Google has quietly launched a GitHub competitor | Hacker News Reader

Google has quietly launched a GitHub competitor

venturebeat.com

214 pointspbreit157 comments

This article is just click bait.

Pretty sure this product is just so you can store your code/repo for your project using Google's cloud services. It's part of a whole for their cloud offering.

Yep, more of a competitor to Microsoft's Visual Studio Online than any of the social coding platforms: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-s...

Well, one part of VSO, since that includes Bugs/Build/Test. I don't really know many private source-only hosting providers though.

VSO is pretty great actually. Private source control, bug tracker / agile planner thingababoo and build all in once place. With the possibility to auto deploy on Azure if you need it.

Didn't know much about this. Thanks for your sharing it here.

Yeah. One consequence is that stacktraces in the appengine log viewer are clickable and take you to actual code. Modest but useful.

Much like any PaaS provider. Heroku, Openshift etc.

It's not new either, it's been integrated into App Engine for a while

Every IaaS provider (Google, Amazon, Azure) has added a code hosting service or will do so in the future. Having your code hosted here will increase lock-in which is the best way for the IaaS provider to increase margins in the future. However, code hosting is not the essence of that GitHub, BitBucket and we at GitLab offer. The essence is code collaboration: mentioning people, doing a code review, activity streams, etc. Getting this right is hard and I wonder if many IaaS providers will get this right.

The code delivery pipeline consists of issues, IDE, code hosting, CI, code review, configuration management, Continuous Delivery (CD) and a PaaS service. Code hosting is a first step and getting all the rest right is a lot of work. Services working on getting the IDE right are Koding, Nitrous.io, Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy. And I suspect that GitHub Atom is running in a web-browser so they can effortlessly offer it online in the future. For configuration management you want to integrate with Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt and Docker.

At GitLab we offer CI and CD via GitLab CI. We hope for a multi-cloud future where organizations will deploy to different cloud providers. They will use PaaS software that spans the different IaaS providers. Cloud independent PaaS software offerings are CloudFoundry, OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Mesos DCOS, Docker Swarm and Flynn. We want to ensure that GitLab is the best option to do code collaboration upstream from these offerings.

So one thing GitLab and others don't offer that Google can is tight integration with Deployment. Yeah we have all used the CI servers to do a form of Continous Delivery, but can google and amazon surpass those offerings by giving a tighter integration that a third part can't offer.

Right now our support for deployments is lacking. On the short term we'll add documentation how to use the Travis DPL gem to push to the IaaS providers.

Currently we're thinking about solving this problem, but in our opinion it is more than a simple deployment. You need a build pipeline.

We're thinking about adding a build pipeline configuration to .gitlab-ci.yml file. Right now we're looking into how to deal with dependencies that trigger a build and how to allow for multiple environments (staging, preprod, prod) to be deployed.

We think that solving the build pipeline properly (like GoCD and Concourse already have) in a simple to setup way will offer a lot of value. What do you think?

on a more serious note, what will your new logo look like?

Thanks for asking, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-artwork/blob/master/new...

> And I suspect that GitHub Atom is running in a web-browser so they can effortlessly offer it online in the future.

A note about atom ... It does not run in a web browser and it would be damn hard to port it to the web since it runs on Node. It uses chromium for displaying the DOM but is not in a browser.

The reason people use GitHub is everything around the git hosting: the web interface, the account system, pull requests and issues, forking, comments, wikis, Pages, even the desktop and mobile apps. Hosting git repositories is straightforward, by design.

This article is only slightly more sensible than claiming that S3 is a GitHub competitor because you can git clone over HTTP.

Lately, the Web UI has been sucky, I relied on my username button quite a bit, now I have to perform two steps to go to my user page

To be honest, I think it has always been sucky in many ways. They change it quite frequently, but it doesn't actually seem to be changes that improve the UI. It only makes it frustratingly different than before.

I often wonder if the projects my team works on ends up that way. We A/B test a lot of changes and often find that it makes absolutely no difference in conversion. In the end we often don't change things that seem to be "obvious" improvements for fear that we'll just frustrate our customers by changing things in ways they don't care about.

UI design is hard :-)

Exactly this, it always sucks and it changes too often in completely random ways.

