Section 20 of Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871, 1888. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Sue Anderson. Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871, 1888, by Francis Rowe. Section 20, Letters from 1888, Part 1. Fort Shaw, Montana Territory, May, 1888. Such upheaval orders have been coming to the post the past few days. Some of us wonder if there has not been an earthquake, and can only sit around and wait in a numb sort of way for whatever may come next. General Bork, who had been Colonel of the Regiment, you know, has been appointed a Brigadier-General, and is to command the Department of the Platt, with headquarters at Omaha, Nebraska. This might have affected Fay under any circumstances, as a new Colonel has the privilege of selecting his own staff officers, but General Bork, as soon as he received the telegram telling of his appointment, told Fay that he should ask for him as aide to camp. This will take us to Omaha also, and I am almost heartbroken over it, as it will be a wretched life for me, cooped up in a noisy city. At the same time, I am delighted that Fay will have, for four years, the fine staff position. These appointments are complementary, and considered most desirable. The real stirrup, however, came with orders for the Regiment to go to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, for that effects about everyone here. General Munson, who relieves General Bork as Colonel of the Regiment, is in St. Paul and is well known as Inspector General of this Department, which perhaps is not the most flattering introduction he could have to his new Regiment. He telegraphed as soon as promoted that he desired Fay to continue as adjutant, but, of course, to be on the staff of a General is far in advance of being on the staff of a Colonel. The Colonel commands only his own Regiment, sometimes not all of that, as when companies are stationed at other posts and headquarters, whereas a Brigadier General has command of a Department consisting of many Army posts and many Regiments. The one thing that distresses me most of all is that I have to part from my horse. This is what makes me so rebellious. Before aside from my own personal loss, I have great sorrow for the poor, dumb animal that will suffer so much with strangers who will not understand him. No one has ridden or driven him for two years but myself, and he has been tractable and lovable always. During very cold weather, when perhaps he would be too frisky, I have allowed him to play in the yard back of the house until all superfluous spirits have been kicked and snorted off, after which I could have a ride in peace and safety. Faye thinks that he is entirely too nervous ever to take kindly to city sights and sounds that the fretting and the heat might kill him. So it has been decided that, once again, we will sell everything, both horses and all things pertaining to them, reserving our saddles only. Every piece of furniture will be sold also, as we do not propose to keep house at all while in Omaha. How I envy our friends who will go to Fort Snelling. We have always been told that it is such a beautiful post, and the people of St. Paul and Minneapolis are most charming. It seems so funny that the regiment should be sent to Snelling, just as Colonel Munson was promoted to it. He will have to move six miles only. We know that when we leave Fort Shaw we will go from the old army life of the West, that if we ever come back it will be two unfamiliar scenes and a new condition of things. We have seen the passing of the Buffalo and other game, and the Indian seems to be passing also. But I must confess that I have no regret for the Indians. There are still too many of them. End of letter. Fort Shaw, Montana Territory, May 1888. There can be only two more days at this dear old post where we have been so happy, and I want those to pass as quickly as possible and have some of the misery over. Our house is perfectly forlorn, with just a few absolute necessaries in it for our use while here. Everything has been sold or given away, and all that is left to us are our trunks and army chests. From fine china and a few pieces of cut glass I kept, and even those are packed in small boxes and in the chests. The general selling out business has been funny. No one in the regiment possessed many things that they cared to move east with them, and as we did not desire to turn our houses into second hand shops where people could handle and make remarks about things we had treasured, it was decided that everything to be sold should be moved to the large hall where enlisted men could attend to the shop business. Our only purchases were people from Sun River Crossing and a few ranches that are at some distance from the post, and it was soon discovered that anything at all nice was passed by them, so we became sharp, bunching the worthless with the good, and that worked beautifully and things sold fast. These moves are of the greatest importance to army officers, and many times the change of station is a mere nothing in comparison to the refitting of a house, something that is never taken into consideration when the pay of the army is under discussion. The regiment has been on the frontier ten years, and everything that we had that was at all nice had been sent up from St. Paul at great expense, or purchased in Helena at an exorbitant price. All those things have been disposed of for almost nothing, and when the regiment reaches Fort Snelling, where larger quarters have to be furnished for an almost city life, the officers will be at great expense. Why I am bothered about Fort Snelling I fail to see, as we are not going there, and I certainly have enough troubles of my own to think about. This very morning Mrs. Ames of Sun River Crossing, who now owns Dear Rollo, came up to ask me to show her how to drive him. Just think of that. She talked as though she had been deceived, that it was my duty to show her the trick by which I had managed to control the horse, and naturally it would be a delightful pleasure to me to be allowed to drive him once more, and so on. Mrs. Ames said that yesterday she started out with him, intending to come to the post to let me see him. Certainly the delicate feeling expressed in that, but the horse went so fast she became frightened, for it seemed as though the telegraph poles were only a foot apart. She finally got the horse turned around and drove back home, when her husband got in and undertook to drive him, but with no better success, but he too started the horse toward his old home. Mr. Ames then told her to have Rollo put back in the stable until she could get me to show her how to drive him. I almost cried out from pure pity for the poor dumb beast that I knew was suffering so in his longing for his old home and friends who understood him, but for the horse's sake I tried not to break down. I told her that first of all she must teach the horse to love her. That was an awfully hard thing to say, I assure you, and I doubt if the woman understood my meaning after all. When I told her not to pull on his mouth she looked amazed and said why he would run away with me if I didn't, but I assured her that he would not, that he had been taught differently, that he was very nervous and spirited, that the harder she pulled the more excited he would become, that I had simply held him steady no more. I saw that Mrs. Ames did not believe one word that I had said, but I tried to convince her for the sake of the unhappy animal that had been placed at her mercy. I have often met and passed her out on the road, and the horse she drives is a large, handsome animal, and we had supposed that she was a good whip. So when Mr. Ames appeared the other day and said his wife had asked him to come up and buy the sorrel horse for her, we were delighted that such a good home had been found for him, and for Fanny too, Mr. Ames bought the entire outfit. Fanny is beautiful but wholly lacking in affection and can take care of herself any place. All sorts of people have been here for the horses. Some wanted both, others only one, but Faye would not let them go to any of them as he was afraid they would not have the best of care. Rolo had been gone only an hour or so when a young man, a typical Bronco breaker, came to buy him and seemed really distressed because he had been sold. He said that he had broken him when a colt at Mr. Vaughn's. It so happened that Faye was at the adjutant's office and the man asked for me. I was very glad, for I had always wanted to meet the person who had slammed the saddle first on Rolo's back. I told him that it was generally considered at the post that I had broken the horse. I said that he had been made cruelly afraid of a saddle and for a long time after we had bought him he objected to it and to being mounted and I did not consider a horse broken that would do those things. I said also that the horse had not been gated. He interrupted with, why is a pacer? Just as though that settled everything. But I told him that Rolo had three perfectly trained grades of speed, each one of which I had taught him. The young man's face became very red and he looked angry, but I had a beautiful time. It was such a relief to express my opinion to the man just at that time too when I was grieving so for the horse. I saw at once that he was a Bronco breaker from his style of dress. He had on boots a very fine leather with enormously high heels and strapped to them were large, sharp pointed Mexican spurs. His trousers were of leather and very broad at the bottom, and all down the front and outside was some kind of gray fur, chaps, this article of dress is called, and in one hand he held a closely plated stinging black quilt. He wore a plaid shirt and cotton handkerchief around his neck. That describes the man who rode Rolo first, and no wonder the spirited, high-strung coat was suspicious of saddles, men, and things. I watched the man as he rode away. His horse was going at a furious gallop, with ears turned back, as if expecting whip or spur any instant. And the man sat far over on one side, that leg quite straight as though he was standing in the long stirrup, and the other was resting far up on the saddle, which was of the heavy Mexican make with enormous flaps and high round pommel in front. I am most thankful that Rolo has gone beyond that man's reach, as everything about him told of cruelty to horses.  During the years we owned Rolo, he was struck with a whip only once, the time I wanted him to run down a wolf up the river. The great northern railroad runs very near Fort Shaw now, about twenty miles, I think, and that will make it convenient for the moving of the regiment, and all of us, in fact. We will go to St. Paul on the special train with the regiment, for Faye will not be relieved as adjutant until he reaches Fort Snelling, where we will remain for a day or two. It will be a sad trip for me. For I love the west and life at a western post, and the vanities of city life do not seem attractive to me, and I shall miss my army friends too. Perhaps it is a small matter to mention, but since I have been with the army I have ridden twenty-two horses that had never been ridden by a woman before. As I still recollect the gait and disposition of each horse, it seems of some consequence to me, for unbroken as some were I was never unseeded, not once. And a letter. The Paxton Hotel, Omaha, Nebraska, August, 1888. Almost five weeks have passed since we left dear Fort Shaw. During that time we have become more or less accustomed to the restrictions of a small city, but I fancy that I am not the only one of the party from Montana, who is sometimes sized for the Rocky Mountains and the old garrison life. Here we are not of the army, neither are we citizens. General and Mrs. Bork are still dazzled by the brilliancy of the new silver star on the general shoulder straps, and can still smile. Faye says very little, but I know that he often frets over his present monotonous duties and yearns for the regiment, his duties as adjutant of the regiment, the parades, drills, and outdoor life generally that make life so pleasant at a frontier post. Department headquarters is in a government building down by the river, and the offices are most cheerless. All the offices were civilian clothes, and there is not one scrap