 All right, welcome to today's platform backend update. My name is Dhava Mahan and I am the platform backend lead at GitLab. Someone asked me last time why I gave the introduction because most of the people watching live are my colleagues who should know that I work at GitLab, et cetera. The reason for that is that this video will also, this actually, this presentation is being recorded and it will also be published on our website. So it is interesting for regular GitLab users, contributors, et cetera, to kind of get an idea of what I'm talking about. So I will provide a little bit more context than I would usually do when I'm just talking to colleagues. So I'm just a little bit of context setting. Dhava Mahan, backend lead, and this is all about platform backend to GitLab, everything we did the last five weeks. So the last five weeks, my team worked on a bunch of things, some of these related to the GitLab release at hand, GitLab 9.4, which we released just a couple of days ago, and a number of them not so much related to the GitLab release itself as the software that kind of supports things like selling licenses to customers. And a lot of efforts, for example, went to the first item on this list, which is to get EE to behave as CE when no licenses entered. In the next slide, I'll tell you a little bit about what this sets us up for and why is this so interesting. But this was basically a two or three month effort that was mostly run by Tom, Nick, and Bob, who went through the entire EE code base and added checks to everything that was EE only. In the past, EE only was just a consequence of some code being in the EE repository, but not the CE repository. But since we now want to have EE behave as a CE when no licenses entered, we needed to find every one of those locations and add the appropriate checks around. And this is something that took us a lot of time to do, because GitLab was never really built with us needing to do that in the future in mind. But now we do that with a lot of things to these three people. The second thing that Ruben has been working on mostly is the ability to get a trial license right from Enterprise Edition. This also relates to the first item, but they will all come together in something I'll describe in the next slide. But basically, there is now an interface inside GitLab EE, which allows you to immediately purchase a trial license without having to manually go to the customer app, manually wait for an email to be sent to your inbox, manually enter it into GitLab. This process has been streamlined a lot, which will make it a lot easier for people to try out Enterprise Edition and if they like it, migrate to it. And the migration through everything that we've been doing the last couple months will be a lot more streamlined and less of a hassle than it has been in the past two. The third thing that's related to how we get GitLab into our customer's hand is something that Osvalo has been working on, which is improving the GitLab.com purchase flow. Since we are going to be offering page plans for Enterprise functionality on GitLab.com as well, which I will say a little bit more about in the next slide. We wanted to make the experience on the GitLab.com purchase on the customer app a bit nicer and make it easier for people to give us the money they so desperately want to give us. One piece of feedback we got a couple of days ago is literally someone complaining about how hard we made it for them to give us money, which is of course, we don't want to see happening, but it's something we invested a lot of time in the last couple months. Then of course, we also started development of GitLab 9.5 on July 8th, 9.5 being the next release. It's going to be released in the 22nd of August. And we released GitLab 9.4 in July 22nd. Since this month and the last couple months, we have been working really hard in the background on getting everything set up for these GitLab.com plans and enterprise additions, functioning as CE, when our licenses entered. We were a little bit of short on resources for platform backend feature work. So in 9.4, our team mostly contributed bug fixes and some minor performance stuff, but most of the effort, as I mentioned earlier, went into those three things to top of the slide. Of course, the other teams, platform frontend, discussion back in the frontend, CI, et cetera, have been working hard in getting features to you every month, but since the platform team covers a lot more than just to get an application, we sometimes have to allocate our resources differently. So that's what we did the last five weeks. And now in the next five weeks, we plan to, first of all, define a better process for IATNM contributors. IATNM meaning internationalization, translating GitLab into different languages in English. We started this effort a couple months ago, basically by externalizing one or two pages inside GitLab, externalizing meaning, setting them up to be translated, which is the manual process, because it's something you need to either take into account when you're first developing a feature. And if you do it afterwards, it's not too much effort, but still if you wanna do it for a whole application inside a GitLab, it's gonna be a multi-month process. So a couple months ago, we started doing this. We were not necessarily expecting this whole thing to blow up as much as it did, but literally within days after having externalized that page, we had contributions from people from more than 10 different languages who wanted to help translate GitLab in their language of choice, because we mostly focused on the externalizing part at that point, not so much the process for contributors. The process was not as smooth as it could be. There were some merge conflicts, some things that got overwritten accidentally. This is something that for the next five weeks, we will be defining much better. This is already an ongoing process, but we'll put the tools in place to make this as easy as can be for both people inside GitLab and people outside to help us translate GitLab into as many languages as we can. Of course, there's a number of languages that we want the support to be really, really complete and good in. Those are the languages that we have people actively working on translating, and then there's a lot of languages that the community is helping us with that might be a little bit slower to translate, but so far, there's people have been doing awesome contributions in getting GitLab translated into such languages as Esperanto, which is spoken natively by almost no one. It's a second language by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, but GitLab will be available in Esperanto, if that's something that you fancy. The second thing, of course, we'll finalize GitLab 95 on August 7th, which is in about a week. We'll release it in 20 seconds. A couple of notable mentions here are repository mirroring with SSH keys. This is a feature that has been requested for a while. We have had repository mirroring for a good period of time, more than a year, but it currently only really works with HTTP. If you wanna clone a repository, mirror a repository that is available over HTTP, and then you need to provide the credentials as a username and password, which is not an option in some setups, some environments. So now we're going to allow repository mirroring by providing SSH key, which makes this protection and running of credentials, et cetera, a little bit easier. The second thing is street-based navigation of groups, subgroups, and projects. We released subgroups, so don't have the subgroups in GitLab 9.0 and over the last couple of releases, we have