Github's issue tracker is also very half baked, every real project has to has a Trac instance or so somewhere else.

But _it has critical mass_, and pull requests and the way commenting them and testing them etc works is really awesome, and it'll be hard for a new competitor to get people to move.

That seems true, but only for open source projects. Why would it be hard for closed source projects (where github makes all their money) to move away?

It's actually simple. GitHub tests on their free users and see their reaction. If the feedback is positive, move it to paid clients. If not, keep frustrating your free clients so they move to paid accounts.

Why does that make it harder for me to move my paid repos off of github? I don't use PR or the github issue tracker, so I could probably start using the google cloud repos tomorrow if felt like it.

As others have said, it isn't hard at all. It's just Git. You can host your Git projects anywhere you want. To be fair, Github has reasonable prices and even though I complain about the strange UI, there is a lot of good functionality. The strangely named "Network Graph" has saved my butt more than once.

I have been thinking, though, that I don't like the workflow associated with commenting out of band. I would really prefer that people comment by making a branch and modifying my PR (either with code comments or just fixing the problems directly). If I knew how to do that efficiently, I probably would have almost no attachment left to GH.

I wouldn't say the GitHub UI sucks. All you need to do is look back to SourceForge—even before they completely sold their soul to the devil—to understand that GitHub was actually a huge step forward in the UI department. They do a lot right: powerful features, snappy file browser, very good discussion view in Pull Requests, etc.

Granted, there are a lot of warts and confusing navigation and organization, but in many ways this is a function of trying to serve so many disparate use cases. Certainly it could be a lot better, but it's far from easy—certainly not the type of thing you could just throw a UX designer at, but something where you need a UX visionary who also happens to be a developer with deep understanding and practice using git.

I agree with you that Issues is terrible though. I tried to use it for my team, but the show-stopper was that you can't move issues between repos, and so there is no way to stay organized across a non-monolith architecture where you need to take issues in based on front-facing products and not just code-level concerns. If it wasn't for that, we probably would have tried to suffer through it just for the integration benefits.

Is that what just changed? I swear it felt like I had to go searching for my repos yesterday when I was looking for something.

Just went on Github and I can't believe they remove that button. Doesn't seem like anything is gained from it and I'm sure I'm not the only one who uses it daily. I really hope they reverse that change.

It's very annoying. To me a while of searching around to find the explore button also, which got grouped into that drop down. Hiding content in drop downs unnecessarily is very annoying.

To be honest, I only use github because everyone else does and because it's almost expected I should to. And since I'm job hunting, it means I throw a few projects on to github as a portfolio.

But for everything that I really care about, I still maintain private repos on my home server.

Why?

Why...?

Sorry, you'll have to be more specific.

I use GH because everyone else seems to, and while the UI is nice, I think the permissions system is utterly broken so I now have to have multiple accounts so that I can allow third party access to my repos but not every repo I have access to.

Agreed. GitLab's permission system seems better for specific permissions so hopefully that will translate well when/if 3rd parties start writing plugins for it.

Right now we at GitLab offer Project Services http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/README.html

This enabled people to add new functions that are tested as part of the codebase so that plugins don't break on upgrades.

Are there any plugins you would like to see?

BTW We're considering renaming 'Project Services' to 'Add-ons'. Do you think that makes things clearer?

Thanks for the reply! I think Project Services makes sense. This was just me not reading the docs or researching this better. I'm going to look at adding some services later. Thanks for the information!

OK, thanks!

So they killed Google code to... launch another code hosting thing?

Does Google have too many siloed product managers? Maybe you can only advance up the corporate ladder by releasing new products, and fuck all if they get killed later, because you got your promotion?

No clue what the cause. Just seems weird looking on from the sidelines.

A while ago I remember hearing in some podcast from googler that they internally have separate source code management system (not related to Google Code). I wouldn't be surprised it he was talking about this one and they finally decided to make it public. Killing Google Code was probably just because not many people used it (externally or internally).

It's far more likely the Googler was referring to Google's variant of Perforce, which is what is used for most internal projects.

Google code was project hosting, not just source hosting. This clickbait article is talking about a Google product that just does source hosting and is a part of the overall Google public cloud product strategy.

