Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by reggieband | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

reggieband

Microsoft is really the best at the slow strategic burn.

* You host your project in github

* You fund your project using github sponsors

* You develop your project using github codespaces

* You compile, test and deploy using github actions

* You cloud host on azure

Each individual feature is definitely great. I'm not trying to be critical of Microsoft trying to turn their investment in github into a profitable business. This is a kind of vertical integration that is guaranteed to lead to some efficiencies.

One prediction based on this stack is the next piece could be some sort of subscription payment architecture. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of Microsoft Marketplace integration coming, but maybe branded under github. Some kind of SaaS subscription enabler.

View on HN

We're not even porting GitHub to Azure. Our tooling is completely platform agnostic, and MSFT Actions facilitating deployment to Azure are built in the same platform and open sourced the same way that AWS, GCP and everyone else are offering theirs.

GitHub isn't driving anyone to Azure Devops, we'd prefer folks to migrate from AzDO to GitHub. The focus of much of our work is building out the GitHub platform to meet and fairly quickly exceed the capabilities of AzDO (or any other platform for that matter) in every respect

And strangely enough, Microsoft is currently the only big three Cloud Vendor which you likely wont be competing against.

If you are doing anything on the Web, you are competing against Google ( and Facebook ). If you are doing Retail, e-commerce, you are competing against Amazon.

Microsoft is trying to turn the Cloud into its new OS before Amazon does it. But from the way things stand this will likely never happen.

So as far as I can tell I have no problem with that strategy at all.

Don't forget about VSCode! It's very quickly becoming one of the best free editors out there, replacing Sublime, Atom and the rest. I'm actually curious, will this be using Atom, it's own thing, or VS Code as the editor backend?

I have actually been running code-server [0] which finally allows me to have my powerful editor with all my settings and extensions and working with my own files on any device.

[0] https://github.com/cdr/code-server

> Don't forget about VSCode! It's very quickly becoming one of the best free editors out there

I don't know if people realize just how much market share VS Code has grabbed. It went from 7% to 50% in five years, according some some surveys [1]. Microsoft is quietly dominating this part of the stack. [2]

[1]: https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/vs-code-javas...

[2]: This is not an invitation to debate the merits of VS Code or tell me which editor you use, just an observation of growth

It's hard to make a profit from a code editor - i think. but will it allow MS to grab developer mind share to focus on C# .NET and Azure?

MS constructing a path between different levels of the development stack. They're integrating languages they control with their super popular IDE with their insanely popular source code repository with their cloud provider.

My bet is they won't stop you from going off the path (e.g. using VS Code to push to Bitbucket and deploy to AWS), but they will make the MS path the easiest and the default.

VS Code in GitHub is a perfect example of this. Every integration makes it easier and more appealing to your CTO to Just Use Microsoft TM.

I feel New Microsoft is a lot.of about TypeScript/JavaScript. TypeScript development is dominated by Visual Studio Code.

>I'm actually curious, will this be using Atom, it's own thing, or VS Code as the editor backend?

Isn't it obvious? VS Code.

> replacing Sublime, Atom and the rest

Regarding Atom, I've heard some whispers around the internet that they may slowly wind it down in favor of VSCode so that Microsoft doesn't have two competing text editors. Anyone know how true that might be?

If you look into Atom's changelogs and commits graph you can clearly see they winded it down the day the GitHub acquisition was completed.

Atom is basically in maintenance mode now.

Github CodeSpaces is explicitly VS Code. Their tagline is "Get the full Visual Studio Code experience without leaving GitHub."

As someone how really like github and really dislikes azure devops - and a corporate direction pushing us from the former to the later - any idea what their endgame is as these two converge?

I also use Azure DevOps for work and am a recently-former MSFT person. From what I've heard from those still there, most of the new development is going towards Github Actions, which is also reflected in their staffing movements. However with GHA running on top of ADO pipeline infrastructure (public info), Microsoft's success with the strategic slow burn as OP called it, and their super-long-term-support reputation, it's probably not in their interest to rush the move. I'd be willing to bet that in a year+ or so the writing on the public wall becomes much clearer. To that extent, we've started planning a migration at my company.