of uniform to be seen any place, nothing whatever to tell one who is who from the department commander down to delayneat the old Irish messenger. Each one sits at his desk and busies himself over the many neatly tied packages of official papers upon it, and tries to make the world believe that he is happy. But there are confidential talks when it is admitted that life is dreary, the regiment the only place for an energetic officer, and so on. Yet not one of those officers could be induced to give up his detail, for it is always such a compliment to be selected from the many for duty at headquarters. Faye and Lieutenant Travis are on the general's personal staff, the others belong to the department. Just now Faye is away with the department commander who is making an official tour of inspection through his new department, which is large, and includes some fine posts. It is known as the Department of the Platt. Everyone has been most hospitable, particularly the army people at Fort Omaha, a post just beyond the city limits. Mrs. Wheeler, wife of the Colonel in command, gave a dancing reception very soon after we got here, and an elegant dinner a little later on, both for the new brigadier general and his staff. Mrs. Foster, the handsome wife of the Lieutenant Colonel, gave a beautiful luncheon, and the officers of the regiment gave a dance that was pleasant, but their orchestra is far from being as fine as ours. In the city there have been afternoon and evening receptions, and several luncheons, the most charming luncheon of all having been the one given by my friend Mrs. Wheeler at the Union Club. One afternoon each week the club rooms are at the disposal of the wives of its members, and so popular is this way of entertaining, the rooms are usually engaged weeks in advance. The service is really perfect, and the rooms airy and delightfully cool, and cool rooms are great treasures in this hot place. The heat has been almost unbearable to us from the mountains, and one morning I nearly collapsed while having things fitted in the stuffy rooms of a dressmaker. Many of these nouveau riche dress elegantly, and their jewels are splendid. All the women here have such white skins, and by comparison I must look like a Mexican.  Of course there has been much shopping to do, and for a time it was so confusing, to have to select things from a counter with a shop girl staring at me, or perhaps insisting upon my purchasing articles I did not want. For years we had shopped from catalogs, and it was a nice quiet way too. Parasols have bothered me. I would forget to open them in the street, and would invariably leave them in the stores when shopping, and then have to go about looking them up. But this is the first summer I have been east in nine years, and it is not surprising that parasols and things mix me up at times.  I might as well be on them, since I have to hear their buzz and clang both day and night from our rooms here in the hotel. The other morning as I was returning from a ride across the river to Council Bluffs, I heard the shrill notes of a Calliope that reminded me that Fourpaw's Circus was to be in town that day, and that I had promised to go to the afternoon performance with a party of friends. But soon there were other sounds and other thoughts. Of the noise of the car I heard a brass band, and there could be no mistake it was playing strong and full one of Sousa's marches. The march passed of the Rifle Regiment, a march that was written for Faye while he was adjutant of the regiment, and dedicated to the officers and enlisted men of the regiment. For almost three years that one particular march had been the review march of the regiment, that is, it had been played always whenever the regiment had passed in review before the Colonel, Inspector General of the Department, or any official of sufficient rank and authority to review the troops. The car seemed to go miles before it came to a place where I could get off. Every second was most precious, and I jumped down while it was still in motion, receiving a scathing rebuke from the conductor for doing so. I almost ran until I got to the walk nearest the band, where I tagged along with boys, both big and small. The march was played for some time, and no one could possibly imagine how those familiar strains thrilled me. But there was an ever-increasing feeling of indignation that a tawdry, coated circus band sitting in a gilded wagon should presume to play that march, which seemed to belong exclusively to the regiment, and to be associated only with scenes of ceremony and great dignity. The circus men played the piece remarkably well, however, and when it was stopped I came back to the hotel to think matters over and have a heart-to-heart talk with myself. Of course I am more than proud that Faye is an aide to camp, and would not have things different from what they are, but the detail is for four years, and the thought of living in this unattractive place that length of time is crushing. But Faye will undoubtedly have his captaincy by the expiration of the four years, and the anticipation of that is comforting. It is the feeling of loneliness I mind here, of being lost and no one to search for me. I miss the cheery garrison life, the delightful rides, and it may sound funny, but I miss also the little church choir that finally became a joy to me. Sergeant Graves is now leader of the regimental band at Fort Snelling, and Matijasek is in New York, a member of the Damrosch Orchestra. It is still something to wonder over that I should have been on a streetcar that carried me to a circus parade at the precise time the review march was being played. It seems quite as marvelous as my having been seated at a supper table in a faraway ranch in Montana the very night a number of horsebreakers were there, also at the table, and one of them put up Rolo and me to his friends. I shall never forget how queer I felt when I heard myself discussed by perfect strangers in my very presence, not one of whom knew in the least who I was. It made me think that perhaps I was shadowy, invisible, although to myself I did not feel at all that way. Faye wrote to Mrs. Ames about Rolo, thinking that possibly he might buy him back. But Mr. Ames wrote in reply that Rolo had already been sold, because Mrs. Ames had found it impossible to manage him. Also that he was owned by the post-traitor at Fort McGuinness, who was making a pet of him. So as the horse had a good home and gentle treatment, it was once more decided to leave him up in his native mountains. It might have been cruel to have brought him here to suffer from the heat, and to be frightened and ever fretted by the many strange sights and sounds. But I am not satisfied, for the horse had an awful fear of men when ridden or driven by them, and I know he is so unhappy, and wonders why I no longer come to him, and why I do not take him from the strange people who do not understand him. He was a wonderfully playful animal, and sometimes when Miller would be leading the two horses from our yard to the corral, he would turn Rolo loose for a run. That always brought out a number of soldiers to see him rear, lunge, and snort. His turn so quick, his beautiful tawny mane would be tossed from side to side and over his face until he looked like a wild horse. The more the men laughed, the wilder he seemed to get. He never forgot Miller, however, but would be at the corral by the time he got there, and would go to his own stall quietly and without guidance. Poor Rolo. End of letter. Section 21 of Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871, 1888. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sue Anderson. Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871, 1888. By Francis Rowe. Section 21. Letters from 1888, Part 2. Camp near Uinta Mountains, Wyoming Territory, August, 1888. To be back in the mountains and in camp is simply glorious. And to see soldiers walking around wearing the dear old uniform just as we used to see them makes one feel as though old days had returned. The two colored men, Chef and Butler, rather destroy the technique of a military camp, but they seem to be necessary adjuncts. And besides, we are not striving for harmony and effect, but for a fine outing each day to be complete with its own pleasures. It was a novel experience to come to the mountains in a private car. The camp is very complete, as the camp of a department commander should be, and we have everything for our comfort. We are fourteen miles from the Union Pacific Railroad, and six from Fort Bridger, from which posts our tents and supplies came. Our ices sent from there also, and of course the enlisted men are from that garrison. The party consists of General and Mrs. Bork, Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Bork's sister, Mrs. Ord of Omaha, General Stanley Paymaster, Captain Reeves, Judge Advocate, both of the department staff, Lieutenant Travis, Junior Aid to Camp, Fay, and myself. Mrs. Ord is a pretty woman, always wears dainty gowns, and is a favorite with Omaha society people. I know her very well. Still, I hesitated about wearing my short-skirted outing suit, fearing it would shock her. But a day or two after we got here, she said to me, What are we to do about those fish, Mrs. Ray? I always catch the most fish wherever I go, but I hear that you are successful also. So with high spirits we started out by ourselves that very morning, every one laughing and betting on our number of fish as we left camp. I wore the short-skirt, but Mrs. Ord had her skirts pinned so high, I felt that a tuck or two should be taken in mind to save her from embarrassment. The fishing is excellent here, and each one had every confidence in her own good luck, for the morning was perfect for trout fishing. Once I missed Mrs. Ord, and pushing some bushes back where I thought she might be, I saw a most comical sight. Lined flat on the ground, hat pushed back, and eyes peering over the bank of the stream was Mrs. Ord, the society woman. I could not help laughing, she was so ridiculous in that position, which the pinned-up dress made even more funny. But she did not like it, and looking at me most reproachfully said, You have frightened him away, and I almost had him. She had been in that position a long time, she said, waiting for a large trout to take her hook. The race for honors was about even that day, and there was no cause for envy on either side, for neither Mrs. Ord nor I caught one fish. Our camp is near Smith's Fork of Snake River, and not far from the camp is another fork that never has fish in it, so everyone tells us. That seemed so strange, for both streams have the same water from the stream above, and the same rocky beds. One day I thought I would try the stream, as Smith's Fork was so muddy we could not fish in that. There had been a storm up in the mountains that had caused both streams to rise, so I caught some grasshoppers to bait with, as it would be useless, of course, to try flies. I walked along the banks of the swollen stream until I saw a place where I thought there should be a trout, and to that little place the grasshopper was cast, when Snap went my leader, I put on another hook and another grasshopper, but the result was precisely the same. So I concluded there must be a snag there, although I had supposed that I knew a fish from a snag. I tried one or two other places, but there was no variation, and each time I lost a leader and hook. In the meantime a party had come over from camp, Faye among them, and there had been much good advice given me, and each one had told me that there were no fish ever in that stream. Then they went on up and sat down on the bank under some trees. I was very cross, for it was not pleasant to be laughed at, particularly by women who had probably never had a rod in their hands, and I felt positive that it had been fish that had carried off my hooks, and I was determined to ascertain what was the matter. So I went back to our tent, and got a very long leader, which I doubled a number of times. I knew that the thickness would not frighten the fish, as the water was so cloudy. I fixed a strong hook to that, upon which was a fine grasshopper, and going to one of the places where my friends said that I had been snagged, I casted over, and away it all went, which proved that I had caught