GitHub

The GitHub developer service, acquired by Microsoft in 2018, has grown from a source code hosting service, primarily for open-source projects, to a full-featured application life-cycle environment with developer productivity tools that target all solution types, including large, private enterprise projects.

Many GitHub capabilities are free, enabling it to reach a large number of developers. It has become a focal point of Microsoft’s development tool investments and now overshadows some of the company’s traditional offerings, such as Azure DevOps. Furthermore, on-premises server software called GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) is available for organizations to deploy a private instance of GitHub technology, similar to the way Azure DevOps Server enables a private deployment of Azure DevOps Services.

GitHub’s source control services are built on the Git open-source software distributed version control system (DVCS). Git is supported by many development tools, whether served by the GitHub implementation or others. (GitLab and Bitbucket are other popular Git-based services, although GitHub has a significantly larger customer base.)