The Future of GitHub at Microsoft

What does Microsoft have in mind with this acquisition of GitHub? It certainly has raised a lot of eyebrows and concerns.

Tools to the cloud

For one, they have historically made money off selling products and tooling. Microsoft will use its sales channels to get GitHub into more enterprises that don’t have it. It will most likely be offered as a service in Microsoft’s cloud. A natural question is, would an AWS offer GitHub-as-a-service from Microsoft.

New developer audiences

Microsoft wants their new development platform (.NET Core) to be seen as compelling and “cool” as other platforms, like Ruby on Rails or NodeJS. Historically, the .NET ecosystem was an outlier compared to others, running on Windows and using Windows tooling, while many others used Linux tooling, so it is more standard across stacks. Microsoft has already embraced open source and written their new web framework with open source and it’s cross-platform, so it’s a viable option for all developers instead of just Windows/.NET developers. They want their open source .NET Core platform to be considered amongst those who look at Ruby, NodeJs, Python, and others.

Part of their new business model is Azure growth, and a diverse developer ecosystem is an important part of that. The more people using Microsoft development tools, the more opportunities they get to help people deploy into Azure with hooks in the tooling. This includes an enhanced marketplace which they might offer in GitHub, where you could buy cloud services from any provider including Azure, right there.

One-stop development shop

One way Microsoft could draw a larger audience is by following through with their vision of making GitHub a central spot for coding, building, optimizing, deploying to (any) cloud, monitoring, QA, planning, docs/collab. If they jolt GitHub Marketplace, that’ll make the path to cloud deployments easier.

Deep VS Code integration with GibHib could make it a one-stop cross-platform toolset. It could have integrations allowing things like PR review to be done without going to the website.

They envision a single toolset for developing & deploying using any platform, with VS Code, GitHub and a Github marketplace. You could buy and use cloud services like Enterprise Jenkins (CloudBees) and Azure right in Github. Some are excited about this vision such as Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees, (enterprise Jenkins) who said he “can’t think of a better destination for GitHub than ‘The New Microsoft.’”

Conclusion

There is some backlash in the developer community, such as those who don’t want a large corporation controlling their source code, and among others who don’t want to be part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Outside of that, Microsoft sees the need to jolt their stature as a software development tools & services vendor, and it plays into future Azure revenue they hope for in various ways, like a larger developer ecosystem using their tools and deploying into Azure.