And there's no reason to suspect this next batch of migrations will be any different. Telling your engineers, 'good luck, you get to spend the next 18 months treading water,' is a terrible way to get them to give their best or even stick around.
That said, the difficulty of the work was absolutely also a factor in deciding not to carry through with earlier migrations, so your point still stands as a whole IMO. Just, now solutions will be found for blockers and engineers will be kept on it, rather than efforts stalling out and being put on hold.
I find it interesting to compare timelines like this (which is very reasonable and expected for an organization of Github's size) with, for example, how AI 2027 describes the world will look like in October 2027.
In the next 24 months, if all these timeslines are to be believed, AI will have cured cancer, agent-5 will be plotting to kill all humans, leveraging all the data in a Global Central Memory Bank to subvert the internal corporate politics of all companies, governments, and militaries toward this goal (These are all real predictions AI 2027 makes); and Github will still be migrating workloads to Azure.
Maybe they should get agent-4 to help them.
The realization that you're close to making, and I hope I can help you make: If Microsoft & Github can't realize the benefits of AI that quickly; why should anyone believe that the rest of the world would be able to? After all, there are roughly zero "pre-AI" companies that are force-mutating their structure to adopt AI faster than Microsoft is [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/780946/microsoft-satya-nadella...
Yes, if AI is godlike, then the first company to leverage the machine god will be rewarded.
But it’s not. The “benefits of AI” are a combination of placebo, automation of mediocre work, and few modest points of leverage.
I also saw a creepy cat in the hat breaking into someone’s home and take a shotgun round to the chest.
not burning human effort and quintillions of CPU cycles on mickey mouse videos (literally)
IIRC in the paper itself they back up their reputation using their previous predictions that only had a ~50% success rate.
I also just don’t know why the paper needed to make up narrative stories as predictions instead of being more straightforward.
So none of that is far fetched.
I think there will probably be a long tail which will prevent that from happening so quickly.
(It also probably doesn't really matter... if their main goal is to scale using azure they really only need the stuff that will be scaling up to be there. They probably also want to be seen as eating their own dog food, which can reasonably be achieved without all of the long tail.)
With Github's service record, that means there should be no observable difference between them doing the migration and them operating as usual.
But having gone through a data center migration; depending on how "unique" some of their existing setup was; I do not envy them in this process (and I estimate this will take double the expected time :P).
I just hoped they would fix the mess that are GitHub notifications: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/15747
yes, the addition of un-disableable "AI" features made me spend a large amount of time and effort moving every single one of my projects off GitHub
Running your own servers was never rocket science, it was literally the only option 20 years ago. Every startup used to have a rack of servers in a closet.
I have always thought of cloud hosting as something you do because you cannot afford a full-time ops team so it's wild to me that companies like Netflix decide that they literally don't have the operational expertise to manage servers.
You can pair that up with a template repository for the org and everyone can start new projects from that template (which contains the workflow to check future workflow files).
If you want assistance with organisation-wide code policies, I can help and my email is in my profile.
You really think they, not unlike most top of the crop MSFT partners, get support out of India?
Try directly from the teams in Redmond.
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-entra-id-vulnerability...
mgdev•4mo ago
tyleo•4mo ago
This seems inevitable since the acquisition and not necessarily a bad thing. I see it as neutral.
tacker2000•4mo ago
But since “new features” consists primarily of shoving the bloody copilot agent down everyones throat, it might not be such a bad thing.
dmix•4mo ago
I've tested the beta one and like most SPAs it doesn't scale well to large amounts of data (large numbers of files / line counts). You can feel the DOM slowing down even on a high end macbook. It even blanked out the page a couple times, another common issue when browsers are overloaded. So I switched back to the old one.
dmart•4mo ago
torgoguys•4mo ago
Good! Shoring up infrastructure vs. delivering the latest hotness is something that is rarely prioritized. I'll take boring and reliable every day of the week.
tacker2000•4mo ago
Does anyone know what infra they are running on now? AWS?
dbbk•4mo ago
walkabout•4mo ago
stackskipton•4mo ago
walkabout•4mo ago
aaronbrethorst•4mo ago
rufo•4mo ago
Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.
I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.
driverdan•4mo ago
bediger4000•4mo ago