Google code did source hosting and was one of the primary features.

Source hosting is the only feature of GCP source hosting. It's literally just a way to get your code into the platform, nothing more.

https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/

A number of features are listed, 'Source Code Editor' seems to be the other big one, the rest might fall into the other cloud offerings.

After just wasting the last three nights migrating my old project (code was on GitHub, but the rest wasn't) off of Google code the chance of me putting code on a Google hosting service any time soon is pretty much zero.

About once a year for the last several years I have spent a few hours/days migrating stuff off of Google because the project is being shut down. Maybe they are just cleaning house from the mass of project in 2005-2010, but the constant reminder that the stuff I create is in danger if it lives on Google's servers is probably not the lesson they want to be teaching me.

This is exactly why I won't use anything they make anymore. I cannot trust it will be around two years from now.

Can't wait to see how long it takes them to get rid of this one like they did with Google Code

Well, it could last ten years, like Google Code did. :P

Except git is the shit right now

Can you elaborate on that? Just wondering.

I think I posted that on the wrong comment :D

It's integrated directly into the cloud product. Since its purpose is not to host your code, but make your code visible to the cloud product itself, expect it to live as long as the cloud product.

... and since the cloud product actually offers a direct way for Google to generate revenue from the service, I'd assume it'd live for awhile. ;)

My team has just started looking for a github replacement because the code review workflow is just not working for us, we need something with more structure. I think there's plenty of space for feature and price competition, especially for private repos where github's social network effects don't matter as much.

Have you checked out any of the GitHub plugins that do this, something like https://www.zenhub.io could help you add more structure to GitHub

Doesn't BitBucket/Stash provide more structure for code reviews? You can lock down the main branch and force code to get merged via a PR.

We use gerrit hosted on EC2 mirroring commits to github for backup.

I am an unabashed fan of Gerrit - the fine-grained ACLs can be annoying to wrap your head around, but the code review interface is quite nice.

the only thing I've found missing is the ability to render images inline. If someone submits a documentation update with SVG and PNG updates, you have to download the changeset to see the files. It would be nice if an option for "view this attachment inline" were available without installing extensions.

Github's code review capabilities are a huge weak point for team projects, and I've seen several services spring up to attempt to capitalize on this. Mozilla's Servo project is currently trialing one called Reviewable, here's a demonstration: https://reviewable.io/reviews/servo/servo/6456

check out stash by atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash

In my experience Stash is not much better. It has simple commenting on diffs, but we had to have a plugin to automatically "unapprove" everyone once a new commit was added to a PR. It's social aspects are no better than GitHub code comments either.

I always found Crucible much nicer and it integrates w/ Stash decently, but I worry it and Fisheye are on the backburner at Atlassian.

What is it that you're after? You already know about Stash's plugin system that you can configure to do anything weird and wonderful (huge perk), but wondering if there is something we should bake into the core product?

(Atlassian CEO here)

So glad you responded, thank you. I definitely have suggestions. Our devops team was going to remove Crucible/Fisheye and I gave them this non-exhaustive list of why I would like to keep those tools in conjunction with stash:

* Fisheye has crazy advanced searching (in commit messages, users, etc)

* Fisheye offers he ability to watch for changes on files and directories that happen in any branch

* Fisheye shows a file as it might look with all branches and tags together (though it doesn't always combine them well of course as might be expected w/out using the VCS's conflict resolution)

* Crucible shows you what changed since you last reviewed and has an awesome slider (though can be a bit buggy)

* Crucible live-notifies updates in the browser on changes

* Crucible offers reviews on patches to a repo that may not be committed

* Crucible differentiates comments and defects

* Crucible lets me see unread vs read comments on files

* Crucible lets me see the number of comments (read and unread) on in the file-list pane on the left before going to the file

I personally think all 3 tools serve different purposes. I understand the want to move away from Crucible/Fisheye which are older and predate Git which causes some issues. IMO, there is a big unsatisfied market for code review tooling right now. There is also a market (probably not as big) for intelligent searching and notifications across a repo.

Edit: Formatting

Just want to say thanks for creating an awesome suite of products that integrates nicely and seamlessly together.

