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.
> 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 plotting to kill all humans, leveraging all the data in a Global Central Memory Bank to subvert the internal corporate politics of all companies, governments, and militaries toward this goal (These are all real predictions AI 2027 makes); and Github will still be migrating workloads to Azure.
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.
In practice, I'd expect the majority of servers to go through a tool based lift and shift like Azure Migrate. That's what we're using to migrate around 6k state government servers to the cloud. Where there are opportunities for low hanging modernization, we'll take that route. Like migrating to SQL Managed Instances rather than pushing to SQL in a VM.
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).
This is good news right? People complain about them having bloated it with too many features. If this keeps them from making it even more of an ridiculous AI editor rather than something that complements an editor, that would be great.
I'm kind of neutral on this... It was more than expected since the MS acquisition and my biggest surprise is that both it didn't come sooner and that they're making the relatively sane choice to clearly prioritize getting the environment shifted instead of juggling multiple "priority" projects and features.
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.
Obviously 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.
I agree with this. It makes total sense for startup, but not for large profitable company, full of smart people. Look at Basecamp cloud exit, good example.
I hope they are prepared for lots of headaches, random outages, slow (did I say S-L-O-W) tooling and infrastructure, terrible access to GPU's, at least 2-3x more expensive than any other cloud. Support is staffed by overseas Indians who drag every interaction out and just wear you down until you give up.
Okay, I get it, but they also abandoned maintaining their Terraform provider! What a joke! They don't even want to open its maintenance and development to the community! How can you manage hundreds and thousands of repos manually?! It's always been a terrible provider - slow, buggy, and severely behind the latest GitHub features, but now it's literally dead! They openly claimed to be focusing their energy on API development, and until the API is fixed, they will continue working on the provider. This is unacceptable!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.1 ms ] threadAnd 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 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 plotting to kill all humans, leveraging all the data in a Global Central Memory Bank to subvert the internal corporate politics of all companies, governments, and militaries toward this goal (These are all real predictions AI 2027 makes); and Github will still be migrating workloads to Azure.
Maybe they should get agent-4 to help them.
So none of that is far fetched.
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).
I just hoped they would fix the mess that are GitHub notifications: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/15747
yes, the addition of un-disableable "AI" features made me spend a large amount of time and effort moving every single one of my projects off GitHub
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.
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-entra-id-vulnerability...