something that could at least act like a fish. I reeled it in, and in time landed the thing, a splendid large trout. My very first thought was of those disagreeable people who had laughed at me, Faye, first of all. So after them I went, carrying the fish, which gained in weight with every step. Their surprise was great, and I could see that Faye was delighted. He carried the trout to camp for me, and I went with him, for I was very tired. The next morning I went to that stream again, taking with me a book of all sorts of flies and some grasshoppers. The department commander went over also. He asked me to show him where I had lost the hooks. But I said, if you fish in those places, you will be laughed at more than I was yesterday. He understood and went further down. The water was much more clear, but still flies could not be seen, so I used the scorned grasshopper. In about two hours I caught sixteen beautiful trout, which weighed en masse a little over twenty-five pounds. I cast in the very places where I had lost hooks, and almost every time caught a fish. I left them in the shade in various places along the stream, and Faye and the soldier brought them to camp. A fine display they made spread out on the grass, for they seemed precisely the same size. The general caught two large and several small trout. Those were all that day. It was most remarkable that I should have found the only good places in the stream at a time when the water was not clear. Not only the right places, but the one right day, for not one trout has been caught there since. Perhaps with the high water the fish came up from Snake River, although trout are supposed to live in clear water. We can dispose of any number of birds and fish here, for those that are not needed for our own large mess can be given to the soldiers, and we often send chicken and trout to our friends at Fort Bridger. The further one goes up the stream the better the fishing is. That is, the fish are more plentiful, but not as large as they are here. About sixteen miles up, almost in the mountains, was General Crook's favorite fishing ground, and when he was in command of the department he and General Stanley, who is also an expert fisherman, came here many times. Consequently General Stanley is familiar with the country about here. The evening after my splendid catch General Stanley said that he would like to have Mrs. Ord and me go with him up the stream several miles, and asked if I would be willing to give Mrs. Ord the stream, as she had never used to fly, adding that she seemed a little peckade because I had caught such fine fish. I said at once that I would be delighted to give her the lead, although I knew, of course, that whoever goes second in a trout stream has very poor sport. But the request was a compliment, and besides, I had caught enough fish for a while. The next day we made preparations, and early on the morning of the second we started. The department commander had gone to Omaha on official business, so he was not with us, and Faye did not go, but the rest of the party went twelve miles and then established a little camp for the day, and there we left them. Mrs. Ord and I, and General Stanley, with a driver, got on a buckboard drawn by two mules, and went five miles further up the stream, until, in fact, it was impossible for even a buckboard to go along the rocky trail. There we were expected to take the stream, and as soon as we left the wagon Mrs. Ord and I retired to some bushes to prepare for the water. I had taken the tuck in my outing skirt, so there was not much for me to do, but Mrs. Ord pulled up and pinned up her surged skirt in a way that would have made a small fortune to a cartoonist. When we came from the bushes, Rod's in hand, the soldier-driver gave one bewildered stare, and then almost fell from his seat. He was too respectful to laugh outright, and thus relieved his spasms, but he would look at us from the side of his eye, turn his face from us, and fairly double over. Then another quick look, and another double down again. Mrs. Ord laughed, and so did I. She is quite stout, and I am very thin, and I suppose the soldier did see funny things about us. We saw them ourselves. I shall never forget my first step in that water. It was as chilling as if it had been running over miles of ice, and by comparison the August sun seemed fiery. But these things were soon forgotten, for at once the excitement of casting a fly began. It is almost as much pleasure to put a little fly just where you want it as it is to catch the fish. My rod and reel were in perfect condition, they had seen to that, and my book of flies was complete, and with charming companions and a stream full of trout, a day of unusual pleasure was assured. We were obliged to wait every step as the banks of the stream had walls of boulders and thick bushes. Most of the stream was not very deep, but was a foamy, roaring torrent rushing over the small rocks and around the large ones, with little still dark places along the banks, ideal homes for the mountain trout. We found a few deep pools that looked most harmless, but the current in them was swift and dangerous to those who could not always keep their balance. It was most difficult for me to walk on the slippery stones at first, and I had many a fall, but Mrs. Ord, being heavy, avoided upsets very nicely. At times we would be in water above our wastes, and then Mrs. Ord and I would fall back with General Stanley for protection, who alternately praised and laughed at us during the whole day. Mrs. Ord was very quick to learn where and how to cast a fly, and I was delighted to let General Stanley see that grasshoppers were not at all necessary to my success in fishing. We sat upon a big flat rock at luncheon, and were thankful that General Stanley was a tall man and could keep the box of sandwiches from getting wet. When we toppled over he always came to our assistance, so at times his waiting-boots were not of much use to him. Mrs. Ord was far ahead of me in number of fish, and General Stanley said that I had better keep up with her if I wished. The stream had broadened out some, so finally Mrs. Ord whipped the left side, which is easier casting, and I whipped the right. We waited down the entire five miles, and Mrs. Ord, who had the stream most of the time, caught sixty-four trout, and I caught fifty-six, and General Stanley picked up fourteen after our splashing and frightening away the fish we did not catch. The trout were small but wonderfully full of fight in that cold water. Of course General Stanley carried them for us. The driver had been ordered to keep within call on the trail, as General Stanley thought it would be impossible for Mrs. Ord and me to wade the five miles. But the distance seemed short to us. We never once thought of being tired, and it was with great regret we reeled in our lines. There was a beaver dam above the picnic-camp, and before we came to it I happened to get near the bank, where I saw, in the mud, the impression of a huge paw. It was larger than a tea-plate, and was so fresh one could easily see where the nails had been. I asked General Stanley to look at it, but he said, that, oh, that is only the paw of a cub, he has been down after fish. That once I discovered that the middle of the stream was most attractive, and there I went, and carefully remained there the rest of the way down. If the paw of a mere cub could be that enormous size, what might not be the size of an ordinary grown-up bear paw is included. Mrs. Ord declared that she rather liked little bears, they were so cunning and playful, but I noticed she avoided the banks also. We had left dry clothing at the small camp, and when we returned we found nice little retreats already for us, made of cloaks and things, in among the boulders and bushes. There were cups of delicious hot tea, too, but we were not cold, and the most astonishing thing about that whole grand day is we did not feel stiff or the slightest discomfort in any form after it. The tramp was long, and the water cold, and my own baths many. I might have saved myself sometimes from going all the way down, had I not been afraid of breaking my rod, which I always held high when I fell. The day was one to be remembered by Mrs. Ord and me. We had thought all the time that General Stanley was making a great sacrifice by giving up a day's sport for our amusement, and that it was so kind of him, for, of course, he could not be enjoying the day. But it seems that he had sport of which we knew nothing until the following day. In fact, we know nothing about it yet. But he began to tell the most absurd stories of what we did, and we must have done many unusual things, for he is still entertaining the camp with them. He was very proud of us nevertheless, and says so often. The ride of twelve miles back to camp seemed endless, for as soon as the excitement of the stream was over, we found that we were tired, awfully tired. We have only a few weeks more of this delightful life. The hunting is excellent, too, and fey and captain rebase often bring in large bags of mountain grouse and young sage hens. The sage chicken are as tender and delicious as partridge before they begin to feed upon wild sage in the fall. But one short day in the brush makes them different birds and holy unpalatable. We often send birds and fish also to friends at Fort Bridger, who were most hospitable the day we arrived and before coming to camp. I had quite forgotten the wedding yesterday. It was at Fort Bridger, and the bride, a daughter of the post-traitor, is related to several families of social position at Omaha. We put on the very prettiest gowns we had with us, but the effect was disappointing. Our red faces look redder than ever above delicate laces and silks. The ceremony was at noon, was very pretty, and everything passed off beautifully. The breakfast was delicious, and we wondered at the dainty dishes served so far from a caterer. The house was not large, and every bit of air had been shut out by darkening the windows. But we were spared the heat and smell of lamps on the hot day by the rooms being lighted by hundreds of candles. Each one with a pretty white shade. But some of us felt smothered, and as soon as the affair was over started immediately for the camp, where we could have exhilarating mountain air once more. It was really one whole day stolen from our outing. We can always have crowded rooms, receptions, and breakfasts whenever we happen to be in the East. But when again will we be in a glorious camp like this? And our days here are to be so few. From here we are to go to Salt Lake City for a week or two. of Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871, 1888. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sue Anderson. Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871, 1888, by Francis Rowe. Section 22. A Last Letter from 1888. The Walker House, Salt Lake City, Utah, September, 1888. The weather is still very warm, but not hot enough to keep us from going to the lake as usual this morning. The ride is about 18 miles long, and is always more or less pleasant. The cars, often long trains, are narrow gauge, open, and airy. The bathing is delightful, but wholly unlike anything to be found elsewhere. The wonderfully clear water is cool and exhilarating. But to swim in it is impossible. It is so heavy from its large percentage of salt. So everyone floats. But not at all as one floats in other waters. We lie upon our backs, of course. At least we think we do, but our feet are always out of the water, and our heads straight up, with large straw hats upon them. They have a way of forming human chains on the water that often startles one at first. They are made by hooking one's arms close to the shoulder over the ankles of another person, still another body hooking onto you and so on. Then each one will stretch his or her arms out and paddle backward, and in this way we can go about without much effort and can see all the funny things going on around us. As I am rather tall, second position in a chain is almost always given to me, and my first acquaintance with masculine toes close to my face came very near being disastrous. The feet stood straight up, and the toes looked so very funny with now and then a twitch back or front that soon I wanted to laugh, and the more I tried not to, the more hysterical I became. My shoulders were shaking, and the owner of the toes, a pompous man, began to suspect that I was laughing and probably at the toes. Still he continued to twist them around, one under the other, in an astonishing way that made them fascinating. The head of the chain, the pompous man, became ominously silent.  