Re: stash. It's by far the best code review product I've used. And I've tried plenty!

Hey Hasan, have you tried https://reviewable.io? I'd love to get your feedback / comparison with Stash if you have a moment! (It's not a direct competitor as it's specific to GitHub, but I'd love to know how it measures up against your favorite.) Thanks.

I haven't actually, but I just looked at it and while it seems very well thought of, the first thing I miss from stash is the fact that It doesn't show me the whole file by default, just the diffs. And I can comment on lines outside the diffs, which is often needed. I could't find a way in reviewable to comment on a line. Stash shows the comments near the lines which makes it easy to follow.

In stash, I see the list of files on the left, and clicking on each file shows me the diffs. I also have the option to see the diff only (without the whole file).

Where I work we cannot use outside review tools, it has to be hosted internally. But I don't think we are your target audience in this case.

Cool, thanks! You need to sign in to leave comments, and they are indeed attached to specific lines (either in or outside the diff). They even move across revisions of a file as you iterate on the review... And yeah, you can easily expand to see a whole file if you want.

I figured that Reviewable wasn't the right tool for you / your company -- I was just looking for your opinion. Cheers!

Maybe you should look at RhodeCode, it has several different workflows for code-review. From very simple like just voting on each individual commit, to a fully blown server side mergable workflow that includes, voting, checks by CI, and integration to external services. We did a blog about it recently on how we use it internally: https://rhodecode.com/blog/increased-automation-at-rhodecode...

Displaimer: i'm the CTO of RhodeCode

Displaimer = Displayed Disclaimer?

Take a look at Phabricator:

http://phabricator.org/

It has it's own code review workflow which is, in my opinion, superior to Github's.

A nice summary:

http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on-pull-requests/

What kind of structure? Bitbucket/Stash have explicit "approve" built in, which has always been plenty for my use case.

FYI We've added 'Approve' to GitLab Enterprise Edition as well with the latest release (7.12).

Hi guelo,

can you elaborate a bit more what you are looking for? What kind of structure do you need?

Without these informations, I'll just throw gitlab in the possible alternatives pool.

https://about.gitlab.com/features/

Please note that I'm biased since I'm on the gitlab core team. :)

I'm the CEO of Atlassian (who run Bitbucket & Stash). Would love to get your feedback on what we can do to improve. We really pride ourselves on making products that have the right level of control in our products.

Or email me - scott <at> atlassian.

Hi! I'm a Developer Advocate over at Atlassian, and I'd like to point out that Stash offers extensible merge controls through merge request check plugins. In addition to pre-configured and third-party plugins, an open API allows you to make custom merge requirements.

https://developer.atlassian.com/stash/docs/latest/tutorials-...

In Bitbucket, we don't support this yet, but we do allow branch restrictions to ensure only trusted users are able to merge sensitive branches and many teams find this to be a suitable proxy for that behavior.

https://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/09/16/take-control-with-bran...

This just seems to be a place to have the code that you run on Google Cloud Platform. Not exactly a competitor.

It's certainly Google Cloud branded, but it appears to have somewhat equivalent functionality to Github.

For Google to launch something purely as a "Github competitor" would be silly because those using Github would quickly dismiss it; "we already have Github!"

So Google are playing up the integration with the rest of Google Cloud, integrating with Github and Bitbucket, and offering additional features.

You have to extrapolate a bit to realize it, and Google probably won't admit it, but this is definitely intended as a Github/Bitbucket competitor.

No, GP was correct. It is intended as a way to get your source into the platform.

They're private repos to which only people in your projects have access.

Well, not quite a competitor. I presume it's expected to work better with Google Cloud than elsewhere?

Yeah, it looks like it's mainly a way to manage code you're running on Google Cloud services

It just reminds me of Google App Script and its editor.

This is clickbait. Nevertheless, my first thought was "GitHub is much better and much much safer than anything Google can offer". Back in the day, were Microsoft to offer a competitor to a small company's product and my reaction would be: "They're dead in the water".

Food for thought...

Yes. Google now try to take it all like the old Microsoft. No wonder they get bad response for each new product like that people simply don't trust them anymore.

I pretty much trust Google, Apple, Amazon etc. to safeguard my data better than others.

