Edit: We first launched the precursor to GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Firewall Install, over two years ago.
Same pricing, but better branding. I wonder what else has changed?
- Enterprise is delivered in an OVF, which means it's a fully contained VM. This simplifies deployments astronomically from the previous FI architecture.
- We've spent a lot of time on the runtime and packaging of Enterprise in relation to how it runs the code. It's now much faster.
- We've changed how we merge the two codebases (.com and FI/Enterprise). Effectively, they are the same now. This means new features that come to .com will come to Enterprise quickly/immediately. Previously we had to do hard, manual merges which meant new features got to FI very late (3, 6, 8 months later).
I first heard the idea from Jeff Atwood in 2006 [1], neat to see the idea taking root with a high-profile product.
[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/01/our-virtual-machine...
(Previous versions were a tarball of PHP code and a lot of brittle install scripts.)
GitHub Enterprise is the latest release of our on-premise product with a re-engineered back end and our new customer dashboard.