 Hello, my name is Jason Lenny and I'm the product manager for the release stage here at GitLab And I'd like to talk to you a bit today about what we plan to do over the next few months to a year Maybe the first thing though would be to talk a little bit about what release automation and orchestration are So if you're familiar with the industry terms, this aligns to CDRA and ARL Which are the continuous delivery and release automation reports as well as the application release automation and orchestration reports If you're not familiar with those what this means really is just taking the software that comes out of your CI system It's been tested it's been scanned and it's ready to follow the path to production through your environments and ultimately to your users With that there's a few north stars that we see is very very important Incident in achieving successes in this area. The first is probably the one that I think is most important And this is really just looking at things in terms of zero-touch delivery If you do a lot of work with continuous integration systems, you know that there's a lot of maturity that's developed there Where all you have to do is check in some code The system can automatically determine what language it's in what tests need to be run And build it and and do everything for you and end up with a release deliverable We have a vision for doing the same thing With the release side and so we have environments in our system We have the code in the system and we want to pair those up automatically So that there's very very minimal to no configuration needed to make that happen Also, we want to make environments where we want to continue to make environments ephemeral and available where needed One of the great features that comes with GitLab CD is the review apps feature and that lets you spin up environments to test on Demand they can be associated with merge requests. They can just be associated with the pipeline whatever you want to do there It's on demand and it makes testing in and in particular doing user acceptance validation and that sort of thing very very easy And then lastly We see the need for secure and compliant deployments And there's a lot of innovation that's happening in that space especially around things like binary authorization But being able to lock down the path to production being able to Take the output of your continuous integration continuous deployment systems And have those kind of like assets that are associated with the build and deployment Be bundled in and in a secure way with the release itself So that you can really trust that what what you built what you tested and what you deployed is really what you expected That's going to be incredibly powerful, especially as we're moving to these more Distributed deployment systems with Kubernetes and things like that that can be quite complex to understand You really need some some some powerful basic tools in there to make sure that you know what's happening So making up the release stage, there's actually a few different categories here that we focus on continuous delivery sort of captures the All of the automation around Deploying to Kubernetes deploying to other systems a lot of this is based off of the continuous integration pipelines that we also built here at GitLab But really it's all about orchestrating things in a very deployment transactional oriented way Which leads pretty naturally into our release orchestration category Which is where we will be looking at more of the big picture and like as a company How are you orchestrating and planning releases and supporting that now an important thing to call out here Is that I get lab our vision for release orchestration is that it's a automated system that supports delivery It is not tools for kind of slowing things down or blocking blocking delivery So with continuous delivery and release orchestration together we believe that you can do continuous deployment production and Not run into the kinds of organization or planning problems that that you can run into If you if you don't have a good plan Pages so many folks probably use pages and it's a great feature for delivering content that goes with your release Review apps I mentioned, but they're just such a powerful tool for being able to preview. What's going to actually happen in your production environment? incremental rollouts is sort of a sub subcategory of the continuous delivery category where we are really just focusing on making sure that Supporting all kinds of incremental rollout systems that on different platforms is supported Future flags is something here that we delivered towards the end of last year and we're continuing to mature this year But this is implementing feature flags for your code and using get lab to manage them and then lastly release governance here is about kind of that third North Star that I talked about where it's Doing the control and tracking and auditing of what's happening in releases but again similar to release orchestration doing it away in a way where there's not manual gates or kind of You know individuals who have to go and approve different things to go to go on we want to see these Integrated into the fully automated deployment chain so that everything remains zero touch But you have that confidence that you need in order to deliver One thing that I'll call out here is that if you visit this page each of these vision links We'll take you to a page where you can see in a lot of detail what we plan to do next how we're thinking about the space And would welcome your participation there and it'd be great to hear from you We also can link to Learn more pages that have kind of a basic overview as well as the detailed documentation for each of these So moving on to what's next we have a few releases coming up and I'll I'll preview a few of the items that That we're going to be delivering so an 11.8, which is our February release We're doing a couple things to focus on improving the way the pages work So in a recent release we added access control for pages. We're going to be enabling that on get lab calm We're also going to be adding support for subgroups Which is a very popular item and one that I'm happy that we're going to be delivering now And then another improvement to our feature flags is to be able to turn them on and off per environment So like I said feature flags is a new feature right now. They're global and turned on and off at a global level But this this starts to mature that feature and and make it so that you can use it more scenarios And you'll see that there's more coming up as well So 11.9, which is our March release We're adding the ability to limit pipeline concurrency in different ways We got a few requests to do things like Limit pipeline concurrency per environment or per project or per job And we have an approach here that you're welcome to come click on this issue and check out and get involved in the discussion Where we're going to have flexible semaphores that can be created in any pipeline that Will allow you to limit pipeline concurrency in whatever way you want Continuing the theme of mature and feature flags. We're going to be adding auditing and permissions as to who can who can control those Binary authorization is I'll skip ahead to this one for Just because it's it's easier to start with this one but binary authorization is a way to in your continuous integration platform in Mark a release as trusted And also market as having certain things having happened to it So there's an attestation signature which can be associated with all of the tests running or having a security scam run And this will on the release side ensure that that is Checked and that only the right things can be deployed Into your various environments So the first part is actually Working with the continuous integration pipeline to make sure that this is set up impossible and easy to do And then this sort of follows on from that in that will make sure that there's a one-click or easy way to turn on the binary authorization feature in your GKE clusters Another one big one in the 11.9 release is running the build on the merge code before merging So we're continuing to work towards having release trains and merge trains that are Make that will make it easier to manage how features are flowing out to your production environment Especially when there's a lot of contention going on So that's a good issue to check out if that's something that you're interested in The 11.10 release which will be coming in April Has cryptable runbooks for releases. This is something that I'm pretty excited about This is going to be a easier way to Set up things that are like well runbooks is a good example, but the If there's a certain way that you can look at it as at a release as a kind of runbook so There's manual and automated steps that need to be set up in there And we have a vision where you'll be able to do that in markdown and create the plan in markdown But also embed code within that as well So that things like checks to see if the environment is up or down before you start the deployment It could be a one-button click inside of that runbook We think that's going to be very powerful and open up Release management to people who are less technical than those who might be editing the YAML and a continuous integration pipeline In the 11.10 release also Will be adding release package creation from the GitLab CI YAML We recently introduced a releases feature where you can create and manage releases Directly from within GitLab. So this is maturing that feature by allowing you to actually create the package as well Adding truly dynamic environment URLs to pages Automatic HTTPS renewal support for custom domains and then an environment dashboard Which will let you see for your project at a glance what all of your environments are and What what's deployed to them for example and what the status is? So of course this goes on we have things planned out to about Q3 I would love your feedback if you're interested in any of these items to jump in and let me know what you think And then also down here below We've got this other interesting item categories Where you can see just other items that we've identified within the release area as being important and just interesting We haven't scheduled them yet But if you think that one of these things is you know valuable or that we should reconsider I would love to hear your feedback. So again jump in and And let me know the other way that I'll mention that you can contact me is up here You can either send me a DM directly on Twitter or an email I'll get both of those. I'd be happy to hear from you and look up to chat. So hopefully this was a helpful bit of information And thank you for your time. See you later