If webhooks become increasingly less useful we will know what thinks are going.

the end game is the developer gig economy. you assign a ticket to yourself, write the code while they analyse your behavior to calculate your hourly rate then you get paid

It might work for low level development tasks (which could very well be most of the software development happening in the world, who knows?), but not for anything more advanced.

Edit: I misunderstood your comment as about Azure generally and not Azure DevOps specifically. I see Azure DevOps as the “full service” version of GitHub’s slightly more “DIY” approach. DevOps can also be customized and sold by partners, consultants, I think. GitHub if anything, might move more to a “consultant network” approach. I think Microsoft is maintaining two district brands for developers, for the time being. I originally wrote:

I think there’s a clear benefit to Microsoft for GitHub to internally use Azure, but I think there’s a clear benefit to Microsoft’s developer community, GitHub and the Microsoft Partner ecosystem for GitHub to support AWS and GCP via open source, AWS Marketplace, Docker and anything else that helps ensure GitHub is useful independent of the rest of Microsoft’s services — GitHub being impartial is more important to Microsoft than the extra market share they might — might — get.

The corporate direction could be based on pricing. Azure DevOps (pay per concurrent job) can be a lot cheaper than Github Actions (pay per minute of CI time, with macOS minutes counting as 10 minutes each).

I see a Marketplace, but not their own payments architecture. I think what would be more likely is better project management built into Github.

Wait till they have linkedin spammers trying to recruit you directly in your IDE.

I definitely agree - was thinking about this in 2018 when thinking about the acquisition, and it's really interesting to see how this is driving the competitive landscape between Azure and AWS: http://redgoldleader.blogspot.com/2018/07/using-continuous-d...

Yup all the free stuff is ultimately to lead us into using and paying for Azure. Need an open source alternative to GitHub.

Sourcehut would like to have a word...

https://sr.ht/

I like the concept but the UI is so ugly

I find the UI much more beautiful and clean than github's, but this is mostly a personal preference. Just hope it will be feature complete really soon!

I had not seen that...interesting.

Source hut is cool. Among things, it prioritizes exposing and leveraging Git's existing functionality wherever possible, like email patches, rather than building new proprietary functionality on top of Git like Github and others do.

Everything about Github's PR workflow is killer to me, so to me personally the message I take away from this is that Source Hut isn't even competing with Github in the parts I care about.

If the one particular aspect I mentioned isn't for you then why even bother wasting your valuable time responding? Just go read their website instead and see if there is something for you. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but at least then you'd know definitively. Much better use of your time and effort. I'll even save you a few clicks:

https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availabilit...

https://sourcehut.org/

I posted because I think my post would be useful to other people who are considering alternatives to GitHub but also like rich PR workflows like GitHub has, and because I think it's good to encourage would-be GitHub alternatives to invest in that area.

I've actually been following Sourcehut's mailing list and updates since forever because I find their philosophies interesting, but not right or practical for my own workflow.

Github flow is garbage.

Its broken by design and forces a subpar experience on top of something that actually fucking works.

Maybe you find it nice and dumbed down, good for you. The rest of us want git to actually be git.

Sharing dissenting opinions is useful and by no stretch a waste of time.

It was just on the front page last week for a new feature launch (project hubs). The design is very minimal, but it’s organized into several different composable features. The author is on here often.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030489

I haven’t migrated over completely from GH yet, but it’s a compelling option.

Codeberg[1] also recently had some conversations here.[2]

[1] https://codeberg.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930

Why is that a bad thing? If you found value in Azure and it solved your problem, why is that a negative?

Switching costs.

If the things are offered free, and you build a lot of it into your system, and now it costs money, you have to choose between paying that money, or paying a potentially high switching cost to move to a different system.