They look like wings in their pin-feather stage, only they are on the wrong side, and I am wondering if the black stockings would make real black wings and what some of us would do with them after all. After that there was less pompous dignity and less hysteria, although the toes continued to wig-wag. It is a sight that repays one to watch when dozens of these chains, some long, some short, are paddling about on the blue water that is often without a ripple. It is impossible to drown, for sink in it you cannot, but to get the brining one's nose and throat is dangerous as it easily causes strangulation, particularly if the person is at all nervous. We wear little bits of cotton in our ears to prevent the water from getting in, for the crust of salt it would leave might cause intense pain. Bathing in water so salt makes one both hungry and sleepy, therefore it is considered quite the correct thing to eat hot popcorn and snooze on the return trip. We get the popcorn at the pavilion, put up in attractive little bags, and it is always crisp and delicious. Just imagine a long, open car full of people, each man, woman, and child, greedily munching the tender corn. By the time one bagful has been eaten, heads begin to wobble, and soon there is a land of nod, real nod too. Some days when the air is particularly soft and balmy, everyone in the car will be oblivious of his whereabouts. Not one stop is made from the lake to the city. Faye and I were at the lake almost a week, Garfield Beach, the bathing place is called, so I could make a few water-colored drawings early in the morning when the tints on the water are so pearly and exquisitely delicate. During the day the lake is usually a wonderful blue, deep and brilliant, and the colors at sunset are past description. The sun disappears back of the Okira Mountains in a world of glorious yellow and orange, and as twilight comes on the mountains take on violet and purple shades that become deeper and deeper until night covers all from sight. There was not a vacant room at Garfield Beach, so they gave us two large rooms at Black Rock, almost one mile away, but on the car-line. The rooms were in a low, long building that might easily be mistaken for soldiers' barracks, and which had broad verandas with low roofs all along both sides. That queer building had been built by Brigham Young for his seven wives. It consisted of seven apartments of two rooms each, a sitting room and a sleeping room. All the sitting rooms were on one side, opening out upon the one veranda, and the bedrooms were on the other side and opened out upon the other veranda. These apartments did not connect in any way except by the two porches. Not far from that building was another that had once been the dining room and kitchen of the seven wives.  It was almost interesting and a remarkable experience to have lived in one of Brigham Young's very own houses. But the place was ghostly, lonesome beyond everything, and when the wind moaned and sighed through the rooms, one could fancy it was the wailing of the spirits of those seven wretched wives. When we returned at night to the dark, unoccupied building, it seemed more spooky than ever after the music and light at Garfield Beach. Our meals were served to us at the restaurant at the pavilion. I made some very good sketches of the lake, Antelope Island, and a number of the wonderful black rock that is out in the lake opposite the Brigham Young house. About two miles from the city and upon the side of the Wasatch Mountains is Camp Douglas, an army post which the new department commander came to inspect. The inspection was in the morning, and we all went to see it, and were driven in the post with the booming of cannon, the salute always given a brigadier-general when he enters a post officially. It was pretty to see the general's wife partly cover her ears and pretend that she did not like the noise, when all the time her eyes were sparkling, and we knew that every roar of the big guns added to her pride. If all those guns had been for Faye, I could never have stayed in the ambulance. It is charming up there in the post, and the view is magnificent. We sat out on a vine-covered porch during the inspection, and watched the troops and the review. It made me so happy, and yet so homesick too to see Faye once more in his uniform. The inspection was all too short, and after it was over many officers and their wives came to call upon us when wine and delicious cake was served. We were at the quarters of the Colonel and post commander. That was the second post we had taken Mrs. Ord to, and she is suddenly enthusiastic over army people, forgetting that Omaha has a post of its own, but with us she has been in the tail of the comet which made things more interesting.  There is only one Mormon store here, and that is very large and cooperative. Every Mormon who has anything whatever to sell is compelled to take it to that store to be appraised and a percentage taken from it. There are a few nice Gentile shops, but Mormons cannot enter them. They can purchase only at the Mormon store, where the Gentiles are evercourgely welcomed also. Splendid fruit and vegetables are grown in this valley, especially the fruit which is superior to any we ever saw. The grapes are of many varieties, each one large and rich with flavor, and the peaches and big yellow pears are most luscious. Upon our table down in the dining room there is always an immense glass bowl of selected fruit, peaches, pears, and grapes, and each time we go down it seems to look more attractive. We have been to see the tabernacle, with its marvelous acoustic properties, and the temple which is not yet finished, the immense pipe organ in the tabernacle was built where it now stands and entirely by Mormons. From Brigham Young's old home a grand boulevard runs, through the city, across the valley, and over the hill far away, and how much beyond I do not know. This road, so broad and white, Brigham Young said would lead to Jerusalem. They have a river Jordan here too, a little stream that runs just outside the city. There are grand trees in every street and every old yard, and one cannot help feeling great indignation to see where, in some places the incoming gentiles have cut trees down to make space for modern, showy buildings that are so holy out of harmony with the low, artistic whitehouses and vine-covered walls. It is such a pity that these high red buildings could not have been kept outside, and the old Mormon city left in its original quaint beauty. We will return to Omaha soon now, and I shall at once become busy with preparations for the winter east. I have decided to go home in October so I can have a long, comfortable visit before going to Washington. Fay wishes me to join him there the last of December. I am not very enthusiastic over the prospect of crowded rooms, daily receptions and teas, and other affairs of more formality, but since I cannot return to the plains, I might as well go to the city, where we will meet people of culture, see the fascinating diplomatic corps, and be presented to the President's beautiful young wife. Later on there will be the inauguration, for we expect to pass the winter in Washington. End of Section 22, End of Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871, 1888, by Francis Rowe.


Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech, International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I have two guests from AWS here with me. Carolina Pina joins us, the head of Enterprise Enablement for Lightham, and Laura Alvarez-Modernel is here as well, Public Sector Programs Manager at AWS. Ladies, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Nice to meet you for having us. Carolina, let's start with you. Talk to me a little bit about your role, what it is that you're doing there. My role in AWS is to actually create mechanisms of massive training to try to close the tiling gap that we have in the region. And when I mentioned tiling gap, I'm talking about obviously digital and cloud computing skills. So that's in a nutshell what my role entails. Got it. How long have you been in that role? Just curious. So I've been at AWS a little bit over two years. I was actually in the public sector team when I joined, leading the education vertical for Latin America and Canada. And I recently joined the commercial sector now leading these massive training efforts for the region, for Lightham. And Laura, you're in public sector. Talk to me a little bit about your role. Yes. I'm in public sector. I'm also based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So I am from Latin America. And I lead educational and community impact programs in the southern cone of Latin America. I also lead diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And I'm part of the Women at Amazon Global Board. That's our affinity group to make sure we make efforts towards building a more equal world. And on a personal note, I'm really passionate about the topic of gender equality because I truly think it affects us all as women and as Latin. So that's something that I'm always interested in collaborating with. Excellent. Carolina, back to you. If we think about from an enablement perspective, how is AWS partnering with its customers and its partners to train and employ women, particularly in technology? No, sure, Lisa. So it's not a surprise. We, like I mentioned, we have a big cloud skills tallying gap in the region. In fact, 69% of companies have reported tallying shortages and difficulty hiring. So this represents a 15-year high. So many of these companies are actually our own commercial customers. So they approach us asking for support training and developing their talent. So like I mentioned in my role, I create massive training efforts and initiatives. So we always take into consideration women, minorities, underrepresented community. And not just for the current talent, meaning like the people that are currently employed, but also to ensure that we're proactively implementing initiatives to develop a talent of younger generation and a talent so we can to inspire them and ensure that we're seeing them represented in companies like AWS and our customers and in our partners. And obviously, when we sit down with customers to craft these massive trainings, leveraging their ecosystems and communities, we actually try to use all our AWS training and certification portfolio, which includes in class with live instructors, in classroom trainings. We also have our AWS skill-building platform, which is the platform that allows us to reach a broader audience because it has over 500 free and on-demand classes. And we also have a lot of different other programs that touches in different audiences. We have AWS Restart for underrepresented and under-employed minorities. We also have AWS Academy, which is the program that we have for higher education institutions. And we have AWS Educate, which also touches and Cloud Beginners. So in every single of these programs, we ensure that we are encompassing and really speaking to women and developing training and developing women. That's a great focus there. Laura, talk to me about upskilling. I know AWS is very much about promoting from within. What are some of the things that it's doing to help women in Latin America develop those tech skills and upskill from where maybe where they are now? Well, Lisa, I think that is super interesting because there's definitely a skills gap problem, right? We have all heard about. And what's funny is that we have this huge opportunity in Latin America to train people and to help further develop the countries. And we have the companies that need the talent. So why is there still a gap, right? And I think that's because there's no mashing solution to solving this problem. No, like Epic Hollywood movie scene that it's going to show how we close the gap. And it takes stepping out of our comfort zone. And as Carolina mentioned, collaborating. So we at AWS have a commitment