
Google has quietly launched a GitHub competitor - pbreit
http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/24/google-has-quietly-launched-a-github-competitor-source-code-repositories/
======
exacube
This article is just click bait.

Pretty sure this product is just so you can store your code/repo for your
project using Google's cloud services. It's part of a whole for their cloud
offering.

~~~
mwilcox
Yep, more of a competitor to Microsoft's Visual Studio Online than any of the
social coding platforms: [https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-
visual-s...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-
studio-online-vs.aspx)

~~~
mynameisvlad
Well, one part of VSO, since that includes Bugs/Build/Test. I don't really
know many private source-only hosting providers though.

~~~
mariusmg
VSO is pretty great actually. Private source control, bug tracker / agile
planner thingababoo and build all in once place. With the possibility to auto
deploy on Azure if you need it.

~~~
lawira
Didn't know much about this. Thanks for your sharing it here.

------
sytse
Every IaaS provider (Google, Amazon, Azure) has added a code hosting service
or will do so in the future. Having your code hosted here will increase lock-
in which is the best way for the IaaS provider to increase margins in the
future. However, code hosting is not the essence of that GitHub, BitBucket and
we at GitLab offer. The essence is code collaboration: mentioning people,
doing a code review, activity streams, etc. Getting this right is hard and I
wonder if many IaaS providers will get this right.

The code delivery pipeline consists of issues, IDE, code hosting, CI, code
review, configuration management, Continuous Delivery (CD) and a PaaS service.
Code hosting is a first step and getting all the rest right is a lot of work.
Services working on getting the IDE right are Koding, Nitrous.io, Cloud9,
CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy. And I suspect that GitHub Atom is running in
a web-browser so they can effortlessly offer it online in the future. For
configuration management you want to integrate with Chef, Puppet, Ansible,
Salt and Docker.

At GitLab we offer CI and CD via GitLab CI. We hope for a multi-cloud future
where organizations will deploy to different cloud providers. They will use
PaaS software that spans the different IaaS providers. Cloud independent PaaS
software offerings are CloudFoundry, OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Mesos
DCOS, Docker Swarm and Flynn. We want to ensure that GitLab is the best option
to do code collaboration upstream from these offerings.

~~~
dkhenry
So one thing GitLab and others don't offer that Google can is tight
integration with Deployment. Yeah we have all used the CI servers to do a form
of Continous Delivery, but can google and amazon surpass those offerings by
giving a tighter integration that a third part can't offer.

~~~
sytse
Right now our support for deployments is lacking. On the short term we'll add
documentation how to use the Travis DPL gem to push to the IaaS providers.

Currently we're thinking about solving this problem, but in our opinion it is
more than a simple deployment. You need a build pipeline.

We're thinking about adding a build pipeline configuration to .gitlab-ci.yml
file. Right now we're looking into how to deal with dependencies that trigger
a build and how to allow for multiple environments (staging, preprod, prod) to
be deployed.

We think that solving the build pipeline properly (like GoCD and Concourse
already have) in a simple to setup way will offer a lot of value. What do you
think?

------
geofft
The reason people use GitHub is everything _around_ the git hosting: the web
interface, the account system, pull requests and issues, forking, comments,
wikis, Pages, even the desktop and mobile apps. Hosting git repositories is
straightforward, by design.

This article is only slightly more sensible than claiming that S3 is a GitHub
competitor because you can git clone over HTTP.

~~~
shrineOfLies
Lately, the Web UI has been sucky, I relied on my username button quite a bit,
now I have to perform two steps to go to my user page

~~~
mikekchar
To be honest, I think it has always been sucky in many ways. They change it
quite frequently, but it doesn't actually seem to be changes that improve the
UI. It only makes it frustratingly different than before.

I often wonder if the projects my team works on ends up that way. We A/B test
a lot of changes and often find that it makes absolutely no difference in
conversion. In the end we often don't change things that seem to be "obvious"
improvements for fear that we'll just frustrate our customers by changing
things in ways they don't care about.

UI design is hard :-)

~~~
Scarblac
Exactly this, it always sucks and it changes too often in completely random
ways.

Github's issue tracker is also very half baked, every real project has to has
a Trac instance or so somewhere else.

But _it has critical mass_, and pull requests and the way commenting them and
testing them etc works is really awesome, and it'll be hard for a new
competitor to get people to move.

~~~
nulltype
That seems true, but only for open source projects. Why would it be hard for
closed source projects (where github makes all their money) to move away?

~~~
waterflame
It's actually simple. GitHub tests on their free users and see their reaction.
If the feedback is positive, move it to paid clients. If not, keep frustrating
your free clients so they move to paid accounts.

