GitHub Is Central to Developer Platform

• The GitHub cloud developer service is receiving substantial Microsoft investment for software source code control, collaboration, deployment, and other functions.
• Azure DevOps offers advanced capabilities in the same functional areas as GitHub, but GitHub is catching up, and it has a larger base of trained developers.

GitHub 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.

(GitHub is also available as privately hostable software with the GitHub Enterprise Server product. The offering could allow certain organizations to use GitHub functionality while meeting security and data residency requirements that are not possible when using the externally hosted GitHub service.)