> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months.
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.
This discrepancy is precisely the reason (or at least one reason) why AI 2027 hypothesizes that all the interesting developments will be happening inside whichever AI lab is in the lead. The kind of AI agent that AI 2027 hypothesizes in that timeframe could do the migration in much less than 24 months, but only if the organization completely changes how it works internally so that everything is driven by the goal of exploiting the AI's capabilities to the maximal extent. Microsoft/GitHub probably can't do that that quickly.
You're certainly correct that they couldn't, though I don't feel stating "this is why all the interesting developments will be happening inside AI labs" is a fair review of the AI 2027 paper, as it makes many wide-ranging statements about how AI will impact the military, government, medical research, typical corpo-politics, software engineering, and, of course, AI research.
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].
Obviously this makes sense from a dog-fooding perspective because the cloud provider (Microsoft) owns the product (Github), but I'm always surprised when very capable tech companies decide they aren't capable of running bare metal.
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.
I agree with this. It makes total sense for startup, but not for large profitable company, full of smart people. Look at Basecamp cloud exit, good example.
I've never done a migration at a scale like this, but I have seen infra at similar scale, and I can't imagine how difficult this will be in a 12 month period. How big are github's ops/dev teams? That seems like a really unrealistic target to me. I expect outages.
In practice, I'd expect the majority of servers to go through a tool based lift and shift like Azure Migrate. That's what we're using to migrate around 6k state government servers to the cloud. Where there are opportunities for low hanging modernization, we'll take that route. Like migrating to SQL Managed Instances rather than pushing to SQL in a VM.
When I was on infrastructure at Adobe, similar migrations took around 8-9 months (e.g. expanding into Azure, modernizing our datacenters, switching to Kubernetes).
The quote says the effort is to move "completely".
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.)
Okay, I get it, but they also abandoned maintaining their Terraform provider! What a joke! They don't even want to open its maintenance and development to the community! How can you manage hundreds and thousands of repos manually?! It's always been a terrible provider - slow, buggy, and severely behind the latest GitHub features, but now it's literally dead! They openly claimed to be focusing their energy on API development, and until the API is fixed, they will continue working on the provider. This is unacceptable!
Running your own physical infrastructure is hard, so it makes sense to me that github should benefit from the economies of scale of Azure. Given the biggest downside of running in a public cloud is cost, this is a non-issue for github as they will be vertically integrated with Azure and will receive infra at cost.
I'm kind of neutral on this... It was more than expected since the MS acquisition and my biggest surprise is that both it didn't come sooner and that they're making the relatively sane choice to clearly prioritize getting the environment shifted instead of juggling multiple "priority" projects and features.
I hope they are prepared for lots of headaches, random outages, slow (did I say S-L-O-W) tooling and infrastructure, terrible access to GPU's, at least 2-3x more expensive than any other cloud. Support is staffed by overseas Indians who drag every interaction out and just wear you down until you give up.
Are you joking? You obviously never worked with Microsoft, or been a part of any of their deals. OpenAI absolutely will not get anything special. In fact, because of all the attention, they will probably even get worse service than a regular user. It makes no sense, but that's how they operate.
Readit News
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...
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.
Dead Comment
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.
With Github's service record, that means there should be no observable difference between them doing the migration and them operating as usual.
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.)
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-entra-id-vulnerability...
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.