Running your own physical infrastructure is hard, so it makes sense to me that github should benefit from the economies of scale of Azure. Given the biggest downside of running in a public cloud is cost, this is a non-issue for github as they will be vertically integrated with Azure and will receive infra at cost.
GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
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Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#32It 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).
Vladimir Fedorov just joined Github from Meta a few months ago. What does he know?
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#33I'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.
> I expect outages.
With Github's service record, that means there should be no observable difference between them doing the migration and them operating as usual.
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#34> 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…
This discrepancy is precisely the reason (or at least one reason) why AI 2027 hypothesizes that all the interesting developments will be happening inside whichever AI lab is in the lead. The kind of AI agent that AI 2027 hypothesizes in that timeframe could do the migration in much less than 24 months, but only if the organization completely changes how it works internally so that everything is driven by the goal of…
You're certainly correct that they couldn't, though I don't feel stating "this is why all the interesting developments will be happening inside AI labs" is a fair review of the AI 2027 paper, as it makes many wide-ranging statements about how AI will impact the military, government, medical research, typical corpo-politics, software engineering, and, of course, AI research.
The realization that you're close to making, and I hope I can help you make: If Microsoft & Github can't realize the benefits of AI that quickly; why should anyone believe that the rest of the world would be able to? After all, there are roughly zero "pre-AI" companies that are force-mutating their structure to adopt AI faster than Microsoft is [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/780946/microsoft-satya-nadella...
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#35Obviously this makes sense from a dog-fooding perspective because the cloud provider (Microsoft) owns the product (Github), but I'm always surprised when very capable tech companies decide they aren't capable of running bare metal.
Running your own servers was never rocket science, it was literally the only option 20 years ago. Every startup used to have a rack of servers in a closet.
I have always thought of cloud hosting as something you do because you cannot afford a full-time ops team so it's wild to me that companies like Netflix decide that they literally don't have the operational expertise to manage servers.
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#36I essentially don't want any more GitHub features, so this sounds totally positive.
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#37[flagged]
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#38> 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…
[dead]
Why cop out? Smoke!
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#39I essentially don't want any more GitHub features, so this sounds totally positive.
It would be great if Actions received some polish. How are people applying org/team wide policies such as job timeouts to avoid burning through monthly limits? Last I checked this wasn’t a feature :/
Re: GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
#40Earlier 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.
>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.
Fair point, but I believe they are just migrating for the sake of pleasing their MS overlords.
Does anyone know what infra they are running on now? AWS?