been improving the UI in certain aspects, including adding a kind of tree-like navigation to the group page, which means you can expand the group and then the subgroups will render, et cetera. But people were getting, well, it ended up being confusing that you couldn't go one level deeper and actually show the project inside one of those subgroups or inside a group. So now we're basically implementing full street-based navigation of all of your groups, subgroups, and projects, which will make it a little bit easier to find the project you're looking for if you have an instance with a lot of projects inside it. Of course, there's a lot more that we're working on, some performance, some bug fixes, just some things, minor improvements that we have been wanting to do for a while. And you can find out about those if you check that more link. If you are just watching the presentation right now, there will be a link to the slides in the eventual blog post, as well as in the calendar event for this presentation. Third, we will start development of GitLab 10.0, not 96, but 10.0 on August 8th. We have a lot of great things in store for GitLab, or the upcoming release of GitLab, the one that's gonna be after 95. So we decided to call it 10.0 to kind of communicate the kind of changes we're making and that this is really something that people should be looking forward to and also something that people will experience as a major improvement, even more so than every monthly release is. So that's gonna be August 8th that we will start working on that. As those who are familiar with the GitLab scheduling process will know, we basically only finalize what is gonna go into a release a couple of days ahead of this date of the 8th, which to answer the question, Richard Rapp is asking, what are the big new features we're planning for 10.0? There are some stuff that you can already find if you look for the 10.0 milestone in the issue tracker, but the exact list of deliverables will only be determined a couple of days ahead of the 8th. So this is something that this week and early next week, engineering leads, product managers will be talking about a lot to pin it down. So I'm not gonna call out any specific feature because then it might get, you know, scripted favor or something else, but we have a lot of great stuff in store. Something you've already been able to see as a kind of beta even on GitLab.com is the new navigation, which Cushals have just pointed out. We do have more of an idea than that, Rapp. I just don't wanna say something now and it turns out we ended up replacing it by something else. I suggest you go to the 10.0 milestone or you ask the project manager to sell it on you. But yeah, the new UI, the new navigation is the primary reason. There's some API deprecations and some stuff on both the CI platform and discussion site that customers would really have. And of course there's a lot more that you can already find if you open it to the more link that I just noticed I haven't actually added. But yeah, 10.0 milestone in GitLab.com and you will find out what we have in store. And then we will have the last couple of months of work pay off with GitLab.com paid plans with extra functionality. For ages, we have had the enterprise edition of course with extra functionality over the free community edition. We've also had enterprise edition standard and premium for a while. But on GitLab.com, we basically made all of this functionality available to everyone, which of course is great. But since some of these features were developed in mind with more enterprise, bigger size customers in mind, it was kind of a loss of the opportunity for financing GitLab, everything we're doing. We give a lot of stuff away for free but we cannot do that with everything. So we're gonna be building more cool stuff in the future and some of the stuff we have built for new users of GitLab.com is gonna require a plan as well. Of course, everyone who already has an account on GitLab.com will be grandfathered into an early adopter plan. So don't worry about your features going away. Within the future, this is a change for making which will allow us to do more because more paid plans, more money coming in, more awesome stuff we can build and the prices will be very affordable as you will find if you check out the issue or at least if you wait for that stuff to go live. But that's basically something that we've been working on the last three months. Took a lot of effort buying the scenes to get everything set up for this. And yeah, that's finally gonna pay off. Easy e-feature discoverability trial and upgrade is related to this as well. This is something I touched on earlier which is that it's really easy to just get started with CE and then you are never really exposed what EE has to offer over CE. So a lot of people who are using CE are not even aware of what EE does. And if they were, they would likely be interested in upgrading, but they don't get that opportunity. And of course, since CE and EE requires right now a new package installation to perform that upgrade, it seems like a cumbersome process even though it's still done in a couple of seconds. But this is something where we wanna remove as many hurdles as we can. So a lot of the work we've been doing the last couple of months specifically with having EE behave as CE when the license has entered and with allowing easy trial purchase from within the EE interface are all working towards this effort that is being worked on by many areas inside the company. Something that platform has spent a lot of time in as well. So what we're gonna be seeing in the next couple of weeks or when we decide to roll this out is that we will recommending our, everyone who wants GitLab on their own server we're recommending they just install EE to start with. And if they don't enter a license they will just get all the CE functionality. But if at any point they find out like, hey, this EE thing, it's cool. They can simply purchase that trial license which is done in 30 seconds. You just enter a couple of items of basic information. No, you'll be up and running. And at any point if you decide to continue with EE or if you decide to go back to CE you will not have to reinstall a different version of the software. You will not have to migrate any databases. Everything will just work really easily. This too sets us up for getting more people familiar with the awesome stuff we have to offer in EE. And in the end, I don't wanna repeat this too much but of course this helps us with making money too because there's no way we can build all of this stuff for free if there's not something coming back and even if that's a couple of percentage of all of the GitLab users around the world that's enough for us to be able to build a lot for free and have a little bit of stuff for enterprise customers. So yeah, that's the next five weeks. In five weeks I'll tell you how much of that we were able to actually get done. I know that we're gonna get the nine-five stuff done. I know that we're gonna get those GitLab.com and EE things rolled out. So I am very hopeful. And in five weeks I'll tell you what's the plans are over the five weeks following that. If anyone has any questions feel free to post into the Zoom group chat right now. Of course if anyone's seeing this later if you have any questions you can comment on the blog post where this update will be featured and we will try to respond as soon as possible. I didn't see any questions in the group chat. So with that I thank you for your attention and I will see you in five weeks or in the meantime if you happen to be a colleague of mine. Have a good day.