 Thanks. Let me wake up my machine here. Yeah, I'm a two month old baby at GitLab in product marketing for the first time. You know, it's funny. Since I joined all of two months ago, there are five or six more newer people just on my team. So that's GitLab right now. I'm going to like feel the pace of it. We're like a thousand people just short of a thousand employees and I had to check again today because yesterday it was in 62 countries and today it's 63 because it's another day. Why not? We're in 63 countries. I googled really hard for that image so I hate to waste a perfectly good welcome slide. I know it's getting a little late for a welcome, but part of what I'm here to do is actually just to generalize the conversation a little bit, tell you a little bit more about GitLab, the company, the software and I believe it was actually promised I would talk about DevOps tool chains. So I will. It's true. I am Brian Glanz and there I am. I actually did tweet something at the hashtag because why not? It's pretty cool out there. At GitLab we work where we live instead of needing to live where we need to work. And I happen to live in like the building out the window, but I have this urge to say welcome to GitLab at the top of the talk because I've been in your seat many times and lots of other companies and you know whether it's over at the spheres actually that way or like further that way I was down at X the innovation labs, the research and development labs at Google and I'm reminded of a time a buddy of mine's given the remarks at the top of the day there and largely a non-Google audience and he's got this big like Hindi film narrator voice like Amitabh Bachchan and he says at the start of it welcome to X you know and I'm just like goosebumps because it's a super dramatic setting and it occurs to me that this building which is just a building but you know the space needle is kind of like GitLab's building today and we don't we don't have a building you know those thousand people in 63 countries they don't go to any one office we don't have a headquarters to welcome you all to but if you get more than a few of us in the same place and at the same time because we're also asynchronous and all our work by default and then customers and users and contributors at that point like somewhere in there we've every right to say this is GitLab right now so so yeah welcome to GitLab and that's a little bit of context about the company you've heard a little bit about me I was in fact a developer and as a consultant I'm thinking you know for all the different operations I was inside of more than a hundred different clients of different sizes over the years I don't know of another one who dog fooded quite as aggressively and in all the same ways as GitLab does and that that I sort of bring up because it was occurring to me like how do we get away with it you know back when we were just crossing the threshold into being what they were calling the first Ukrainian unicorn or sometimes called the San Francisco based startup or Netherlands tech company or of course the first Ukrainian unicorn because that's like I said just a bit of who we are and everywhere that we are but I get this question a lot and I always marveled at it before joining the company like how do we get away with it and we we get away with it by using GitLab is actually now that I'm on the other side the inside of it even this event organized in GitLab so we use the product to develop the product we also use the product to run the company and that'll come back around and actually be relevant in one of these slides let's pull at that DevOps question with software delivery and this question you must have been told to think about so many times in recent years how often do you release I like this needle for kind of pulling at the thread I'll do this a few times in these slides like think of the answer for yourself and then we'll go survey says and we'll show you the answer from lots of other developers or in some cases lots of other folks in in IT on the opposite or in security actually how many people are developers here I'm looking around and already know some of the answer yeah just good to know quite a lot of the room which makes sense so how often do you release I mean we've all been told and I must have told people a thousand times it should be more often but in case this is small I'm gonna walk over here and do so 2014 to 18 over five years this is a question asked by Forrester these are you know their data this is their analysis I'm just bringing it to you we all know we should be releasing more often or so I've been told but many teams are stuck I think stuck is a fair word there over those five years I'm actually really surprised there wasn't a lot more movement on that question but if you zoom in on 2018 and then do a 2019 version finally like a little bit of loosening up and Chris condo the principal on this subject and related subjects at Forrester this is him drawing a box and saying target zone I I don't disagree if I disagree with Chris I'll let you know but I don't generally speaking nor in this case so there's a lot of questions about why I mean even like why why so stuck but also like why release more often matters I think it's just a it's an aspect of being agile not like agile methodologies per se like are you fleet of foot are you ready to react to an opportunity when it presents itself to you know an incident that that requires releasing to to respond to to your competition more quickly releasing something that's better and sooner than you expected over some of these same years Forrester 2013 15 and 17 we're asking just developers in general are your organizations using an agile methodology never mind which flavor 2013 half we're saying that fewer than 25% of their teams were using agile and that script really flipped by 2017 exactly half that is right and saying that more than 75% were using agile but here's another one of those surveys