What do you mean? Don't you use gmail, publish to the app store, and host with AWS? Do you use Stripe for payments? Google Maps? Facebook login? You are trusting these companies with a great deal.

> I pretty much trust Google, Apple, Amazon etc. to safeguard my data better than others.

Why?

> Don't you use gmail, publish to the app store, and host with AWS? Do you use Stripe for payments? Google Maps? Facebook login? You are trusting these companies with a great deal.

Believe it or not, most people do not do all of these things. Many do none.

Many developers and startups do one or more of those things.

Because trusting large companies that are trusted by many others and have invested in a large infrastructure makes it much more feasible to accomplish their goals. It is possible to trust no one, eg build on the blockchain or freenet, but there is so far much less audience, and it's only recently become feasible to go to marketwith that stuff.

If your goal is to attract millions of customers who can understand how to get started with your technology, trusting large corporations is usually an acceptable tradeoff.

And if you want to be competitive with what's out there using the features of native iOS or AWS or gmail or whatever these services offer that you can't simply get without trusting them, then you HAVE to trust them or users will use another product which did.

>Don't you use gmail, publish to the app store, and host with AWS? Do you use Stripe for payments? Google Maps? Facebook login?

Dear god no, no, no, no, no, no.

Depends on what you mean by 'trust'. Personally try to minimize possible negative impact such services can do with information I choose to share/store in case some/all services are compromised.

How do you mitigate AWS and the App Store?

Those I just don't use at all, really. :) They are not so popular in my part of the world.

How is it much much safer?

In the sense that I can trust it to be around five years from now. Google has, today, a bad perception in terms of product lifetime.

Calling a source code repo service a competitor to GitHub is like calling a online book store a competitor to Amazon.

Hint: source code is not GitHub's value, just like books where not Amazon's. GitHubs true value is something Google is profoundly bad at.

What is gtihub's true value?

Social.

Sure, it'll compete with GitHub but I think a more exciting possibility is that it'll compete with Heroku. CodeCommit (similar service offered by AWS) integrates with other AWS services to help manage deployment and releases but I still find the entire AWS platform to be very difficult to use. I would love to see Google add pressure to all three companies to make their respective products better.

GCP has a push-to-deploy https://cloud.google.com/tools/repo/push-to-deploy

That along with the cloud debugging from their git repo are some nice to haves.

Calling the GCP source hosting a competitor with github is nonsense. No public access to these repos, for one, so they're completely unsuitable for general project hosting.

So interesting. This race for features between the cloud vendors feels crazy to me, but totally makes sense from a business perspective. Classic attempt at locking you in to a single platform.

> Classic attempt at locking you in to a single platform.

Isn't that what happens immediately after one places their artifacts into "the cloud"?

Nah, there are multiple cloud vendors out there. My platform runs in DO, AWS, and GCE for instance. The notion that cloud itself locks you in will disappear soon.

From the repository feature's docs (https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/):

"Using Cloud Source Repositories is easy if you are familiar with Git. For example, you can add a Cloud Source Repository to a local Git repository as a remote, or you can connect it to a hosted repository on GitHub or Bitbucket"

If the goal is lock-in, they're doing it wrong.

It looks more like a beginning of an online IDE than a direct github competitor. It's just convenient if you're already using Google's cloud services.

I'm curious what kinds of additional features you'd be interested in here. In these comments so far I've heard code review, access control and online IDE. Would any of those be useful? What else would be useful?

Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform

GitHub has at least some good ideas in this area. Code review and issue tracking are nice, but everyone seems to want something different from those systems so I'm not sure how to do that in a reasonable way. Access control would be nice for deploys I guess?

I hope that someone really does make an online IDE that means I don't have to use a local IDE anymore, but I'm not certain how feasible that is. Atom seems like a giant step in the right direction.

Thanks, nt. Cloud-based IDEs are the future, I think. Too many good reasons to have them.

> It can serve as a “remote” for Git repositories sitting elsewhere on the Internet or locally.

