 I am going to welcome here today on video call Michael Sabota, who is the Director of Product Integration at Charter Communications. So Charter is a very big enterprise company. So I'm going to be reading off some numbers that are going to be really big. So Charter is an American telecom company that offers its services to consumers and businesses under the banding of spectrum. It provides services to 26 million customers and then some in 41 states. It is the second largest cable operator in the United States and the fifth largest telephone provider based on residential subscriber line count. And they have 94,000 employees worldwide. Wow. I told you that was going to be a lot of big numbers. So with that, welcome to this live stream, Michael. Hey, Priyanka. Hi. How's it going? It's great. Very excited to be here and talking with you guys today and congratulations on all the recent exciting announcements that you guys have been making. Thank you so much. It's very nice of you to take the time. So to kick us off, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Charter? Yeah. Sure thing. So, you know, thanks for the intro. Quite a big operation going on here at Charter. Being the Director of Product Integration, my primary focus is within our product experience development. And it's, you know, my job to make sure are developers who are working on our clients and providing a digital experience to our subscribers under that spectrum brand have a great developer experience, helping them realize that vision of quick iterations, giving them feedback, you know, shifting these concerns like security and testing and deployments and getting that feedback early in our value stream where it's cheaper to course correct. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So in this next year or two, what are your biggest goals as you break that down? Yeah. So like I said, our biggest goals are kind of realizing on that vision of quick iterative development, shifting concerns left, you know, GitLab's been a cornerstone of our DevOps platform, right? Yeah. Using it for source control management for continuous integration, continuous deployment, a Docker registry, artifacts. So really, how can we expand on the features that you guys are providing and create that single place, right, you know, GitLab has been a tool that checks so many boxes for us. We want to continue checking those boxes and give developers a single place to get feedback, self-service and do it in a responsible manner that, you know, allows us to provide quick value to our subscribers. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. So quick question though. So as you mentioned, Charter is trying to shift left, right? And bring operations more into the developer's workflow. Why exactly did you decide to do that? I bet that's a big move. Yeah. It's totally a big move. I think we've seen, you know, signals in the market that consumers and subscribers are looking for different ways to interact with companies. They're looking for different ways to interact with us in a more digital way, looking for different ways to consume content. Shifting these concerns left makes us be able to be competitive in creating these new digital ways for consumers to interact with us, whether it's paying their bill or understanding how their account is set up, ordering new service, consuming live streaming video or video on demand, adding to our already valuable product, just different ways for consumers to do this, and doing it in a quick way that I think the rest of, you know, the industry and all these other businesses have created, you know, the customers want that quick feedback and to do that, we need to shift things left. Yeah, I think it's become table sticks, so to speak, with the growing impact of technology. And I think what you said is really relevant because so many large enterprises are shifting left or trying to shift left. And I think those folks will find a lot of value in our discussion today. So going back to the plan then, what are the areas where GitLab has provided you guys acceleration in this shift left philosophy? Yeah, so like I mentioned before, GitLab kind of checking all the boxes, being that cornerstone. The single application, you mean, right? Yes, absolutely. All that feedback and be able to understand, did my code merge in? Did it build? Did it pass the tests? Did it pass the security scan? These things in a single place, within the merge request, within that UI and seeing that, it's helped us come down and make feedback that was typically around our sprint cycle of two weeks-ish, down to minutes. So now for front-end client development and prototyping, we're doing thousands of deployments a week, leveraging the GitLab Runner system, a huge piece that we leveraged, said I mentioned earlier, it's been a great use case for us to be able to put the power in developers' hands, define their build context, garner the days of managing different build machines. It's all in the power of the developers. And now, from the first line of code on every single branch, we can deploy a mutually exclusive environment and get feedback in minutes, down from that week cycle. Wait, how long was the cycle before? On average, two weeks, within a sprint, merging the code at the end of a sprint. Now, every single branch of code goes up, picks up a global shared runner that we have, you define your own build context with the Docker functionality. Every single branch of code can have a deployment and you can have feedback as a developer, feedback as a product donor, as a designer, right away. Wow, so from two weeks to seconds. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to call that meaningful. That's amazing, that's so cool. So tell me, it's very nice to hear that we have been able to help your organization make this move towards the DevOps way of doing things. And the proof, as I said before, proof is in the pudding, favorite phrase. So I want to ask, how did you guys find us in the first place? Yeah, so one of our engineers, Stefan Leigh Lee, who's still with our team today, he found you guys early when you were out there. Could have possibly been from that show Hacker News Post that Sid was talking about. But he was out there, saw what you guys were doing, sort of started evangelizing it. And we've grown from about three years ago when Stefan introduced it into product to now about a thousand active contributors on the GitHub. Wow, that's amazing. So it seems like Hacker News is really important to us. Yeah. Okay. What you guys have been doing and a good evangelism of your product from the ground up as engineers in product. Yeah, it's like a true story of, you know, the bottoms up developer love story. And I think that's so exciting, not just because of the way it happened, but that, you know, large companies like Charter are listening to the feedback from their developers and then leaders like yourself are responding to it and creating strategies that are affecting the whole company's bottom line and brand. So that's really, really cool. So tell me, so you have so many people using GitLab and, you know, working with it every day, what does the GitLab team at Charter look like? Yeah. So right now, for what we're doing in product experience development, we have Stefan, who I mentioned, and another engineer, Tyler Horvath, and there are the two that run our GitLab deployment and the surrounding tools, which again, aren't very many since GitLab takes care of a lot, but they're kind of responsible for the deployment and the self-service developer platform that we have within product, and it's just the two of them. And I think it's a huge testament to the ease of operations of your tool and, you know, taking a lot of sharp tools, but putting it into one really sharp tool, it reduces that footprint of operations, right? So it's one... Sorry, I just had to say it. We have a small team, which, you know, if we had, you know, 8, 9, 10 tools pieced together rather than just a handful with GitLab being that centerpiece, we'd probably need more than 10 people, but we're able to accomplish a team of two right now. And so these two folks are able to serve 1,000-plus users of GitLab at Charter. Yeah, I'm going to start calling them contributors now. Oh, we've got 1,000 contributors. Love it, love it. We are co-creating here. Awesome. Yeah. Very cool. So tell me, I'm really glad to hear you've seen such a positive response so far. Where are you planning to integrate in the future with GitLab, like what additional areas? Yeah, so right now we have a lot of things planned for the remainder of this year. You know, a lot of that's probably going to continue to change as you guys announce new functionality. Fair. But I think we've seen signals in the community around moving to containerization, right? Especially for modern architectures, it has a lot of benefits. I think we've seen the signals in the community as well that orchestrating these containerized workloads with Kubernetes is the way to go. So that's the path we're on. We will continue to integrate with more functionality that you guys have there. And we're looking to run GitLab itself on Kubernetes before the end of the day. Oh, so you'll use the Helm charts deployment that we have? Yeah, yeah, you guys just went GA on that. So I think for us it's going to be even easier to operate and scale the individual components and move it on to Kubernetes. I love that. I was referencing this in the beginning of the live stream, but I personally have tried using GitLab to deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster and it makes it so much easier. I'm sure your developers will be thrilled by this, so great plan. So thank you, Michael. This has been such a useful session for me. I'm so stoked just hearing all the great impact that GitLab has made in your company. I just hope we can continue to serve you better and better as we go into the future. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us.