says so when you ask are you using agile oh yeah and lots of movement over those four or five years but if you ask on the specific method level I mean just think of your own answers to these and it doesn't really matter what you call them like do you do stand-ups do you do sprints do you do you know when you ask people more specifically are you actually using these practices associated with modern app development yeah yeah that's what I remembered quite a gap right if you ask people like are you using agile or if you ask him are you doing some of these specific things associated with one of the other one of the other agile methodologies not so much and let's look to the other side of DevOps and ask in this case in the next few some IT professionals with responsibility over toolchain management and they're telling Forrester too many tools create friction kind of obvious from I guess a little bit of my consulting bias I thought some of these numbers would be even worse but two-thirds is pretty bad on the lower right there agree that handoffs between teams using different tools slows down delivery sure it does right and let's let's pick at that just a little bit as Chris condo headlines it teams have too many tool chains and too many tools so how many different software delivery tool chains in your organization one two three to five twenty twenty one plus thankfully only two percent in the twenty one plus club but that's four and five with with two or more tool chains each of which of course are comprised of multiple tools I might have flipped these charts but how many tools per tool chain again with the 21 plus crikey so a solid half with six or more tools per tool chain and four and five with two or more tool chains so sure there's a lot of there's a lot of rub there plenty of friction to go around who who's actually feeling it is the next question put to the same IT professionals here who's responsible for maintaining all of that keeping it all working yeah the developers we all kind of know that but conveniently 31 plus 19 is 50 so exactly half of these organizations know they have a problem to the extent that they have teams devoted to keeping these things working dev ops teams internal tools teams yeah labor intensive so let's pick up just a little bit of how the integration actually is done and the way I read this one is that you want to be here right out of the box solution integrated end-to-end and that that jibes with the sort of one in five being in the old promised land here I don't know what incidentally I don't know how to read this last one our tool chain is not integrated so is it tool chain I'm not sure what that means thankfully small small answers there but you know maybe it's wonderful maybe it's like oh we use one tool so it's not an you know IT people there you know maybe it's like in the days of you know the sneaker net right you'd put data on a thing and walk it across the office and your sneakers maybe it's I don't know if the human is the interface then it's not an integrated I don't know I'm that I don't know what it means thankfully they were asking the smart people this question this is a little convoluted we're looking at of the so the benefits you will you will realize or do you anticipate realizing if you're in that promised land if you're in that one in five with a fully integrated tool chain out of the box and this is I mean I think some obvious ones right like yeah improved developer productivity we just saw the other side of that coin increased revenue I'm impressed that pops is high on that list and so these respondents are quickly connecting those dots between simplifying release releasing more often increasing revenue right easy enough for them to connect the dots I like this one improved developer job satisfaction partly because I still get recruited which is totally inappropriate but they still get recruited as a developer and the messaging in those things says stuff like you know it's a developer's paradise you can use any tools you want is it really is that really like a paradise to be able to use any tools you want no you end up in you end up in the middle of this and so I do I do think that the situation actually leads to improved job satisfaction among deaths so in this case we're only actually asking a subset these are the folks who actually have an out-of-the-box toolchain management system and then all of the benefits they have realized which do they see having the greatest impact on their business and ability to deploy to any cloud somewhat to my surprise really pops there although I'm not surprised at all that three and four would agree they don't want to get locked in I mean who wants to be locked in and and why is multi-cloud important I mean I I think this is fairly self-explanatory but and it also occurs to me that we're standing in an enormous lightning rod in the middle of cloud city and I don't want to get struck down but yeah don't let big cloud lock you in right of course they're developing lots of tools that are intentionally going to work a little more smoothly if you're also yeah locked in we all kind of know that but it's nice to see that and correlated with these other data in these responses so what can you do well of course look for something that doesn't lock you okay that allows you to deploy wherever is best for you including on promises and something that does just as much of this for you as possible this is all still despite the little tanooki up in the corner this is all still chris condos analysis but you see where it's all going you know where I work you know I'm going to turn the corner on this all this lines up extremely well with having one tool to do as much of this for you as possible so let's talk about git lab and Hayden talked about this some and some of these slides just flesh it out even a little bit more get lab is for developers sure that's where it started for and by developers with source code management only at