to help 29 million people globally to grow their technical skills with free cloud computing skills training by 2025. I know that sounds a lot throughout educational province, but we do have, as Carolina mentioned, a skill builder. You can go into the website for free, enter, choose your path, get trained. We have academy that we implement with universities. We start that is a program that's already available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Costa Rica. So there are a lot of opportunities. But you also mentioned something else that I would like to type a bit deeper that is Latin American women. And yesterday we had the opportunity to record a panel about intersectionality with three amazing Latin women. And what we have to learn from that is that these are two minorities that intersect, right? We're talking about females that are minority, Latinas are minority and in tech that is also something that is even bigger minority. So there are more difficulties there. And we need to make sure that we're meeting that talent that is there, that is in Latin America that exists. We know for sure we have unicorns in Latin America that are even AWS customers like Mercado Libre, and we have to meet them with the opportunities. And that's why we created a program that came from identifying how this problem evolves in Latin America, that there is a lack of confidence in women also that they don't feel prepared or equipped. There's a cultural component why we don't choose tech careers. And we partner with universities, more than 12 universities in Latin America, in the International American Development Bank as well to create tech skills that's a free five weeks program in order to get students and get female in Latin America into the tech word. And we also have them with mentorship. So I think that is an opportunity to truly collaborate because we as AWS are not going to solve this by ourselves, right? We need everyone pitching on that. Right. It's absolutely a team effort. You mentioned something important in terms of helping women and especially minorities get out of their comfort zone. Carolina, I'm curious, when you're talking with women and getting them into the program and and sharing with them all of the enablement programs that you have, how do you help them be confident to get out of that comfort zone? That's a hard thing to do. Yeah, no, for sure. For sure, Lisa. Well, I, you know, a lot of times I actually, I use myself as an example, because, you know, I started engineering and industrial systems engineering many years ago. And, you know, a lot of my career has been in higher education and innovation and startups. And as I mentioned in the intro, I've been at AWS for a little bit over two years. So I, my career has not been in cloud and I recently joined the cloud. So I actually had to go through our own trainings and get our own certifications. So I, that's, you know, a lot of times I actually use my own example. So people understand that you don't have to come from tech. You don't have to come. You can actually be a non-tech person and also see the benefits of the cloud. And you don't have to only, you know, learn cloud if you're in the IT department or in an IT team. So sometimes I also emphasize that the cloud and the future is absolutely the cloud. In fact, the World Economic Forum, you know, teaches us that cloud computing is the technology that's going to be mostly adopted by 2025. So that's why we need to ensure that every single person, women and others, are really knowledgeable in the cloud. So that's why, you know, technical and non-technical. But I, you know, I use myself as an example for them to say, you know, you can actually do it. And obviously also I collaborate with Laura in a lot of the women at Amazon Latin America group to also, you know, ensure that we're doing webinars and panels. So we show them ourselves as role model, like Laura is an incredible role model for our community. And so it's also to show examples of what the possibilities are. And that's what we do. I love that you're sure. Oh, please. Yes. To add to that, I think it also requires the companies and the private sector to get out of their comfort zone, right? Because we're not going to find solutions doing what we are already doing. We truly need to go and get near these persons with a new message. The interest is there in these programs. We have reached more than 3,000 women already in Latin America with tech skills. So it's not that women are not interested. It's like how do we reach them with a message that resounds with them, right? Like how we can explain the power of technology to transform the world and to actually improve their communities. I think there's something there also that we need to think further of. It's so important. You know, we say often when we're talking about women in tech that she needs to see what she can be. Or if she can't see it, she can't be it. So having those role models and those mentors and sponsors is absolutely critical for women to get, I call it, getting comfortably uncomfortable out of that comfort zone and recognizing there's so many opportunities. Carolina, to your point, these days every company is a tech company, a data company, whether you're talking about a car dealer in grocery market. So your point about, you know, and obviously the future being cloud, there's so much opportunity that that opens up for everybody, really. But that's an important thing for people to recognize how they can be a part of that, get out of their comfort zone, and try something that they maybe hadn't considered before. Yes. And actually, Lisa, I would love to share an example. So we have a Grupo Boticario, which is one of our customers, one of the leaders of retails in Brazil, and they've been a customer of AWS since 2013, when they realized that, you know, the urgency and the importance of embracing state-of-the-art technology, to your point, like, you know, this is a retail company that understands that needs to be, you know, embraced digital transformation, especially because, you know, they're getting very busy during mother's days and other holidays during the year.  So they decided to start training within. And that's when we obviously, we partner with them to also create a very comprehensive training and certification plan that started with, you know, a lot of the infrastructure and security teams. But then it was actually then implemented in the rest of the company. So going back to the point, like, everybody really needs to know. And what we also love about Boticario is they really care about the diversion and inclusion aspect of this equation. And we actually collaborated with them as well through this program called Desenvolvi, with the Brazilian government. And Desenvolvi means developing Portuguese. And this program really ensures that we are also closing that gender and that race gap and ensuring that they're actually, you know, developing talent in cloud for Brazil. So we, you know, obviously have been very successful with them. And we will continue to do even more things with them, particularly for this topic. I've always known how customer-focused AWS is every time we get to go to a re-invent or some of the events. But it's so nice to hear these, the educational programs that you're doing with customers to help them improve DEI, to help them enable their own women in their organizations to learn skills. I didn't realize that. I think that's, that's fantastic. Very much a symbiotic part of AWS. If we think about the theme for this year's International Women's Day, breaking the bias. I want to get both of your opinions on Laura. We'll start with you. What that means to you and where do you think we are in Latin America with breaking the bias? Well, I think breaking the bias is the first step to truly being who we are every day and being able to bring that to our work as well. I think we are in a learning curve of that. The companies are changing culturally. As Carolina mentioned, we have customers that are aware of the importance of having women. And as we say at AWS, not only because there is a good business reason, because there is, because there are studies that show that we can increase the country's GPD, but also because it's important, it's the right thing to do. So in terms of breaking the bias, I think we are learning and we have a long way to go. I talked a bit earlier about intersectionality. And that is something that is also important to highlight, because we are talking about females, but we are also talking about other minorities. We are talking about underrepresented communities, indigenous people, Latins. So when this overlap, we face even bigger challenges to get where we want to get. And to get to decision making places, because technology is transforming the ways we take decisions. We live and we need someone like us taking those decisions. So I think it's important at first to be aware and to see that you can get there and eventually to start the conversation going and to build the conversation. Not to just lead it, but to make sure we hear people and their inputs and what they're going through. Yes, we definitely need to hear them. Carolina, what's your take on breaking the bias? And from your experience, where do you think we are with you? Yeah, I'm as passionate as Laura on this topic. And that's why we're collaborating in the women at Amazon Latin America chapter, because we're both very, I think breaking the bias starts with us and ourselves. And we're very proactive within AWS and externally. And I feel it's also, I mean, Lisa, what we've been doing is not only obviously gathering the troops and really making sure that we have very, very aggressive goals internally, but also bringing our male counterparts and other members of the other communities. Because the change, we're not going to make it alone. It's not women only talking to women is going to make the change. We actually need to make sure the male and other groups are represented and the dialogue that we're very conscious about that. And I feel like we're seeing more and more that the topic is becoming more of a priority, not only within AWS and Amazon, but we also see it because now that I meet with when I meet with customers around the region, they really want to see how we can collaborate in this diversity and inclusion initiative. So I think we are breaking the bias because now this topic is more top of mind and then we're being more proactively addressing it and training people and educating people. And I feel we're really in a pivoted point where the change that we're really being wanting to, we will see in the next few years, which is very exciting. Excellent. And we'll see that with the help of women like you guys. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what you're doing, how you're helping organizations across AWS's ecosystem, customers, partners, and helping, of course, folks from within you, right? It's a holistic effort, but we are on our way to breaking that bias. And again, I thank you both for your insights. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa, for the opportunity. My pleasure for Carolina Pina and Laura Alvarez-Modernel. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech International Women's Day 2022.


