Live data from Hacker News

GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

thenewstack.io

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#11

While GitHub had previously started work on migrating parts of its service to Azure, our understanding is that these migrations have been halting and sometimes failed And there's no reason to suspect this next batch of migrations will be any different. Telling your engineers, 'good luck, you get to spend the next 18 months treading water,' is a terrible way to get them to give their best or even stick around.

I think sometimes the migrations were halted more because MSFT wanted to hold off. Microsoft makes more money selling Azure outside the company, and they needed more power for GPU build-out once LLMs and AI started becoming one of Microsoft's Things™.

That said, the difficulty of the work was absolutely also a factor in deciding not to carry through with earlier migrations, so your point still stands as a whole IMO. Just, now solutions will be found for blockers and engineers will be kept on it, rather than efforts stalling out and being put on hold.

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#12

I've never done a migration at a scale like this, but I have seen infra at similar scale, and I can't imagine how difficult this will be in a 12 month period. How big are github's ops/dev teams? That seems like a really unrealistic target to me. I expect outages.

Maybe. Tho I would expect the devops practices and automation effectiveness of github internal projects to be far above your average shop.

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that they are prioritizing this over new features. But since “new features” consists primarily of shoving the bloody copilot agent down everyones throat, it might not be such a bad thing.

That plus the new React diff viewer in beta. The old one seemed to be a simpler Web Component inside a Rails turbo frame. I've tested the beta one and like most SPAs it doesn't scale well to large amounts of data (large numbers of files / line counts). You can feel the DOM slowing down even on a high end macbook. It even blanked out the page a couple times, another common issue when browsers are overloaded. So I swit…

The new one also doesn’t consistently snap to a specific line in the URL fragment if the diff is too large, which makes sharing links problematic.

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#14
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beginning of the end of what? If I could have take a bet, “Will GitHub move to Azure?” a few years ago, I would have thrown money down. This seems inevitable since the acquisition and not necessarily a bad thing. I see it as neutral.

The infrastructure behind serving git repos the way they do is pretty fiddly—I'd not be a bit surprised if this move reduces stability and/or performance.

Sure but it also might make them fix some of that.

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#15
It makes sense given "CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center." and Azure has a decent setup for their AI support infrastructure and base virtual machines.

But having gone through a data center migration; depending on how "unique" some of their existing setup was; I do not envy them in this process (and I estimate this will take double the expected time :P).

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#16
post #6

> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months. I find it interesting to compare timelines like this (which is very reasonable and expected for an organization of Github's size) with, for example, how AI 2027 describes the world will look like in October 2027. In the next 24 months, if all these timeslines are to be believed, AI will have cured cancer, agent-5 will be…

The difference, as I'm sure you know, is that stocks don't care about azure migration. They care about delusions of grandeur

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#17
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beginning of the end of what? If I could have take a bet, “Will GitHub move to Azure?” a few years ago, I would have thrown money down. This seems inevitable since the acquisition and not necessarily a bad thing. I see it as neutral.

The point is that they are prioritizing this over new features. But since “new features” consists primarily of shoving the bloody copilot agent down everyones throat, it might not be such a bad thing.

>The point is that they are prioritizing this over new features.

Good! Shoring up infrastructure vs. delivering the latest hotness is something that is rarely prioritized. I'll take boring and reliable every day of the week.

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#18
post #2

This is, as they say, "The beginning of the end."

nah, I'd say we're well past that. The beginning might have been Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. Or the elimination of GitHub's independence.

IMHO: the acceleration curve into point-of-no-return was when Microsoft decided to go hard on AI, and saw GitHub's Copilot as one of the key inflection points they were going to use to do so - even going so far to adopt the Copilot brand across the entire company.

Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.

I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.

Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development

#19

I've never done a migration at a scale like this, but I have seen infra at similar scale, and I can't imagine how difficult this will be in a 12 month period. How big are github's ops/dev teams? That seems like a really unrealistic target to me. I expect outages.

When I was on infrastructure at Adobe, similar migrations took around 8-9 months (e.g. expanding into Azure, modernizing our datacenters, switching to Kubernetes).
Post reply on HN