GitLab is shifting from Azure to Google Cloud but says its decision was not due to users who migrated from GitHub following its Microsoft acquisition.
Following the news of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, traffic spiked of people using GitLab’s tool for importing projects from the world’s biggest Git service. It’s clear developers still have very divisive opinions about Microsoft.
At first glance, it would be easy to believe GitLab’s migration from Azure to Google Cloud is to distance itself from Microsoft and make its users who jumped ship happier. However, the company says this is not the case.
Months before the GitHub acquisition was announced, GitLab maintained a Geo (allows for full, read-only mirrors of GitLab instances) secondary of its service running on Google Cloud with an up-to-date copy ‘of about 200TB of Git data and 2TB of relational data in PostgreSQL’ in preparation for a migration.
In parallel, the company also transferred around 200TB of file artifacts to GCS (Google Cloud Storage) from their previous NFS servers which they said ran the risk of being a single point-of-failure.
Andrew Newdigate, GCP Project Manager at GitLab, wrote in a post:
“We believe Kubernetes is the future. It's a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible. This is why earlier this year we shipped native integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to give GitLab users a simple way to use Kubernetes.
Similarly, we've chosen GCP as our cloud provider because of our desire to run GitLab on Kubernetes.
Google invented Kubernetes, and GKE has the most robust and mature Kubernetes support. Migrating to GCP is the next step in our plan to make GitLab.com ready for your mission-critical workloads.”
So there we have it, the switch is all about performance and stability in GitLab’s view. That alone still provides ammo for the anti-Microsoft haters out there, however.
(Image Credit: Access to Cloud / Ladder to Heaven by FutUndBeidl under CC BY 2.0)
Do you agree with GitLab’s decision to migrate to Google Cloud? Let us know in the comments.
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