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GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

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Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#151
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A monopoly is not inherently bad. They often benefit users with increased efficiency and productivity. They're only bad when progress stagnates and/or prices rise. My argument is every single monopoly eventually becomes 'bad' and makes progress stagnate and prices rise . Just look at Google and Amazon. Up until I'd say late-ish 00s, nearly everyone loved Google and Amazon. I remember when Google search, GMail, Maps…

Now that you mention it maps hasn't really improved since streetview. Search is worse. Gmail hasn't really changed much. I guess after it's launched new features are too difficult to add for google.

Building new stuff is always more attractive to engineers than maintaining and incrementally improving existing stuff. Google suffers from this problem somewhat worse than most companies, where its best engineers jump to new projects and the existing products languish because it's not attractive to work on.

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#152
post #72
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because there's no unified grand vision driving this and the GitHub team is an independent silo. Yes there will be duplicated efforts, but at least the GitHub login system doesn't get replaced with Microsoft Account login.

> but at least the GitHub login system doesn't get replaced with Microsoft Account login. That's a good example of a tiny change Microsoft could do, which would make me want to leave github, hehe :)

They actually did the opposite and made it so you can log into basically any Microsoft service with a GitHub account.

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been less than a year since the MS acquisition. Give it time.

Microsoft is an even better example of a massive company continually competing. Their dev/tech products and tools have gotten magnitudes better in recent years.

Huh? MS is the perfect example of how monopolies cause things to stagnate. It was only when new technology paradigms allowed for the growth of companies like Google and Amazon (wrt AWS) did MS turn around.

IE stagnated for years after MS killed Netscape. No company has really ever challenged Windows on desktop PCs. It was only when new platforms like the Internet and mobile computing came along that provided space for upstarts did MS start competing again.

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#154

This is very interesting to me. It also makes me think about the natural rise of monopolies and monoculture in tech. GitHub has really been extending to "eating the world" as of late. Recently in terms of their package registry that must have folks like Artifactory and Nexus a bit shaken, and now this, which is bad news for folks like CircleCI (and I say this as a CircleCI user). As a developer, in the short term I l…

As a .NET developer, this just smells like trying to rope in more people to Azure DevOps and then the Azure cloud. This is Microsoft's endgame. Everything they do is to win marketshare in the cloud.

I don't think it's an evil plan by any means, though, and their competition has been nothing but good for the ecosystem. Remember, they were evil about Windows because so many people didn't have any other real choice. They don't have a monopoly over the cloud, so they can't be bullies (and management is totally different now, too, probably as a result).

However on my very first impressions, the tools they're rolling out kind of look like Azure DevOps under the hood. There's a good chance they'll leave the github brand alone though and just make it better.

Personally, I've been happy working in the MS stack. They really want to earn the love and mindshare of developers.

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what real scenario do you see a monopoly not doing exactly what monopolies do? Do they have some moral code they can't break? Do they hate money? What exactly is it that would make them immune to human tendencies?

this is where the Valve vs Epic argument gets interesting as Valve has consistently been pro-consumer, so i have no problem with them being a monopoly. Epic appears to be firmly pro-developer, which no matter what Tim Sweeney says isn't currently translating into an improved consumer experience.

Valve are not a monopoly. Steam's competition is not Epic, it is piracy.

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been less than a year since the MS acquisition. Give it time.

Microsoft is an even better example of a massive company continually competing. Their dev/tech products and tools have gotten magnitudes better in recent years.

For those that lived through the Windows 9x desktop monopoly in the 90s, the Internet Explorer monopoly, etc, they will see Microsoft as a prime example of how monopolies are terrible.

In fact the few areas where you actually see Microsoft improve things are in areas where they have experience but don’t actually have a monopoly (eg IDEs).

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#158
post #48

I do not understand why Microsoft finances this. I understand the hosting as a specialized social platform, but GitHub Actions vs. Azure DevOps Pipelines are a duplicated effort. Better integration for GitHub for the Azure DevOps suite would solve that in a similar way without duplication of capabilities.

All roads lead to Azure. Github's user base is far bigger than Azure's user base, and Microsoft wants to eventually get as many people as possible buying IaaS (or equivalents). The next logical step after Github Actions for CI/CD is to offer Github as a place to run the production code too. You would be buying Azure with fewer steps. It's pretty arbitrary that we develop code in one place while then going off and usi…

Yes, MS is intent on grabbing that cloud market as best as they can. It's phenomenal how many technologies they're coming up with to do that. They want you to use their tools, love them, and naturally start using Azure on your next project.

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#159
post #48

I do not understand why Microsoft finances this. I understand the hosting as a specialized social platform, but GitHub Actions vs. Azure DevOps Pipelines are a duplicated effort. Better integration for GitHub for the Azure DevOps suite would solve that in a similar way without duplication of capabilities.

Some possibilities: - Market segmentation, the people on Azure DevOps are not likely to use GitHub Actions and vice versa. - Long term plan might be to bring both of them closer together. - Build good will (marketing).

Azure DevOps already is moving towards YAML build configurations. I wouldn't doubt it if it was the exact same tech under the hood.

Re: GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories

#160
post #9

Really interesting. My project just migrated to Azure DevOps and I noticed that their configuration file looks really similar. My suspicion is that Azure DevOps is backing GitHub CI/CD.

Hey there, I’m the Director of Engineering at GitHub with the team working on Actions. We really wanted to get an extremely flexible and powerful SDLC automation platform into our users hands as fast as possible. To do that we borrowed some code and infra from Pipelines to be able to offer a rock-solid CI/CD to every developer on GitHub sooner, and to be able to scale out to 40 million developers. With hosted runners…

I feel like everyone who uses MS these days and still doesn't carry over distrust cultivated in the 90s knows that the problem isn't going to be lock in. But I'm sure MS's end game is to make you want to use Azure more, which is fair game.
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