That's not a feature of this product, it's just how git works.

sources say it allows you to "host" your "repository" in the "cloud"

Of course, we're pretty proud of our git support. We also support "connected repos" where we keep a repo in Cloud Source Repositories in sync with a repo you specify on GitHub or BitBucket; if you make a change on GH or BB, it's reflected into GCSR and vice versa. The idea is that you should be able to integrate with the features we're building on top of GCSR without making you move away from GH or BB. Useful?

Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform

Github really owns the "organization aspect".

For my personal projects, I'm fine with my own git server on a cheap vm, but for work I've been really happy with Github's issue tracker and org membership administration (with which we use OAUTH heavily for internal tools, several of which queue background computation). Github issues are much easier for tracking job submissions from analysts than integrating with the company email, and developers prefer it.

I looked at GitLab a year ago. I liked it, but it was a little funky (avatars weren't working; obviously not mission critical, but little shit like that erodes confidence -- either support a feature or don't, but never half ass it because I'm not going to admin over a server when I've got a chorus analysts bitching about it being hacky). GitLab people: this was a digitalocean prepared image version of GitLab, in case you're listening.

Version control is really the most minor and easy to replicate part of Github's value proposition.

Thanks for looking at GitLab and sorry to hear that avatars didn't work. There was an issue with avatars and using relative urls 7 months ago: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/369 This was fixed. But if you used relative urls please consider switching to a full hostname, it is a better experience. We recommend installing packages from our package server https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ since templates on cloud providers might be out of date.

meh. this has zero chances of competing with github. I think it's meant more for Google Cloud Platform users to have a place where to store their code within the same "cloud"

Hasn't Google Code existed for ages?

No one seemed to like it. Heck, Google didn't seem to like it enough to give it any love, just check out the UI on the site: https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3aPython

google code is EOL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/03/farewell-to-goo...

Off topic, but the image in the article is of a building in Santa Monica that Google moved out of atleast 2 years ago.

Ha! thanks... I was wondering about that :-)

To me, this more looks like a Google's cloud IDE (targeted Java), for which it would of course make sense to have code-hosting there also. It makes sense for Google to have one, unlike just a GitHub competitor, imho.

The _actual_ link should lead to https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/

Sites like GitHub thrive on the community they engender. Google no doubt has the tech chops to compete with anybody on a pure technical basis, but community is not their forte. Witness Google Plus.

When I go to princing and quota I get:

> This Beta release of Cloud Source Repositories is free and can be used to store up to 500 MB of source files.

No thanks! I still remember what happened with AppEngine.

What happened with AppEngine?

The SDK's were slow to update, the Java App Engine doesn't support Java 8 yet the Python and/or PHP version are behind a bit I think. There's a bunch of bugs which haven't been resolved after a long time. The instances were underpowered for the price, Java ones took a long time to start up which compounded issues with the auto-scaler.

I used it a little bit a few years ago and despite the issues with the original platform I'm quite interested in the new Docker based managed-vm app engine platform, where you can build your own images and have much better control, and compute engine pricing.

When they went out of beta/preview, the prices skyrocketed to absurdness and many people had to shutdown their app because of everything being coupled to their specific API and the notice being to short to adapt.

So yeah, don't invest into something when you don't know what the final pricing will be.

Thats cool...until the day Google decides to close it and shuts down the service and all projects trapped on it. But until then, its pretty cool!

Google Notebook, Google Sites, Google Wave, Feedburner…

Hasn't Google been moving code to GitHub itself?

Yes. Open source GCP projects are hosted either on github or googlesource.com, an unindexed place for git and codereview. (eg https://go.googlesource.com is where the go language is hosted).

And keep in mind, googlesource.com is not the same service as the one talked about in this article. Not even the same backend.

Competition in the Git hosting arena seems to be largely nullified by the fact that it's trivial to use multiple remotes.

Anyone else notice that the photo they are using is the old Santa Monica office that Google has moved out of a while back?

Google abandoned its previous Github comptetitor. Unlikely many outside of the Go-phers will use the new one.

Sorry, but I just can't trust them. I am absolutely sure that Google will shut it down in X years.

I don't understand the reasoning here, or you would benefit from dependent types. I am /also/ absolutely sure that /everything/ will shut down in X(company) years.

GitHub will not shutdown in X years. That's their main business. While Google has the tendency to shutdown products after their beta phase. From Google POV that's a side project to their ad biz.