some point there was a big debate there weren't a whole lot of people necessarily in the debate at that point because we're early days like 2011 2012 some of my history is a little fuzzy and someone in here will will tell the story a little better if you're interested but there was a big debate over merging in get lab ci which was a separate thing was a separate code base with source code management and perfectly reasonable to be with lots to be said on both sides like there's a lot to be said for the the temptation of a real best in class tool that does this one thing extremely well but as soon as they did integrate them it was obvious at least there in that bubble that what the benefits were and that they were going to go toward developing things for the full dev ops life cycle it was just clear to them it was I think initially a choice made based on their own needs for efficiency like they wanted to maintain one code base they wanted to have one database that was the size of the get lab team at that point but it became clear what the larger opportunity was and that they would be building this company and this product out in that direction so from the very earliest days of the company get lab is for dev ops was more where that was at now I've already even in my two months talked to plenty of people and certainly in my 20 plus years talked to plenty plenty of people who have even more logos on their crazy wall than this uh yeah and I don't think it's too much to call it a crisis you know it's not when you you've got all that in your hands and how bad is it really it's pretty bad so when you look at some of these sources like the source on the 5.2 billy spent on dev ops tools in 2018 that source projects 15 plus billy being spent in 2023 and still like almost nine and 10 organizations are disappointed with their dev ops initiatives and and so you've got this stuff that you know the marketing people like me now will say it will dissolve it'll digitally dissolve your silos and then ironically uh because you've bought so many tools you end up recreating those silos you know but per tool chain or per tool and it's even harder to mitigate than the silos you were trying to buy your way out of I don't know at this point that we need to say a whole lot more about this particular slide we've all got enough context except that I would add single user interface to that I mean just occasionally as a dev doing ops that's invaluable to me and I only have so much brain RAM so if I'm trying to chase down an incident or something the less I can the less I can do in the way of context switching the better for me this and and all of the maturity related to this this is just one click off of our homepage and and I'm sure everybody in here has you know more detailed interest in a lot of these areas the fact that it's all up here is some of its of course labeled is coming soon but it's not to say it's it's complete by any by any stretch I think we can say more so than anyone else that get lab is a complete dev ops platform doesn't mean everything's feature complete but we're pretty serious about let me go ahead to we're pretty serious about tracking down exactly how complete are we and when will we be where right so which things do we consider lovable and they get a heart not just because they've been around for a long time but but because we actually believe that's the best solution you can find for that thing and there's also something in the mix and quite a hot debate about this inside the company and you're more than welcome to jump into those issue threads and join the debate whether you work for give up or not any informed opinion is as much a contribution as a feature or a fix and there's a lot of debate about like at what point are you lovable I would say review apps I mean I love our review apps I know of customers buying the product just for that and who say they love it so this is a little conservative from my taste maybe that's why I'm in marketing now I wasn't before we're beyond just get lab is for dev ops we're trying to stretch the definition of dev ops and clearly it's not just us like we heard earlier with dev sec ops that's not like just a word that we're making up and I think it's not only fair but but necessary to include security in dev ops and as you see there like as first class citizens shortly after I joined the company a couple months ago this tweet went out from the company account like when folks in ops are actually firing up their machines and and get lab as their main interface for getting their work done and and then de-fed this guy David chimes and he works in in ops and insecurity and says this day already came for me just reading it for the people in the back again doesn't necessarily mean we're all the way there but I think we can already say this as well I very much do it's been a year or two since we've been seriously adding to the security portion these are all really big deals now that I'm looking at these aren't just like little features here and there the up and to the right the sort of pickup of the pace it it's here I would say like I bring it here partly just to say you could doubt whether we'll actually be able to be feature complete or lovable in appreciable number of those different categories in a few years you could doubt that but if you looked at the the growth inside of the product and its capabilities and other aspects of the growth of the company and the product I I bet we get away with it I bet we would and the community contributions themselves up and to the right I hit the dashboard just off of this and it's really interesting to click through just in time to throw a couple more things in here we've even got organizations hiring people to contribute so that that all is part of how it's coming together and just to put a bow on it the company's mission formally is everyone can contribute like I said everyone at GitLab already uses GitLab to do their jobs like even this