~~~
nulltype
Why does that make it harder for me to move my paid repos off of github? I
don't use PR or the github issue tracker, so I could probably start using the
google cloud repos tomorrow if felt like it.

------
stock_toaster
So they killed Google code to... launch another code hosting thing?

Does Google have too many siloed product managers? Maybe you can only advance
up the corporate ladder by releasing new products, and fuck all if they get
killed later, because you got your promotion?

No clue what the cause. Just seems weird looking on from the sidelines.

~~~
icefox
After just wasting the last three nights migrating my old project (code was on
GitHub, but the rest wasn't) off of Google code the chance of me putting code
on a Google hosting service any time soon is pretty much zero.

About once a year for the last several years I have spent a few hours/days
migrating stuff off of Google because the project is being shut down. Maybe
they are just cleaning house from the mass of project in 2005-2010, but the
constant reminder that the stuff I create is in danger if it lives on Google's
servers is probably not the lesson they want to be teaching me.

~~~
snarfy
This is exactly why I won't use anything they make anymore. I cannot trust it
will be around two years from now.

------
camhenlin
Can't wait to see how long it takes them to get rid of this one like they did
with Google Code

~~~
baby
Except git is the shit right now

~~~
grepz
Can you elaborate on that? Just wondering.

~~~
baby
I think I posted that on the wrong comment :D

------
guelo
My team has just started looking for a github replacement because the code
review workflow is just not working for us, we need something with more
structure. I think there's plenty of space for feature and price competition,
especially for private repos where github's social network effects don't
matter as much.

~~~
marcinkuzminski
Maybe you should look at RhodeCode, it has several different workflows for
code-review. From very simple like just voting on each individual commit, to a
fully blown server side mergable workflow that includes, voting, checks by CI,
and integration to external services. We did a blog about it recently on how
we use it internally: [https://rhodecode.com/blog/increased-automation-at-
rhodecode...](https://rhodecode.com/blog/increased-automation-at-rhodecode/)

Displaimer: i'm the CTO of RhodeCode

~~~
Zhenya
Displaimer = Displayed Disclaimer?

------
thekevan
This just seems to be a place to have the code that you run on Google Cloud
Platform. Not exactly a competitor.

~~~
jfoster
It's certainly Google Cloud branded, but it appears to have somewhat
equivalent functionality to Github.

For Google to launch something purely as a "Github competitor" would be silly
because those using Github would quickly dismiss it; "we already have Github!"

So Google are playing up the integration with the rest of Google Cloud,
integrating with Github and Bitbucket, and offering additional features.

You have to extrapolate a bit to realize it, and Google probably won't admit
it, but this is definitely intended as a Github/Bitbucket competitor.

~~~
skj
No, GP was correct. It is intended as a way to get your source into the
platform.

They're private repos to which only people in your projects have access.

------
pbreit
Well, not quite a competitor. I presume it's expected to work better with
Google Cloud than elsewhere?

~~~
empyrical
Yeah, it looks like it's mainly a way to manage code you're running on Google
Cloud services

------
sergiosgc
This is clickbait. Nevertheless, my first thought was "GitHub is much better
and much much safer than anything Google can offer". Back in the day, were
Microsoft to offer a competitor to a small company's product and my reaction
would be: "They're dead in the water".

Food for thought...

~~~
prapam2
How is it much much safer?

~~~
sergiosgc
In the sense that I can trust it to be around five years from now. Google has,
today, a bad perception in terms of product lifetime.

------
joshuak
Calling a source code repo service a competitor to GitHub is like calling a
online book store a competitor to Amazon.

Hint: source code is not GitHub's value, just like books where not Amazon's.
GitHubs true value is something Google is profoundly bad at.

~~~
hoodoof
What is gtihub's true value?

~~~
medecau
Social.

------
wasd
Sure, it'll compete with GitHub but I think a more exciting possibility is
that it'll compete with Heroku. CodeCommit (similar service offered by AWS)
integrates with other AWS services to help manage deployment and releases but
I still find the entire AWS platform to be very difficult to use. I would love
to see Google add pressure to all three companies to make their respective
products better.

~~~
campers
GCP has a push-to-deploy [https://cloud.google.com/tools/repo/push-to-
deploy](https://cloud.google.com/tools/repo/push-to-deploy)

That along with the cloud debugging from their git repo are some nice to
haves.

------
skj
Calling the GCP source hosting a competitor with github is nonsense. No public
access to these repos, for one, so they're completely unsuitable for general
project hosting.

------
bradhe
So interesting. This race for features between the cloud vendors feels crazy
to me, but totally makes sense from a business perspective. Classic attempt at
locking you in to a single platform.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
> Classic attempt at locking you in to a single platform.

Isn't that what happens immediately after one places their artifacts into "the
cloud"?

