZ setup, but the thing is that we want to run in pipeline again. We want to test it verify it. It works fine and all the affinity and affinity rules work, so we want to test it. And then define process about 48 hours CVE patches. So if some CVE happens in Kubernetes, in Docker, in HCD, we can patch it and update it and maybe how we can automate. And then define process about one week, when it's upgrade, so we can process, maybe patch it after mate, we'll see. And now commercial part, so if you want to pay our bills, commercial part and I have stickers with this. So peer-to-container service, when you're doing like in bigger organization, often small, you don't have one cluster, you have multiple clusters. And imagine them using YAML, it's not interesting. No one wants to be enterprise YAML developer. So we create PKS so you can manage multiple clusters. It gives on-demand provisioning, so we can provision new cluster with simple select amount and it just starts cluster and you can upgrade and do all the same that CFCR can do because it runs on top of open source Kubernetes, package in open source CFCR. And it's multi-cloud, for now we support GCP and vSphere and it's enterprise-raised, it has multiple VM integrations like SXT, Harbor, Verobs, Webfront and more, which didn't fit in one slide. You should have split multiple slides. And everything's still managed by Bosch, so no additional things, it still manages CFCR managed by Bosch and control access to, control beta access and no hots. And it will be available mid-December, so it was announced on spring one this week. So it will be available starting 15th of December. Ask VMware folks who are here or contact Piotl if you want to have access. And these are links, so documentation, code with CFCR, it's still called Kubo, we haven't renamed it. We know what should be the correct name for CFCR. And then I use Kubo deployment to deploy my cluster on GCP. I just modified it a little bit to change amount of instances. Then Slack, team is using this Slack, open source Slack and demo for the stats cluster on VirtualBox so you can start and see how it's working. And by the way, it's still upgrading because it needs to shut down VM start container, even if it's inside the VirtualBox. And outside, it's green, it's green. I mean, it's always green. So this is just something very important in terms of what Alexander was mentioning about particular things that are coming in the future. So particularly security, operation alerts, or multi AZ that unless we have this in a pipeline where it's fully automated and tested for every single release, we don't guarantee or don't say it's supported. So while people are running multi AZ, it's not in the pipeline yet. So that's why we're not saying that it's there. We have GCP, V-Sphere, AWS and OpenStack, some custom configurations for, oh no, okay, no one saw that. Yeah, demo gods, forgot to say it, does get demo gods. Okay, that's it. We open for questions and we leave in tomorrow so we will hand out after this talks. Yes, this is a question. Question about, you can, Diego, for people who don't know, it's container run times that might just call for the application runtime. Call for the application runtime can run together with call for the container runtime, but it's not required. So it's Diego still stays in application runtime. Container runtime runs Kubernetes and it can run separately. It can run together and reuse some features from call for the application. So no, so not exactly. Container runtime is completely independent. For the initial release container runtime we're operating a bring your own load balancer. So initially internally within the clusters we were deploying HA proxy load balancing in the demo that I've shown here. I'm running a HA proxy load balancer on my local machine and we're rooting. And then in GCP or V-Sphere, particularly with the latest version of NSXT, there'll be load balancer support there as well. So while you can, if you are running Cloud Foundry or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you can use the TCP router or the Go router, but it's not a requirement. And there's no interdependencies. There's just additional hooks that allow you to use it if you want to use it. If you want to use it, you can use it. You don't have to use it. Yes? It's a separate add-on and it's so right now it's only for PQS and I'm not sure. Maybe you can get it somehow for, I used this Cloud Foundry container runtime, but right now it's only... So NSXT is a commercial product from VMware. The VMware folks might be able to give some more information about it. You could run it using container runtime, you could integrate it yourself. The default is Flannel. Flannel is a very open, flat network for containers. NSXT has a lot more enterprise-y type features around security, firewalling, and controlling that network of your containers internally. So that's where there's a lot of value out for the enterprise with NSXT. And NSXT integration part is not open source, I think. I don't know, but I think yes. Yes? Yes, VMware images, so it's it. So stem