event is organized in GitLab right it's and and even in HR which of course we call people ops because it's everything is something ops even they use GitLab every day to do their jobs that's how we get away with being completely remote and and asynchronous by default and and still hold it all together and and pretty well and and so this is already true for us we want it to be true for everyone and and that's part of what it means for everyone can contribute there's even sort of a more profound level to it a company does a lot for you know educational users and for open source projects gives a lot of way for free and of course so much is free and open source besides but gives a lot of what would otherwise be paid away for free in all the right places and there's even a larger version of the mission outside of just DevOps which I think I know from some of the conversations I had before coming up here brings even some of us into the room today we're not all just using GitLab for work necessarily and that larger version I saw somebody see it really neatly which was to turn the nature of all digital work from read only to read write and being like a little bit more technical in nature that actually hit me even more than the sort of elegant version of the thing that GitLab wants to make this a read write world I really like that version of it this version of it is great too that's all I brought for conversation happy to go back and answer questions about any specific slides we should also broaden this up and and and let anybody from GitLab or anywhere else answer questions all right so let's give it up for Brian thank you Brian we're going to turn this into an open AMA right so there's a lot of GitLabers here so we're going to help Brian out if you have a question ask it that's what we're here for we still got this place for I think uh I don't know when it shuts down maybe an hour and a half hour there's still some drinks there's still some food but this is your chance to ask a question we'll walk around and it's an ask me anything right so it's an AMA anyone have any questions all right I got two of these so like if you if I'm like I don't know if I want his question I'll hand them to you I promise it's not too terrible um I worked in sales enablement for just a little while um at a big sales org and part of that was doing mind share events um I have a challenge at Disney where a lot of product managers project managers specifically say hey why would I use GitLab I mean it's got some of these things but Jira's like my tool of choice and smart sheet and these other things that PMs are usually indoctrinated into so I guess my question to GitLab would be how do you guys plan on creating mind share with non-technical people use what's been considered least traditionally a technical product anyone want to take it so um a good example that I was really shocked with was our legal department using GitLab right and and using kind of a workflow of how they negotiate contracts and how they manage their their pipeline of of work that they have to get through for the day right I was really shocked and uh and that one head of legal was in Minneapolis and I had a customer in Minneapolis and they asked the exact question you had and I was like hey Jamie can you go present at this customer and just kind of walk through your workflow your daily workflow and why and a lot of it was just hey I needed a place to just kind of organize all this stuff that's coming at me that's better than email right I mean which is not you know that's a pretty low bar right um and then just to be able to pass work to other people when there's you know other people contributing back to it it's a conversation it's just not lost an email and so since we had that in GitLab it just made sense I've had other customers ask the same thing and everyone's a little unique I think it's just smart to find some solution where you can collaborate and everyone can kind of contribute and there's kind of an audit trail of what's going on that's my answer to this question does anyone else want to jump in oh you're known as dojo if you're so uh my take on that is as with everything else at GitLab it's an iterative process and we've gotten to a point now where I think we've satisfied a lot of end users or engineers or developers needs and the next evolution of that the next iteration is to get feedback from those project managers who say I can't live outside of JIRA so we are actively seeking that feedback so it'd be great if we could interface with people like that that have that stance saying this isn't gonna work for me but we need to figure out why because we are satisfying a lot of engineers and developers needs from a project management issue tracking perspective but now we need to get the non- developers feedback it will take a while to prove out and you have to have your early adopters just like with any product um but that's what my focus is next year is figure out so we love to collaborate so challenge accepted in the back of the corner all right any other questions all right uh you mentioned uh feature flags earlier uh when can we expect future flag application in GitLab? I uh I don't know yeah so uh yeah in the back Josh Lambert in the back I don't know if uh here you go sure thanks uh so right now we have a baseline feature flag function which uh we've been iterating upon um so it's based on the unleash API so you can use the unleash client libraries within your application then you can control the feature flags within the GitLab portal or the GitLab user interface I think we did just recently roll out some uh like progressive deployment capabilities and so you can target certain percentages of users and so we are iterating there and so it kind of will depend on how mature and robust the feature that you need but essentially we're on a trajectory there in future flags and we've been iterating on it across the last couple months um so it's continuing to