I think I'm online. Can everybody hear me in the back? Okay. A little bit too loud. Okay. Okay. Good afternoon everyone. How's everyone doing? Great. It's Thursday afternoon on the last day. I'm sure there's a lot of heavy heads and a lot of sore heads. So I'll try and keep this interesting for you guys. So today we're going to be playing croc hunter for the next 40 minutes. Is that what you all wanted to do? Yeah. Good. Thought so. Thought so. Now, so today we're going to be decomposing lithium monolith with Kubernetes on open stack. And you know, coming to the summit, I had a different deck put together and hearing questions out in the audience over the last two days. I've actually changed that deck to what I think everybody wants to hear right now. So hopefully I'm on the mark. But feel free to interject. Now I want to keep this really interactive. If you guys have questions, write in the middle, put your hand up, give me the question, I'll repeat it back to people. I want you guys to be engaged. I want to, you know, I want to answer your questions and concerns while we're going through the content here. So my name is Lachlan Evenson. I'm the cloud platform team lead at Lithium Technologies. So you may have seen the keynote I did the other day. I'm going to drill into a little bit of our journey to getting that keynote the other day. So the agenda, I want you guys to walk away, not only share our journey with you to getting to container based microservices on open stack, but really I want to short circuit your journey and, you know, help you get up and running fast. How many people are running containers on open stack at the moment? Two, how many are interested? Everybody who's here is absolutely interested. Fantastic. You're in the right place. So containers, right? This is, I'm getting a little bitter. Still hear me, okay? Yeah, I think that might be a bit better. So containers, you know, in the market right now, there's a lot of hype about containers, right? What I'm trying to do is shortcut some of that hype and show you what we've done with containers in open stack. So I think for you guys, it's important to get on board with containers and at least have a look at what they're doing and the problems they're solving.  So I think, you know, if I can share that with you guys, that's a great result. You know, I want you to be able to actually walk out of here and apply what I'm saying today to your particular situation. And I'm happy to keep the dialogue going after this session. So if you want to reach out to me, you know where to find me either on Twitter. So one of the biggest things that open stack, so there's plenty of talk about, you know, do you need open stack? What's open stack give you when you have containers? One of the things open stack gave us was a platform to innovate and iterate really quickly. So having all the resources, compute, network and storage at our fingertips, we could actually overlay Kubernetes or other container orchestration systems really quickly and start getting our feet wet, which I think is a great result and a great, you know, a testament to these cloud platforms that you can take them and iterate with new technologies really quickly. Okay, before I get into the details, just a little bit about what we do at Lithium Technologies. So at Lithium Technologies, we help brands connect, engage and understand their customers. And we do that via online communities and social monitoring tools. And, you know, you saw at the keynote one of the tools I showed that was a pulse of the whole world, the global community activity as we saw it. So we do this for brands like AT&T, Skype and Virgin. Containers, VMs and open stacks. So one of the things I want to go into is, you know, there's a lot of talk about containers, open stack, VMs, when to use what, does it make sense to throw away VMs, all that kind of stuff. I'm going to share with you our experience and where we're at currently after running containers in production on open stack for about three months now. So I wanted to kind of debunk that the issue really isn't containers versus VMs. They both have different properties and they do different things. So you really want to make sure that, you know, you're meeting the business needs with the technology you're providing. So honestly, as I say here, our engineers couldn't care if they're deploying to containers or to VMs. What they want is their app to be deployed to a cloud environment, have it scalable, reliable and simple patterns to get it out there, right? So that's really what we're trying to achieve here. So nobody came to me and said, hey, I really want to use containers. They came and said, is there any way we can do better with how we deploy our apps? So that was really the question to us. So, you know, approach it like that. Don't, you know, what's the problem you're trying to solve? So what I was trying to articulate is, you know, the right tool for the job. Some applications are built on the assumption that they're running on a VM, right? So it's very hard to pick them up and put them in a container. If you're starting from the ground up, brand new app, it's very easy to change the way the application works given that it's running in containers. So, you know, using the right tool for the job, I think is very important. Don't try, this is not just a race to get everything containerized and it's not a race to throw out VMs. We still see VMs at Lithium as still an important part of our cloud and we still have plenty of apps that need VMs and were built for VMs, right? So when to use which one is really the question? And there's no solid answer to the way, you know, to answer that question. So it's really what's the problem you're trying to solve here? For example, we were going down a microservices architecture, right? So we have a big monolith and we're trying to break out new features outside of that monolith. So we saw containers as being able to enable that and speed that up. So that's the use case that we pick containers to solve. We'd been running OpenStack in production for about two years at Lithium Technologies and we really took time about six months ago at Vancouver to have a look at how the cloud was being consumed, right? So our customers are internal developers, they're writing features, we have a SaaS platform and they're trying to get those features onto the cloud platform. So the promise that we'd sold to them was the cloud platform was not only going, they were going to have elastic infrastructure that they could deploy to and it was going to make their life easier. And, you know, they wouldn't have to worry about infrastructure, but when we actually took a pulse of how that was working for them, they said actually it's easier still to deploy to bare metal than it is to VMs. So, and I have some stats at the end. So we took a look at that, that statement bothered us. We don't feel we'd actually delivered on, for the microservices team, a platform that they could really embrace and stop worrying about the infrastructure it's running on and start worrying about writing the feature or the application. So what we saw with containers were, you know, you had a very simple packaging and employment and a great development experience. So from laptop up into production, you could package and deploy the same artifact. So it was a great result to the developer experience where it had somewhat been broken with VMs. We couldn't really give them a nice open stack on their laptop to deploy using heat and then promote that up into production using the same heat template, right? So with containers, we kind of had that experience. So we thought that would be good.  So we were using operational tools to solve developer problems. Developers were finding it very complex using the tools we had given them, which were traditionally operational tools to deploy their apps. So with containers, we wanted the effort to be developer led. We wanted those guys to come and say containers are something that work for us and we, you know, it's making our life easier. And then it was on us to build and provide an infrastructure that would support running those containers. So question, another question that's on everybody's lips is should you split the monolith, right? There was, many people have gotten up and said, you know, absolutely, you just break it apart. But really, what did the monolith actually provide? So when we took a look at lithium at why people wanted to check code into the monolith, it was really because there was tooling, monitoring, a well established pipeline that had been there for 10 or 15 years in our company. So they felt safe deploying under the monolith. Now, when you asked them how coding under the monolith was, it was horribly complicated, but they still would prefer to go that route because they were given the deployment tools that the company had been working on for so long. So, you know, that was something we were trying to solve with providing an end to end container pipeline. So what we actually did was we gave the developers containers and we said, for all your new services, let's have a try at putting them in containers and deploying them on OpenStack. So we basically cut it off and said all new services from this point forward are in containers unless you have a case otherwise. So what that really did was enable the developers to try a new pipeline, which was the pipeline I demonstrated from Git commit all the way out into production. Yes, yes, yes. Microservices were solving a people problem. Yes, so we kind of, we, you know, I do agree to some extent with that statement. So microservices basically, if you go and look at how our developers were feeling checking into the monolith, there was a lot of, if you were bringing new developers on, there was a lot of history in that monolith. The company's been around for 15 years. So coming on board and understanding that code base took a long time. Now, what microservices gave us was a way to deliver features without having the backlog of that monolith. So bringing new developers in and saying, you've got 1000 lines of code, you want to knock it out, it does something fairly, you know, one thing really well was kind of liberating for those guys. And even the developers had been around for 10, 15 years. They were actually able to mobilize the code a lot, you know, getting code out a lot quicker as well rather than, you know, the dependencies. It wasn't even, even the code base, it was the build process, right? When you've got a massive code base, build testing, integration, unit test, that, you know, even that flow took a long time to get code into the environment. So, you know, they've actually, we gave containers to the developers had been around the longest first to see they understood the monolith, but we wanted to see if this really could revolutionize the way that they were working. Getting off the ground. So I think this is something everybody trips up on and in OpenStack and in general, there's a lot of things out there, right? So how do you get started building container orchestration and what does it look like on OpenStack? So, you know, just some guidelines from us. Be incremental. So don't try and deliver everything. Try and do one thing well and just do that and deliver on that. So we kind of made that our first deliverable was to containerize one app and run it on a laptop, right? So that was deliverable number one. And then it was containerize the app and run it on OpenStack on a single node. And then it was. So we had these really short incremental milestones. It wasn't let's deliver everything at the same time. And this is what a lot of our team struggled with, right? Because they basically looked at containers and said secrets management, config management, monitoring, tooling, all these things had to be rethought and they got stuck in that headspace, right? How do I even do all that again? So we were very pragmatic and broke it down and gave very small deliverables. And I think that in turn made us successful to getting where we are now. So, you know, I said, do not boil the ocean. When you look at the container ecosystem and the tools that are out there now, your head's going to explode, right? But what is the problem you were trying to solve? So for us, it was getting that time to production and from check in to deploy down. So that's what we were trying to revolutionize and make it a simpler process so that we were out of the way as a cloud platform engineering team. You can't containerize everything. This is an interesting statement. I think it's a myth, but really what are people really saying when you can't containerize everything? You can containerize everything, but does it make sense, right? It's not one shoe that fits every foot container. So really think about, again, what you're trying to do here. So second point, it's not just for stateless web front ends. So I hear a lot of you can only do web front ends and stateless apps and containers. One of the challenges that we had internally was that was the developer's perception. And we actually said, give us your most complicated app, your most complicated microservice, let us containerize it, and let's see what you think. And what that app was was actually ZooKeeper, Kafka, produces consumers, multiply scaled. It was a massive app, right? And I