Main businesses do fail (witness poor, beleaguered SourceForge). Meanwhile, Google's cloud ecosystem is a revenue-generator for the company; that does decrease the odds that it'll have the plug pulled.

I wonder how many people shy away from AWS on the thought that web services aren't Amazon's core business model.

I agree, but some companies such as Twitter and Google have a track record. Time will tell.

Competition is always good. Looks good for Google cloud users. However certainly no GitHub competitor.

Google had googlecode way before github. They just didn't do much with it.

Anecdote: I remember using mercurial on google code, at some point it did not work, a push was just timing out for some reason. I switched to bitbutcket and then used github. Google answered the issue, but I already made the switch, and I don't even know if they fixed it.

Fun fact: google code now has a " We have some known issues with hg repositories. " banner up since a few days ago.

Well I had this issue with mercurial 2 years go.

1. Requires credit card number for free trial

2. No built in issue tracker or wiki (?)

That's because it's not actually project hosting, despite what the article may claim. It's a way to get your code onto the platform.

500 MB lifetime storage doesn't seem like a whole lot.

To be clear, this is the current limit in beta and it's per repo, so if you have multiple cloud projects, you get multiple repos. We're thinking about adding support for multiple repos per project in the future. Would that be useful?

Also, and we're planning on upping the limit once we reach GA. What do you think a reasonable limit should be for a git repo? Our goal is to strike the right balance between usefulness and abuse.

Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform

Is it weird if you just charge GCS-style pricing for git data?

You should absolutely support multiple git repos per project. If someone writes npm-compatible modular JavaScript code, it wouldn't be hard to have a dozen proprietary repos supporting a single reasonably sized project.

I would've liked it better, if it also had auto-deploy to gce, and auto load-balancing, scaling, health-checks and service discovery.

So, if it was AWS?

im ok with that

The first one, sure, but all the others don't really seem like features of source hosting...?

Its not about source hosting, I'm talking about automating the entire workflow, cutting out devops, cutting costs. Its the future man

Does this have an API?

The article says they'll open one up later this year.

...because google code worked out so well....

It did. When googlecode.com launched, it was an immediate market leader (keep in mind that it displaced the wretched sourceforge.com). When the new wave of source hosting (github, bitbucket, etc) made its way up, googlecode fell by the wayside and, after becoming a distinctly third-rate offering, was end-of-lifed.

Post Snowden I'm looking to move away from cloud services and not entangle myself further.

I see this sentiment quite often, and I'm not really sure how to respond to it (other than the snarky, obvious "Enjoy your cave").

Hacker News is a cloud service---we share comments on news stories in a collaborative fashion. I assume this means something closer to "I don't want my personal, sensitive data hosted by anybody and I'm willing to pay for the inefficiency and inconvenience of only being able to access it from a handful of nodes (or having to maintain my own hosting solution on my own hardware)" than the alternative interpretation "I'm a Luddite; down with the Internet?"

You assume correctly.

Any service, especially served abroad like in the US, where I share any of my data, I no longer feel as good about using.

While I was at Google one insight I had is that there's a copy of most internet products. Given the cadre of college grads they hire to work there, cloning something is almost like a fun little coding challenge.

Dropbox? There's a clone. Pinterest? Clone. Everything. Then they dogfood it and if there's more interest they gather up more resources to inevitably pitch the idea to Marissa Meyer, who then plays with it, design the business case for it, and approve a proper budget for it.

If the product is good then the news leaks or they launch it. After awhile if the Google audience doesn't like it they cut it loose.

Which goes to say... any time some investor asks you what happens if Google comes into your space, you should say: good.

WTH does this mean?

Are they saying it is not secure?

https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/

Note Cloud Source Repositories are intended to store only the source code for your application and not user or personal data. Do not store any Core App Engine End User Data (as defined in your License Agreement) in a Cloud Source Repository. To use a hosted Git repository with a Cloud Source Repository, you must first open an account with GitHub or Bitbucket (independent companies separate from Google). If you push source code to a Cloud Source Repository, Google will make a copy of this data which will be hosted in the United States.

It means only put code in source hosting, not user data. That is, follow best practices with your repository.

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