get better uh and um yeah it'll depend on sort of where your needs are versus you know kind of kind of our ramp up but uh so we can talk offline but we've it works now and and we've just had the progressive deployment capabilities and we'll keep on going so we'd love to learn more about what you're looking for what you need great question on our roadmap there's probably an epic about feature flags and I would highly recommend you contribute and say I like this I don't like that and please do this and the more people that raise their hand the make the easier it is for Josh to help steer the ship is how I would say it um but that's a great question um I don't know maybe Hayden looks like he's going to get creative he might pull that up I don't know any other questions I got a question it's more like a quiz does anyone know when GitLab releases uh oh someone in the back wait 20 second of every month like clockwork have we missed it all right not yeah same here I've only been here two and a half and it never happened and I send out an email to a lot of people they're like man you got to stop sending me that email anyways uh any other questions oh in the back back left corner it's kind of a hot hot zone so I'm just curious with uh continuous deployments and delivering more often what's the plan to move towards weekly daily etc with GitLab releasing I'm gonna pass that back to Josh Lambert yeah thanks so uh on GitLab.com we are releasing weekly now um so uh we have a new uh website up at GitLab.com or about.gitlab.com slash releases slash GitLab hyphen com where you can see like what features shipped to GitLab.com that aren't yet available in the GitLab like self-managed release package so you can check that out um it's possible they might be behind a feature flag so they might not they might be merged but not totally deployed yet um but that's a easy way to check out like what's coming um and uh yeah so we're weekly we're working on driving that down to be more quick uh to be uh more rapid um and uh essentially uh we I think we're tackling some of the availability challenges on.com first before we keep on driving forward but we're at weekly now and we end to keep on going but we want to make sure we keep it up first um and then on self-managed I think we feel like a monthly release is about the right cadence for folks as far as a monthly feature release um and that it's it's pretty quick for most self-managed releases uh but um we actually find that uh like 30 percent of users are essentially within n minus one of the release so it's pretty good and I think it's like just under 50 percent are within n minus like completely n minus three yeah so um we keep a close eye on that and make sure upgrades are reliable people are taking them but I think we feel pretty comfortable that's a good cadence but love feedback as far as if you want feature releases faster um or or if that's about right for how fast people can sort of ingest upgrades at this point in time good question uh good discussion josh um how frequently do you upgrade jason so we're self-managed uh and we are typically on a made or a feature release on the 22nd we're usually wait for the first patch release or seven days whichever comes first all right is it manual is it automated it is all automated um we basically just go out and say hey we're ready for the latest release we put in the uh the version that we want which is latest and it pulls down on updates for us all on um no downtime um I have applied security patches in the middle of the day um with no issues awesome you've earned another drink okay any other questions all right we are here it is raining like kind of hard so good luck getting out of here um you could have another drink you could have some more food if you have more questions what we really want you to do is contribute communicate collaborate with each other apparently if it starts with a letter c that's kind of what we do now with events like there's contribute commit uh what was today connect right whatever I mean so we'll eventually run out of c words and come up with something else I don't know who knows um any other questions well I stalled for a little bit so the question was do we have like a local meet up or a local user group here in Seattle is that correct that was your question I don't know I don't live here uh joe d coming soon right so joe is your rep in Seattle um sounds like John's got something to say yeah that was a that was a bad thing this week we're gonna avoid that right yeah so on something else okay kyle james on linkedin he's wide open for a meet up and happy to share what's going on at disney and uh we're waiting for his new channel my kids paid for three years with their allowance they just keep asking me when is it coming I'm kidding so this is just another tip if you ever want to give your kids an allowance I use two dollar bills so they can't use it in vending machines because I'm an evil dad but anyways um yeah here comes Hayden we decided not to get involved in the git lab meetups because we want the community to drive those these git lab connect events are kind of the equivalent of a git lab ink sponsored meetup uh so that's you can consider this kind of a meetup uh but the true meetups are pretty much run by the git lab community so we we generally stay hands off if that makes sense yeah there's like a process I have one I'm setting up in Minneapolis for my customers and I'm letting them drive it known it like we just kind of here's the template you go we're out of it kind of situation so kyle just you know sounds like he just took it all on here today it's recorded so yeah oh good stuff any other questions comments feedback all right like I said we're here for a while there's still coffee beer wine whatever else you like um thank you for coming out go ahead and put a round of applause for yourself for coming out today right you skipped out on work hopefully you learned something all right take care