Azure DevOps or GitHub?

In 2018 Microsoft acquired GitHub. But what about Azure DevOps?

Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for 7.5 B. And Microsoft has a complete offering — Azure DevOps — for managing the DevOps cycle and deliver faster and reliable.

Almost two years went by, and some questions that are still in the air were answered by Sasha Rosenbaum at Azure Podcast, Ep. 321, inspiring the content of this article.

Sasha Rosenbaum — for those who don’t know — is currently a Product Manager at GitHub, and her previous position was Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft for the DevOps Engineering Team, so she is the right person to talk about both worlds.

First Things First

There is still some confusion around due to the product name, GitHub.

Let’s keep in mind that “Git” is the open-source distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development.

GitHub is a product that offers Git-based source control repositories. Other products also offer Git-based repositories, such as GitLab, BitBucket, and Azure DevOps.

Why Microsoft Acquired GitHub

Long story short, Microsoft is increasingly embracing open source technologies in recent years, and the movement of acquiring GitHub is a way to get closer to developers and the open-source community.

After all, as of January 2020, GitHub reports having over 40 million users and more than 100 million repositories.

Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation.

— Satya Nadella

If you want to go deeper on this acquisition, Owen Williams gives his point of view on why this was a good thing, in the following article:

Which One is Better?

This question doesn’t have a binary answer. However, some characteristics can help to define which product can have a better outcome on a specific scenario.

For example, Azure DevOps offers a very granular level of permissions, while Github is driven on a read/write permission.

On an enterprise organization, usually, the granular permissions are a must, and they are often already using Active Directory to control and managing access policies.

Azure DevOps is natively integrated to Active Directory. On the other hand, Github also offers integration to Active Directory on its Enterprise offering, where the identity and security groups can be propagated.

CI pipeline tools on Github is well served, but investments are in place to grow the CD tasks. For such tasks, Azure DevOps is way ahead, allowing us to use deployment gates, for example.

For some companies don’t feel comfortable running everything on the cloud and prefer to choose specific services to run on-premises, both Azure DevOps and GitHub has this option available, where you can have your instance running apart from the cloud offering.

The Future of Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a complete suite with services for the whole DevOps pipeline cycle. And GitHub has the appeal of the open-source community, millions of users and repositories, and doesn’t stop growing.

Keep growing both products doesn’t seem to make sense. They would be competing with each other internally, and it would not be beneficial for anyone.

They both seem to have their own space now, but in the long term, I believe we will have only one product.

We spent some time deliberating about it and I think the biggest conclusion we came to is we can’t effectively run 2 products having this sort of internal competition between two things. So we are going to move towards having one in the end.

— Sasha Rosenbaum

But we’ve seen a similar film before when Microsoft Office Communicator became Lync and was replaced by Skype, which today lives in parallel with Teams, with different purposes.

However, we can’t affirm that this is what will happen to Azure DevOps and GitHub, as we have a new Microsoft these recent years, and, again, managing two offerings with a similar objective might be an unnecessary overload.

Anyway, this is not a short term change, and we can expect Azure DevOps to keep being a stable and evolving platform for, at least, the next five years. This change is not a light switch.

But it’s going to have this long long period of time where we are in process of moving things.

— Sasha Rosenbaum

Another sign that Azure DevOps is still around for some time is that Microsoft certification Azure DevOps Solutions (AZ-400) was released in November of 2018, which was after Microsoft acquired GitHub.

I took and successfully passed this exam, and it is not 100% on the Azure DevOps product but covers a lot of it.

Does it Mean Another Migration?

Probably, yes. And people often don’t like it when things change.

But we must keep in mind that this is not the first migration, and probably will not be the last. After all, we are always evolving the way we develop systems, having to change and adapt at a fast pace.

And think about it: Azure DevOps is a product that is around for the last 15 years! Ok, I know, the term “DevOps” itself just completed 11 years. But Azure DevOps started in 2006, known as “Visual Studio 2005 Team System”.

I’ve been working with this product since this first version, and in 2012 I became a Microsoft ALM Certified. I remember that one of the three required exams was entirely about installing and configuring Team Foundation Server 2012.

So, we’ve done it before. And when it comes to the time to upgrade or migrate it, we will have some work to do, but for sure, we will have tools and validators to help and guide us on this.

So, Azure DevOps or GitHub?

Safe consultant answer: It depends!

The strategic position for Microsoft in the long term is Github. However, Azure DevOps is more mature in handling enterprise customers.

If you’re starting, it is recommended to check GitHub first, give it a try and see if it can attend you, as Microsoft will put more and more effort, priorities, and investments.

But if you already are using Azure DevOps, you don’t need to run and migrate to GitHub.

You can safely continue working with your workloads in Azure DevOps, but if you just starting out, maybe check GitHub first because that’s where we’re going to make investments mostly.

— Sasha Rosenbaum

Conclusion

We know that products are only one of the three pillars of DevOps.

“DevOps is the union of people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.”

— Donovan Brown

And the best solution is that one that fits your scenario, your team, your process.

You can even use a combination of tools for different phases and controls in your development pipeline. Every presentation on Azure DevOps, it was always said that you have a huge advantage using the whole package, but you can also use only the ones you need and integrate into other services that you don’t want to get rid of.

For example, you can keep using your Azure DevOps Boards and start using your code repositories on GitHub. And continue your CI pipeline on Azure Pipelines.

And always forecast the cost. Having a solution that consolidates the whole pipeline can usually be cheaper than having to deal with multiple solutions from different vendors.

Most important is always to be ready for changes; they are inevitable.

And talking about changes, it was recently announced that GitHub is acquiring NPM, increasing its investments in package management tool.

If you want to know more about Microsoft Azure DevOps, check this article and use the demo generator to create a whole project, with preloaded items on all services that will allow you to know the product.

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