The COO of GitHub explains why it has no plans to ever move completely to Microsoft's cloud, over a year after the $7.5 billion acquisition

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The COO of GitHub explains why it has no plans to ever move completely to Microsoft's cloud, over a year after the $7.5 billion acquisition
GitHub, Erica Brescia

GitHub

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GitHub COO Erica Brescia

  • GitHub COO Erica Brescia says GitHub, which now has over 40 million developers on the site, has no plans to move completely to Microsoft's cloud Azure.
  • Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in late 2018, but Brescia says that Microsoft respects GitHub's independence - including its prerogitive to choose where and how it hosts its IT infrastructure.
  • GitHub does use Azure for some applications, but it also uses other cloud providers and its own data centers.
  • "I think it's important we run independently from Microsoft and we make our own choices about what makes sense and what's running where and giving us what we need from wherever we're running, whether it's our own data centers and otherwise," Brescia said.
  • Click here to read more BI Prime stories.

It's been just over a year since GitHub was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion, but don't expect the wildly popular code-sharing service to move to its new parent's Azure cloud any time soon.

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"I will say that they very much respect our independence and our product independence and the way we operate," COO Erica Brescia told Business Insider. "There's nothing that's biasing people or driving people towards any Microsoft products in particular."

GitHub currently runs on much the same infrastructure it did while it was an independent company: A combination of non-Microsoft cloud providers and its own data centers. While GitHub doesn't publicly share which platforms it's hosted on, in 2014, a now-former engineer said that it was an Amazon Web Services customer.

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Brescia says that today, GitHub does use Microsoft Azure to power products like GitHub Actions, which allows users to build, share and execute code directly on the site, and there may be similar instances in the future.

But there are no plans to move the entire service over to Azure. Brescia says that this is a key element of Microsoft's decision to allow GitHub to run as an independent subsidiary, insofar as it helps the company make the best decisions for the 40 million developers registered on the site.

"I think it's important we run independently from Microsoft and we make our own choices about what makes sense and what's running where and giving us what we need from wherever we're running, whether it's our own data centers and otherwise," Brescia said.

Microsoft's hands-off approach here is echoed at another one of CEO Satya Nadella's signature mega-acquisitions. In a recent interview, LinkedIn CTO and VP of Engineering Raghu Hiremagalur told Business Insider that while the professional social network might be in the middle of a massive move to Azure, it was a decision that was initiated internally, not the result of mandate from Microsoft.

"We reached out to folks at Microsoft and said we believe this is the right next step in the long term for us," Hiremagalur told Business Insider. "Obviously, they were happy we were interested."

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The right home

GitHub has only grown in popularity and usage since Microsoft acquired it - entrenching its status as the go-to home for developers, particularly those working on open source software projects.

It hasn't been perfectly smooth sailing: There are still those in the community who are skeptical of Microsoft's role of steward of the site, given its past history of antagonism to open source under previous leadership. And GitHub has faced controversy over its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that has sometimes reached Microsoft itself.

Overall, though, Brescia says Microsoft was "the right home for GitHub." Its next goal is to get to 100 million developers on its site by 2025. It will also continue focusing on making developer tools and investing in its enterprise product.

"We're continuing to invest in making sure people want to run GitHub for the enterprise [on premise] and in the cloud and have an equally delightful experience," Brescia said. "I think that's really the top level message. Continuing to invest in our partner ecosystem and really accelerating and increasing that investment are certainly near and dear to my heart."

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