Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for 7.5billion dollars! With the combined efforts of Microsoft and GitHub, aligned to the same vision, Microsoft seeks to empower users and organizations to achieve more by making GitHub the home for their DevOps.
What Does this Mean for the Future of Azure DevOps?
Microsoft is fully committed to Azure DevOps, and will support and invest in Azure DevOps in the long term.
However, strategic investments are shifted to GitHub, bringing the best of both worlds to a single product experience in GitHub!
Azure DevOps vs GitHub
| DevOps Phase | Area | Azure DevOps | GitHub |
| Plan and Track | Plan | Boards | Issues & Projects |
| Plan | Discussions | ||
| Develop | Source Control | Repos | Repos |
| Advanced Coding | Code Spaces, Copilot | ||
| Security Scanning | Advanced Security | ||
| Build, Release | Packages | Artifacts | Packages |
| Build, Test, Release, Deploy | CI/CD | Pipelines | Actions |
| Workflow Automation | Actions | ||
| Test | Manual Testing | Test Plans | |
| Operate, Monitor, Learn | Dashboards & Reporting | Dashboards & Reporting | Insights |
| All | Mobile Access | Mobile App |
Sprint Planning and Reports
Use Azure Boards w/integration to GitHub for planning at scale with hierarchical work items, saved issue queries, dashboards, process customization, and Sprint planning. Use GitHub Issues & Projects for basic Kanban-style planning with tight integration between code and issues.
Open Source Community
GitHub has 70 million users, and numbers are still growing. It is the largest developer platform on Earth! If you are looking to participate in the open source community or contribute to open source, it is the best platform available. Innersource is a development methodology where engineers build proprietary software using best practices from large-scale open source projects. If you are looking to embrace innersource, GitHub is for you.
Only on GitHub
1. Discussions: A Threaded Forum for conversations about the repository
2. Codespaces: An instant development environment on the cloud that you can spin up in seconds, and code from anywhere.
3. Copilot: Your AI pair programmer that co-develops with you, trained on billions of lines of public code.
4. Advanced Security: Built-in tools to help you secure your code from start. Some of these include dependencies insights, DependaBot, Secrets Scanning, Token Scanning, Vulnerability Management, CodeQl,
5. Actions for Workflows: Script your own automation workflows using YAML.
6. Insights: Understand the pulse, contributions, commits and many more for your repositories.
7. Mobile App: DevOps at your fingertips, anywhere you go. It can be pretty useful if you have code reviews to approve while you are on the run.
Summary
If you are starting a new project, start with GitHub. There are many plugins available in the marketplace, where you can download and simply integrate with Azure DevOps for the capabilities that you need. Long term, you will enjoy the best of both products.
For projects already on Azure DevOps, there are also plugins available to integrate GitHub capabilities. It is still a pretty good DevOps tool for Azure!
Thoughts 