Microsoft has been making its GitHub subsidiary more dependent on the company’s own Azure public cloud.
That aligns with Microsoft’s desire to ramp up usage of Azure, which saw revenue grow 40% in the second quarter, faster than any other major product category the company discloses every three months.
At the same time, it must be careful not to violate the commitments it made at the time $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub in 2018. Otherwise, some developers wary of Microsoft’s past behavior may not want to use GitHub to host their software code.
In the late 1990s, the US Department of Justice held that Microsoft illegally required device manufacturers to commit to including the Internet Explorer browser on every PC they shipped with the Windows 95 operating system. decide landmark antitrust caseMicrosoft has agreed to a moratorium on its proprietary software support claims treaties, among other changes.
When GitHub was an independent company, software developers saw it as a neutral platform where they could house their software projects and then run code on the marketplace. Amazon Cloud Web Services or any other computing environment. Later, Microsoft announced plans to buy GitHub. Some developers protestand more than 1,900 people have signed petition to block the transaction.
“Microsoft may have acquired GitHub so it could integrate more closely with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and ultimately help drive desktop adoption for Azure,” said Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab co-founder and CEO. , a competitor of GitHub, is quoted as saying in a Company blog post.
On the day Microsoft announced the GitHub deal, Microsoft published a blog post from its CEO, Satya Nadella, conveying Microsoft’s intentions.
“In the future, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug in and extend,” Nadella wrote. “Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools, and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and on any device. bag.”
The company will also accelerate the ability for developers at large companies to use Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, Nadella wrote.
Some developers worry that Microsoft tweaking GitHub so that running code on Azure would be the easiest approach.
But Microsoft used more sophisticated tactics.
Instead of motivating developers to run their code on Azure, GitHub is simply showcasing new products and features, many of which are built on Azure. So as developers use GitHub, Azure is increasingly becoming the backbone.
For example, GitHub Co-pilotA tool that helps developers complete their coding projects line-by-line, said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president of cloud and enterprise, in an interview with CNBC. Azure. The GitHub Actions service for building and deploying code and the Codespaces cloud-based development environment also works in Azure, Guthrie said.
“I would say, historically, GitHub has run in their own datacenter, not really in the public cloud, and a lot of GitHub’s new features are using our public cloud.” , said Guthrie.
That means the acquisition of GitHub could increase Azure usage – even if customers don’t realize it – and Microsoft can say that GitHub continues to let anyone run their code on any server.
Under Nadella, Microsoft converted other companies it bought into Azure users. In 2019 LinkedIn announced plan to migrate the business social network to Azure and in 2020 Microsoft says Mojang Studios, the publisher of the popular Minecraft video game, will stop using Amazon’s AWS.
“There’s a lot of great things that we’re doing, but at the same time, we’re being extremely careful, obviously, because you know, GitHub has a gesture of its own, and so we’re taking care of it. told – and Guthrie said we did a great job at it – was able to integrate all of those features natively inside GitHub.
In September Microsoft Notice to investors that the closely watched Azure and Other Cloud Services revenue growth figure each quarter will expand to include “additional GitHub cloud revenue now delivered through the data center infrastructure.” ours.” To date, that revenue has been in the company’s Server Products category.
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