If you had known you were going to be faced with those costs, you may never have bought into the system in the first place.

The trap is comfy and warm. Why ask what the springs are connected to?

GitLab has been great for a while and actually had some features before GH.

Thanks for the mention. As for how the features today map:

1. GitHub Insights => GitLab Insights https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ Code Review Analytics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/code_review_analyt... DevOps Score https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/instance_statistics/dev_ops_... and Value Stream analytics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/value_stream_analy...

2. GitHub CodeScanning => GitLab SAST https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/sast/ and Secret Detection https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/sast/#s...

3. GitHub Codespaces => GitLab Live Preview with client side evaluation https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/index.html#c... and upcoming server side evaluation https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/167 which would work both with on-premises Kubernetes clusters and in any cloud.

Simple but big issue I have is getting solutions that suit the platform. Often when I'm looking for help on something it gives me the on-prem solution. Docs on your website are confusing for this reason and that's why I stopped using. Takes me 30 seconds to solve a problem on GH and 5min to solve the same problem on GL. Clean that up so when devs try out the platform it's slick and easy to buy into not annoying and difficult.

Why? It's not like you MUST deploy on Azure

I think it's more about all of the integration leading to efficiencies that are hard to ignore while they're being subsidized / promoted. It'll start out as something where the value proposition is too good to ignore, but, as time goes on, they'll tier off features and charge a premium as you scale up.

There was a time when I was hopeful and though Microsoft would take a developer first approach with the end goal being making it easy to deploy to Azure. After seeing the VSO (the old name for Codespaces) pricing I'm a lot more cynical. Microsoft's going to be altruistic until they're not.

Go look at the pricing for VSO. They have a full time dev (100 hours a month - lol) estimated at a cost of $23 USD per month. Just wait until there's some type of marketplace for extension developers. The local version of VSCode will disappear overnight and (IMO) we'll be paying $50+ / month for the same thing that's free right now.

Get ready to pay for everything per user per month for the rest of your life.

> The local version of VSCode will disappear overnight

That's the beauty of open source though. VSCode is prominent enough that someone will fork it and maintain it if Microsoft pulls the plug.

My fear is that an officially supported marketplace for selling extensions would be appealing enough that important extensions would put all future development effort into their marketplace versions and cease development of local versions.

Hi! PM on the Codespaces team here.

I wanted to quickly help calm any potential concerns about changes to VS Code or its model.

Codespaces is a separate, additional service from VS Code, very much focused on providing compute catered to developers and their workflows. We hope you'll use and love it, but we're also very happy if you'd prefer to continue to use VS Code in the ways that you may have previously done.

Either way, we will continue to invest heavily in VS Code as you know it. Codespaces will not change that.

Hopefully that helps clarify any concerns!

I believe you when you say your intentions are good, but I'm skeptical. Even if it's not the official stance, getting as many people as possible onto the SaaS offering has to be the goal and, IMO, there could be a point where maintaining the standalone product isn't worth it.

I'm worried that Microsoft's going to be successful in shifting a bunch of developer workload onto Azure and that'll create a power imbalance where developers will see increasing prices while they lose control their own workflows.

Is it true that Nadella frequents the gym and chastises people for running on treadmills instead of Azure? Lol.

> we will continue to invest heavily in VS Code

Just like MS heavily invest in Atom now? :)

"nobody gets fired for buying IBM"

Gitlab CE, Gitea, Gogs

Some background on these:

Gitea is a fork of Gogs. Both are written in Go and are pretty light on resources (they support SQLite as database backend).

Gitlab is heavier on resources and requires at least Postgresql and Redis.

Gitlab looks nicer and has a lot more features even in the open source edition. (Though some paid features seem to be arbitrary paid vs free, like scoped tags, a feature everyone could use is paid, while a really Enterprise feature like kubernetes support is free)

Doesn't gitlab fit the bill here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com