cells are built by... In general, you want to use stem cells built by Bosch team and for Amazon they use AMIs, for GCPs they use Google images, for Azure images, I don't know how they call it. For vSphere, like big turbos, I forgot. And for Opus, like again, big turbos. So they build it. If you really want, you can build your own stem cell, but if you really, really want, I don't know. I don't want to manage it and keep against CVs. So... What are the lessons there? Ubuntu and CentOS are supported by Bosch team. Then SUSE supports SUSE stem cell and Windows stem cell. Also, we have Windows stem cell, but we don't have Kubernetes for Windows yet because it's not like, I think it's in bad condition Windows. Yes? Okay. So that's good question. So let's, I will show my manifest. So I will show my manifest, so production, and I have this az in YAML, which is, for now, it's Z1. But I can do, if I would be really sure I would use Z2, Z3, Z4, and it's all defined in specific configuration that called CloudConfig. So I will show CloudConfig. I hope it doesn't have any secrets. It has my source account. Oh, no. So we have this types of VM. So it's like N1 standard, and I have az, which is az. It's US West 1. So I can have US West 1b, it will be Z2, and for example, Formazont will be different, for VMware, it will be different, and it's still called Z1 in my manifest, but in CloudConfig it will be different. Does that answer your question? So usually you just specify the az in the manifest that you specify, okay, I deploy it on multiple azs, and I don't care how they separate against it. Bosch does it for me, I don't care. It separates them, it checks, okay, can I deploy here? Usually it separates them evenly, but if it can deploy in some az, like Lemiso, it will deploy in different az more nodes. Does this answer your question? Good. Any more? Thank you, thank you. We have stickers, and we'll hang around for some time.


About two or three months after I left my career in biotechnology that I met, Guruji. And our first meeting was kind of extraordinary. He asked me to sing a short composition. And after I finished my composition, he said, I had potential, but he rejected everything I sang. And mind you, I had been learning music for about 30 years before that. And he said, if you think that's classical music, that's really not classical music. And he said that if you're willing to unlearn everything you've learned before and start over again, I'm willing to take you on as my student. And actually, truthfully, I was quite happy that there was someone who was actually willing to make that effort and make that commitment to me to teach me all that he knew. So we began our lessons. And what surprised me was in the very second lesson, he wrote me this letter. And what struck me about this letter was he said, I really don't need anything for myself. But what I really want is to propagate this music. He shared with me all those musicians in the past who had not only created great music, but also did a lot to propagate and preserve music. And he was one of those. And he said, I want to help preserve this music. Will you help me? And if you will help me, I'm ready to move in with you in your house, me and my wife, and commit ourselves to this journey. A few months later, they moved in with us. And so we began our lessons. We spent a lot of our time writing. It was a great collaboration. And what was really amazing was Guruji had this amazing scientific approach to teaching art and having been trained as a scientist for many years. I was really attracted by that. And I had learned from six other teachers before. And this was unusual for me. And I felt I needed to somehow document this and preserve this and share it with everybody else. We wrote a whole bunch of books and these got published last year. It was a series of three volumes that we published. Then after that, we have a whole bunch of other projects that we're doing. We've written another book. We're waiting to publish that. What Guruji has done is, as I said, he's both a musician and a musicologist. And he has done extensive research on various styles of music. He's written all these things in Marathi.  And I think of all the books he's written over 30 books. And of these books, there are about six books that I really think are jewels and that need to be shared with the world. And I'm the process of translating this into English. This is so much about all the books that we're writing. But what about his music? I asked myself, what is it that I really like about his music? I'd learned from so many others. It was only over the years that I realized it was that oneness with sound that I experienced every time, time and again. That ecstasy that we experienced in class, every time, I'd always learned something new, something magnificent from him. And it was his love for melody, for sur, and that perfect sur that he really cared about. We'd like to give you a short glimpse into what we do. Shama, ajahu. Ay-e-shama. Ut-din-bi-t. Din-bi-t. Shama. Ut-din-bi-t. Ajahu. Shama. Shama. Shama. Ajahu. Ajahu. Ajahu. Ajahu.