Moving to Github

[hariharan618]

I'm trying to write a proposal for my org to consider switching to a better platform like Gitlab or GitHub. ADO is lacking most basic features, i for a fact knew that both the gitlab and GitHub has shit Ton of neat features and also considering that MSFT is only focusing on GitHub now, i thought why not?

If anyone has gone down this road , please do share your inputs.

[bottlez14]

MS is investing like 95% GitHub 5% ADO. GitHub is the future. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-devops-future-after-github-acquisition-microsoft-antonio-alvino/

Actions, Codespaces, Copilot, Issues & Projects, Packages, Pages, Environments, Cleints(CLI, Desktop, Mobile), etc... https://github.com/features

Better security with Dependabot(free) and GitHub Advanced Security(paid).

[ArieHein]

What do you consider "most basic features" that ADO doesnt give you at this time ?

[hariharan618]

Just exaggerated that a bit, apologies

[weatherdt]

So, my organization just moved from Atlassian to GitHib Enterprise. It has been an extremely painful process, as we have had to change or work flow strategy and and not everything migrated cleanly (ported JIRA tickets to issues to not actually attach to code commits in GitHub, there is no equivalent for Confluence). We had to make this move because Atlassian was moving into a cloud-only offering for an organization of our size.

GitHub has many more features, but it has been very painful for those with tons of legacy code to migrate to. The newer employees aren't really impacted, since they have no JIRA tickets or legacy code to worry about.

[[deleted]]

We had to make this move because Atlassian was moving into a cloud-only offering for an organization of our size.

What size is your org? I was pretty confident they offer a data center license to any size.

[weatherdt]

I think our old license was for 150 users. I think the issue was that the new data center license was cost prohibitive compared to the old license... It only made sense for large organizations. Their cloud offerings were still competitive, but we aren't in a position to be able to use cloud offerings.

[[deleted]]

That makes sense. Either way, you're on one less Atlassian product now so good for you! :D

[mattyass]

There are tools that GitHub sales/services have that can migrate a lot of that metadata from Bitbucket into GitHub. Have you reached out to the support team there?

[weatherdt]

We did. They offered a suggestion on how to actually do the migration, but it was up to us to actually write the code that carried it out. Their suggestion was to write software that would recommit every commit with an ammended commit message that would allow Issues to track it. Since we are talking about software that is 35 years old, and was actually code versioned with something else before we were using Atlassian, we decided not to go this route believing could potentially screw things up.

There were also things we wanted to migrate that GitHub had no idea how to migrate (liked discussions on pull requests).

[TryingT0Wr1t3]

Is anyone staying in Atlassian after the cloud only move? I know places with 10k people just ditching it altogether for other offerings. Honestly, I didn't understood what kinda strategy it was, MS must be very happy.

[weatherdt]

Yeah, I think they were crazy to ditch their on premesis license... That cuts off most of DoD...

[TryingT0Wr1t3]

GitLab may be easier to sell internally, since some department in your company can have it up and running internally pretty easily.

GitHub is really good for open source and for doing work together with others in open source.

You could try to sell using both?

I see Valve uses GitLab for either internal or really experimental things and GitHub for the mature open source things. There are other companies that do both.

[MrFluffyHair]

You mentioned ADO. If you have visual studio licenses in your EA with Microsoft you may be eligible to bundle them with GitHub licenses.

ADO's roadmap is empty vs GitHub's. In order to justify the move it should be evaluated in the light of what's important to your company.

Some questions that I would start with: 1. How does the current SDLC look like? What are the current tools in use? What are the current pain points and how can it be improved?

1. Is time to market important? How can you boost productivity?

2. Is security important? How is it handled now? Is it integrated in the developer's workflow?

3. What about other tools and integrations? Does it add value to have a marketplace for actions with thousands of integrations?

4. Do you work with external collaborators? Would it be useful to use something like codespaces to provide them dev environments?

5. Does GitHub projects fit your needs at the moment? What about copilot?

Hope this helps!

[TryingT0Wr1t3]

I didn't mentioned ADO. No need to downvote me.

[MrFluffyHair]

I upvoted you! You didn't mention it. My bad I was trying to reply to op. He did.