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Comment by abalaji | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting. My project just migrated to Azure DevOps and I noticed that their configuration file looks really similar. My suspicion is that Azure DevOps is backing GitHub CI/CD.

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Hey there, I’m the Director of Engineering at GitHub with the team working on Actions. We really wanted to get an extremely flexible and powerful SDLC automation platform into our users hands as fast as possible. To do that we borrowed some code and infra from Pipelines to be able to offer a rock-solid CI/CD to every developer on GitHub sooner, and to be able to scale out to 40 million developers. With hosted runners, you’ll be able to run your Actions builds in any cloud, or even on your own hardware; if you don’t want to set that up, builds run on VMs and containers in Azure by default. You can use Actions to deploy anywhere and we have AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud actions to enable you to get started right away. If you want to read up a bit more about our virtual environments as well as what powers our runners check, we have some of that info in our docs here: https://help.github.com/en/articles/virtual-environments-for....

I feel like everyone who uses MS these days and still doesn't carry over distrust cultivated in the 90s knows that the problem isn't going to be lock in. But I'm sure MS's end game is to make you want to use Azure more, which is fair game.

It’s not backed by Azure DevOps, the infrastructure is different and maintained by GitHub. However, the underlying technology is based on the Azure Pipelines technology (a sort of fork).

Not sure I understand. From my understanding Azure Pipelines is a service offered as part of Azure DevOps. Does this make the offerings of Azure Pipelines redundant?

Not really.

Azure Pipelines remains available and it offers extra features that won’t be in GH Actions - like support for repos outside of GitHub (BitBucket, or Git anywhere)... it also supports SVN and TFVC.

Pipelines is also tightly integrated with Azure and has a richer CD experience (eg the K8s integration)

Thanks for clearing that up. Does this mean that GH Actions will support installation caching out of the box?

In azure DevOps CI, docker build steps aren't cached, so I hope they use something else.

In fact there is no stable caching (it's being worked on) and that is a major problem with the system. [1] What pushed us over the edge to take the plunge was out of the box support for MacOS builds.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/adding-caching-to-azur...

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