thought, gee, I don't know if we're going to be able to do this. But at the end of a week, we had ZooKeeper, a reusable container pattern in Kubernetes for ZooKeeper that every new microservice could use. We had Kafka. Every new microservice could use Kafka. They didn't have to build their own. Whereas traditionally with VMs, people were building the same thing over and over and over again, right? So we actually created a lot of patterns and short circuited a lot of learning for new teams trying to bring services on board. So what we have now is complicated apps that live on Cassandra, with ZooKeeper, Quorum. We can scale them up with a command, like the scale up command I showed the other day. We can actually increase the size of a Cassandra or a Kafka cluster at the click of a button, right? So where that had traditionally taken a long time, you can even do it on event, right? So based on this type of load, scale it up. So I'd love to talk to you guys about that if you're interested in what we did with ZooKeeper and these applications that are more complex and clustered, they do actually lend themselves to running in containers because you can scale them up, have Quorum. So why Kubernetes? So in production today, we're running Kubernetes on OpenStack. So what Kubernetes gave us was little engineering effort and no additional capex band. So I took a look at Kubernetes and I had a cluster up and running on OpenStack literally within 30 minutes and I could start deploying containers to it. Now, that was a win for Kubernetes and really it was a means to an end. I just needed orchestration on container orchestration. What we really liked about Kubernetes was it was Docker primitives, right? So you're working with a common framework and a common tool set underneath. So what Kubernetes overlays on top of is Docker. So all the artifacts you're producing could be reused where you were you to use another container orchestration. So one of the things highlighting about what OpenStack provided in this model, if you go and look at containers as they are today, they have a lot of gaps still, right? So persistent storage, networking, all these things are incredibly complex. Has anybody worked with networking and persistent storage on containers with distributed apps? It's complex, right? It's complex. So what OpenStack gave us was a way to fill in those gaps that Docker didn't actually meet right now. So we were able to use Cinder block storage and attach that into containers. We were able to use Neutron networks and overlay these things on top so that we could build a container orchestration system very quickly. So I think this is an ode to, you know, it's one platform as Jonathan Brice said in the keynote. We're able to iterate quickly and provide container orchestration. So innovate. Why Kubernetes continued? So for us, we operate in AWS. We operate in OpenStack. We operate on bare metal. So we have all these environments and we will continue to operate like this. We have used cases that work best in the public cloud. We have used cases that work best. You know, it's the right shoe for the job again. So what Kubernetes gave us was finally we could have a platform that we could deliver to bare metal. We could deliver to public cloud and we could deliver to private cloud using the same orchestration system. And the demo I showed was actually, you know, the realization of that dream. I pushed one container to two places and attached a load balancer and was serving out of AWS and OpenStack at the same time. What this allowed us to do was use AWS effectively as an AZ. So we had apps deployed to both places and if AWS had an issue, we'd be using OpenStack. If OpenStack had an issue, we'd use AWS. And we're able to realize other potentials like upgrades, right? So we could actually just take an OpenStack cluster offline, upgrade it, forget about all, if the data stores don't live in it, forget about all the compute and bring it all back up and everything gets rescheduled onto it and it comes back up.  How did we deploy? So this is something else that's really interesting. So we're cutting from source at the moment. So we're not using any tooling. We're building from the open source Kubernetes repo on the Google platform, GitHub site. And what that allowed us to do was really get in the trenches early and understand what this thing is, whether we could contribute to it. And it gave us, you know, as we see the market evolve, we see the bits that are missing and people are filling those gaps, right? So it's given us an understanding of how Kubernetes runs. And, you know, I think that was fairly valuable in the early days. Now, one other thing I want to note is Kubernetes on AWS, we actually used a tool called Cloud Choreo. And what that does is allow you to define your AWS resources as code. And we did that for Kubernetes. So I defined Kubernetes in a GitHub repo, and it points the repo and creates Kubernetes. So if you take a look at that website, there's a one-click deploy Kubernetes cluster in AWS. So if you want to use that, play with it, that tool can actually get you up and running really quickly. Question over here. Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely. So the question was, can I elaborate on how we solve the networking problem? So on OpenStack, we run OpenContrail. Okay. So in the first iteration, we actually did Kubernetes using static routes. So you can what you can do with layer three and routing, you don't need an overlay, right? When you want to get down to granular control, you need an overlay at this point. So the first iteration, we stuck to primitives. And I did implementations that I've spoken about in previous sessions with static routing. And that got us up and running to get a feel for how it worked. Now, what V2 is, so keeping incremental is reusing our SDN to provide network connectivity inside Kubernetes. So it just so happens that OpenContrail, we've been working with OpenContrail, they actually have integration with Kubernetes. So we've been able to, at the moment, we're testing with double overlay. But our dream is to have single overlay servicing VMs using Neutron and servicing Kubernetes using the Kubernetes plug-in on OpenContrail. So one control plane to manage both container workloads. And what that has also given us in OpenContrail is the same security, all the things that we chose Contrail for were suddenly put into the container world. So you actually have secure multi-tenancy. You're using network namespaces down to the pod interface. So that was a great win. Now, one other thing that we're working on right now that I hope to demo soon is we've put OpenContrail on AWS. So we have OpenContrail, AWS, OpenStack, Federated. I can move layer three workloads from OpenStack to AWS. So OpenContrail has given us a very powerful platform to reuse and not only service VM workloads, but container workloads. So I can talk to you a little bit more about that. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you. The implications of running containers. So as I said before, containers are completely different. What we saw initially was when we asked the developers to use it, they wanted to stuff VMs in containers. They wanted to SSH to a container. They wanted to put SSHD. And that was of no fault of their own, right? They were trying to understand what containers were about and how to utilize them. So one of the things I said from the get-go is that they demand that you rethink how you write your application and how you look at every aspect of how you monitor, log, secrets, config management, don't create container anti-patterns. So it was mind-boggling when I said you don't need to SSH to a container because what I actually saw out in the environment was people putting SSHD, writing entry points that were init, basically init systems to bootstrap multiple processes under a container. And I said, why don't you just split them out, have one process, and I'll show you how to do logging. So we actually, with containers, we were able to simplify logging and monitoring and provide it as a service. If you mount this mount point, I will make sure your logging makes it into the logging infrastructure. If you expose this mount point, I will make sure the monitoring hits your container. So whereas traditionally, that with VM infrastructure, they'd have to deploy that themselves. So I think the main thing is have a look at the patterns with containers. If you're building your app's green field, you have the utmost flexibility to really make containers shine and really utilize them in the best fashion. So we're still striving. I see some anti-patterns in there now, but we need to make sure that we're trying to think, build from the ground up. Containers are not VMs, they're different.  So if you're in that workspace of building a new application, which is what I said be incremental, we could build from the ground up and really utilize containers to their full potential. I don't know. I personally have my feeling about anti-patterns, but it may make for a great blog post. I've seen the Docker blog, and if you look at the Kubernetes blog, they go into sidecars, ambassadors, adapter containers, where these are kind of methodologies where you want to, you have two applications in pairing them and putting them inside pods. So they talk to one another rather than trying to stuff everything. Now the other great thing with logging, monitoring, all these kind of infrastructure, we actually implemented a lot of the stuff we were using in containers. So that actually helped us get to a v1 release a lot quicker. So we took our monitoring tools, our logging tools, and implemented a containerized version of them. Now is that ideal? The jury's still out, but for v1, we didn't have to redo a lot of our tooling. So we just put logging and monitoring in a container, called it done. It did what we needed to, and we could move on with iterating later. Questions? Great. Hello. Yes. Yes. The data store. Great question. So the question was, if you're using sender to provision block storage and mounting that into your pods, if a container goes down and comes back up on a different machine, how do you make sure it has access to that data? That's a very complex question and a very complex solution. So what we've actually done right now to iterate, because that was one of the first big problems, is pinning application workloads to that mount point, right, and doing some clever namespacing. But if you go into the world of, you know, NFS file systems or file systems that could be shared cross-platform, you could actually achieve it. Now the thing is, I don't want to, we didn't want to get ahead of where the marketplace was for containers and Kubernetes, but I would say in a year, you're attaching, you're making the sender call from the container and attaching it directly into the container, right? So container goes down, comes back up, search true sender, do I see what I'm looking for? If so, attach, if not create, right? So that's going to come. So we said, let's not get ahead of ourselves and try and redesign the wheel that's going to come, because everybody has that problem. Yeah, so I mean, I'm not saying that we're using NFS, but some kind of clustered file system and depending on your properties, but I think, you know, if you go down to reattaching the volume to the container rather than the underlying host, I mean, it's got to go through the underlying host anyway, but if it's presented directly as a mount point to the container, then if the container moves, all it needs access to is sender, right? No selector and pinning, absolutely, yeah. So did you have another question? Yes. Yes. Yes. So the question was, do I use rolling upgrades for blue, green upgrades in Kubernetes? And the answer is yes. So one of the other reasons we chose Kubernetes is out of the box scheduler gave us every use case we had, and lithium is not in the business of writing schedulers. So if it gave us what we needed out of the box, we'd prefer to stay with it. But yeah, I know of use cases where you might want to do some more interesting things with rolling updates. One more question? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there's two questions. One is when we said let's containerize one application, what was the developer for feedback? Let me address that one. I put up an internal Docker registry. I put up an internal GitHub repo that said this is how you use the registry and one example of a Docker container that I had built. I went on paternity leave for two weeks. I came back, the repo is full, and there's a Post-it note on my desk saying, when can we get this to prod? I didn't do anything. The developers loved it. So with very little overhead, they could pick it up and run with it. Because if you've ever read a Docker file, it looks like a shell script. So all the metadata you used to have with config management tools is boiled down to java-j, run jar, right? And from java-18, run jar, expose port 80. That's their Docker file. So that's the first question. The second question, can you... So, yes, I understand. So when you get down to kernel modules and network, NFV and different things like this, we do only because we run OpenContrail in containers and OpenContrail has a kernel module. So I have some interesting things about that. But yes, running in kernel space, kernel modules, containerization of apps that need root space and kernel, direct kernel access. I think this for now is a use case for VMs. So rather than, will it come to pass in containers? I don't know. But right now, don't try and one shoe fits all. So, any other questions? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So you need the IP of every Redis node. Query the endpoint API, right? So query the endpoint API is the answer. Elasticsearch discovery in Kubernetes, which if anybody is interested, is built on the same way. So Elasticsearch needs to know about all the other nodes in the cluster before it comes up. You query the endpoint API and the endpoint API is all the IPs of the pods that are attached to the service. The endpoint API in Kubernetes specifically. Yes. Let me just get through the rest of the content because there's lots of good questions here. Lots of good questions, which is a good thing. So I just want to finish up and I've actually only got a slide or two left. So the results, right? So we've been running in production for three months, right? We asked the developers, how long does it take to get a microservice out? They said, on VMs, it took us one month to write the app and three months to deploy it to the cloud in a stable manner. That was templating cross AWS and OpenStack. So it was incredibly complex, right? The main point here is now they're actually spending time on features, not infrastructure. So the last app we rolled out before I left Tokyo was out in production in 15 minutes. So off the build loop. So we've gone from three weeks to 15 minutes. So, you know, that was a great result for the developers writing this code. What we've found is there's a single automatable pattern, including CICD. So we've been able to abstract this pattern, which was really our goal, so that anybody writing any service had a very loose fitting front end to put their service in and the pipeline would take care of pushing it out to the environment. So we have a stable container deployment pipeline. So a great result. Us as the infrastructure team, we have a lot of tooling that lives in the cloud as well, and traditionally we were the guys who knew how to write all the config management scripts. So we had the secret source to get apps out into OpenStack and into AWS that the developers didn't necessarily have. Now with containers, we actually followed the developer-led pipeline that they created to deploy our containerized applications that support the cloud, things like secrets, config management, key value stores. We were actually using the same tools that they use. So this was something that in the past had been split. So the last point is interesting. So if you've ever written a cloud formation template or a heat template, they're incredibly complex. They thousands of lines. AWS actually released a tool yesterday called the template editor for cloud formation. So when you're editing templates, it's actually incredibly complex. And when you have a repo full of templates that are deploying VMs, it's actually incredibly complex problems. So when you look at how people are consuming the cloud that they acknowledge that things, orchestration tools, heat and cloud formation make for incredibly complex deployment templates. Okay, the results. So when we look at the code that's going out there, people are checking in more often. We've got a higher code coverage. They're not worried about the infrastructure. They're now worried about writing the code. They're writing unit tests. They have a common CI, CD deployment pipeline. So we've got higher code coverage on those new services, smaller PRs. When we're deploying to VMs, they were scared to deploy in fear of breaking their application. With containers, they deploy. So in one week of the latest app we deployed, there were 100 commits. There are 100 deployments of that app to our development cluster in one week. So people could test, get it out. Things were tests, unit tests, integration tests, they were all running. So these guys could iterate really quickly. Complex deployment options have been simplified. And I had a quick slide on this. I pulled it out, but I had elastic search in heat and elastic search in Kubernetes. And it went from a three-node cluster with something like 700 lines to 40 lines in Kubernetes. So actually the metadata around deploying elastic search in containers was vastly smaller than that of doing the same thing, cloud formation or heat. Canary releases rolling upgrades and rollbacks. So I don't know if you've ever tried to do an in-place upgrade of containers, rolling them out, ASGs, reattaching them. It takes forever.  And it's just way simplified. One minute, exactly what I showed in the keynote. All right. That's all I had for today. Feel free to continue the discussion if you want to ping me or talk to me. I'll be around all day. Happy to feel more questions. And I want to be in this together with you guys and hear about your journeys too. Did we have any other questions? Okay. I'll take one from this gentleman here. Applications in the data. Exactly. Great question. I spoke a lot about apps. I didn't speak any about data. That was one thing we didn't want to address early, because again it was what's your business running on? Make decisions that are smart and don't put data layers at risk. That was us, right? We run a SaaS platform. It's got to be high uptime, SLA-based. We moved front-end apps and microservices to get a feel for it. But we didn't touch things like data stores right now, right? Because we had them in VMs and we had them in bare metal and had access. So it didn't make sense for us to try and bite into that right now. And again, I think that will come to pass as the Docker environment matures solid foundation for data stores and things like that. Yes. Yes, this gentleman. Yes. Yes. So let me just repeat the first question I'll answer. Is there a middle ground between monolith and microservice? Potentially. It's use case driven. I can't give you a solid answer. So whatever you use case is you decide what fits. The second one is cloud formation. So I mean what cloud formation does is kind of give you access to multiple APIs in one place, right? And to aggregate them all into some kind of order or your request for resources and give you a yes, no at the end, right? With Kubernetes you have a single pane of glass. You're asking a single pane of glass for access to everything. So I'm saying give me a load balance or give me block storage, give me blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Whereas so Kubernetes handles all of that and it's very tightly packaged. If you look at the way a Kubernetes spec file works, it's very, you know, very succinct rather than I need to go and ask Nova for this. I need to ask Cinder for this. I need to ask Neutron for this. Tie this all back together, right? You can do that very simply in Kubernetes spec file. I've got a few more questions. I'll come to you guys. Yes, the lady behind you. Sorry. So what we had was we had an open stack environment running production workloads. What we wanted to do was provide container workloads on open stack and that's what we did actually in a month. We've been looking for six months but the work was the start of August to the end of August and we've been in prod since September 1st. So it was being able to use open stack to deliver containers is the message. Gentlemen in front? Yes. So the question was what do we do with failure domains with this complex stack all the way up? SED. SED to run on. Yes. Toast. Yes. So it's, how do we deal with clustering SED? Is that correct? So what we actually did is if you take all the VMs right, we vertically put them in any affinity groups and put Kubernetes pods on top of them but we did kind of the same thing. We built some VMs that just ran SED and put a load balancer in front of them and if you take a look at that cloud choreo you'll have a look at exactly what we did internally.  So we kind of did it outside the framework of Kubernetes right now. Yes. The CI process. Yes. So the CI process that we actually did the other day was Git commit. It goes in whatever you test to find. So one of the things we wanted to do is have everything in the repository so we put all our metadata for our tests in a form like a Travis CI right so you check out the repo and the CI tool knows how to build and deploy the app. Now if you look at the individual commands that are involved it would be build your app and produce your app artifact whether it's Java or Go then you'd have a Docker file, run a Docker build in a tag, produce the Docker file, upload that Docker file into the registry and then you issue a command to Kubernetes to do a rolling update of the replication controller and give it the new image ID that you've just produced and that's the end-to-end deployment. Then if you want to roll back using tags in Docker tags we're tagging the build number and we can actually just click roll back and it'll roll back to the last tag. So you can actually do it. It's another rolling update. Yeah. Absolutely.  We have actually we have different clusters for the environment and then an app consumes a namespace but there's a dev cluster with its own endpoints a qa cluster with its own endpoints a stage and a prod cluster right so the deployment tool says this is a dev check-in push it to dev so answer your question. So yeah so the question is do we do anything with the YAML files? The YAML files I believe are still pretty raw for developers to use so we want to write a tool around having you know a common library where they can just insert their image ID and have a you know I think it'd be neat to have a tool that just rendered the YAML right you just say I need this much compute this much storage this much and this you know and it builds it right so I think that'd be pretty sexy yeah yeah if you need to or just variable substitute with something like ginger right just have a template and you just yeah a great question how do we manage config management so again we're incremental so we stuffed all the config for all the environments in the same container because the idea is you use the same container the past dev and qa to prod right so we stuffed it in and we just feed a switch in as an environment variable which tells it which config file to use okay that's v1 so don't get hung up on v1 because you want to abstract that out into a probably a clustered key value store and use version that and have it off git and say hello I am Locky and I'm trying to run in dev and he goes here's your config okay so the question is do we use the secret mechanism the answer is yes and we also use hushy corp vault so we have hushy corp vault to store secrets and it actually solves a lot of problems for us if you want to know a little bit more about what we're doing but hushy corp vault runs on on console so we have that as a back end and it's all in containers in kubernetes so that's what I mean about eating our own dog food we're deploying vault on console clustered on kubernetes and let me just check how much more time do I have here I'll make sure I think I'm up I think we're up so we can continue the discussion thank you guys I hope you found it beneficial and thanks for joining me