~~~
bradhe
Nah, there are multiple cloud vendors out there. My platform runs in DO, AWS,
and GCE for instance. The notion that cloud itself locks you in will disappear
soon.

------
10098
It looks more like a beginning of an online IDE than a direct github
competitor. It's just convenient if you're already using Google's cloud
services.

~~~
csells
I'm curious what kinds of additional features you'd be interested in here. In
these comments so far I've heard code review, access control and online IDE.
Would any of those be useful? What else would be useful?

Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform

~~~
nulltype
GitHub has at least some good ideas in this area. Code review and issue
tracking are nice, but everyone seems to want something different from those
systems so I'm not sure how to do that in a reasonable way. Access control
would be nice for deploys I guess?

I hope that someone really does make an online IDE that means I don't have to
use a local IDE anymore, but I'm not certain how feasible that is. Atom seems
like a giant step in the right direction.

~~~
csells
Thanks, nt. Cloud-based IDEs are the future, I think. Too many good reasons to
have them.

------
davidbanham
> It can serve as a “remote” for Git repositories sitting elsewhere on the
> Internet or locally.

That's not a feature of this product, it's just how git works.

~~~
csells
Of course, we're pretty proud of our git support. We also support "connected
repos" where we keep a repo in Cloud Source Repositories in sync with a repo
you specify on GitHub or BitBucket; if you make a change on GH or BB, it's
reflected into GCSR and vice versa. The idea is that you should be able to
integrate with the features we're building on top of GCSR without making you
move away from GH or BB. Useful?

Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform

------
fixxer
Github really owns the "organization aspect".

For my personal projects, I'm fine with my own git server on a cheap vm, but
for work I've been really happy with Github's issue tracker and org membership
administration (with which we use OAUTH heavily for internal tools, several of
which queue background computation). Github issues are much easier for
tracking job submissions from analysts than integrating with the company
email, and developers prefer it.

I looked at GitLab a year ago. I liked it, but it was a little funky (avatars
weren't working; obviously not mission critical, but little shit like that
erodes confidence -- either support a feature or don't, but never half ass it
because I'm not going to admin over a server when I've got a chorus analysts
bitching about it being hacky). GitLab people: this was a digitalocean
prepared image version of GitLab, in case you're listening.

Version control is really the most minor and easy to replicate part of
Github's value proposition.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for looking at GitLab and sorry to hear that avatars didn't work. There
was an issue with avatars and using relative urls 7 months ago:
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/369](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/369) This was
fixed. But if you used relative urls please consider switching to a full
hostname, it is a better experience. We recommend installing packages from our
package server
[https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/](https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/)
since templates on cloud providers might be out of date.

------
mirceal
meh. this has zero chances of competing with github. I think it's meant more
for Google Cloud Platform users to have a place where to store their code
within the same "cloud"

------
personjerry
Hasn't Google Code existed for ages?

No one seemed to like it. Heck, Google didn't seem to like it enough to give
it any love, just check out the UI on the site:
[https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3aPython](https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3aPython)

~~~
detaro
google code is EOL: [http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/03/farewell-to-
goo...](http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/03/farewell-to-google-
code.html)

------
jabo
Off topic, but the image in the article is of a building in Santa Monica that
Google moved out of atleast 2 years ago.

~~~
bradabrams
Ha! thanks... I was wondering about that :-)

------
k_bx
To me, this more looks like a Google's cloud IDE (targeted Java), for which it
would of course make sense to have code-hosting there also. It makes sense for
Google to have one, unlike just a GitHub competitor, imho.

------
sova
The _actual_ link should lead to [https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-
repositories/](https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/)

------
arbuge
Sites like GitHub thrive on the community they engender. Google no doubt has
the tech chops to compete with anybody on a pure technical basis, but
community is not their forte. Witness Google Plus.

------
xsace
When I go to princing and quota I get:

> This Beta release of Cloud Source Repositories is free and can be used to
> store up to 500 MB of source files.

No thanks! I still remember what happened with AppEngine.

~~~
nulltype
What happened with AppEngine?

~~~
campers
The SDK's were slow to update, the Java App Engine doesn't support Java 8 yet
the Python and/or PHP version are behind a bit I think. There's a bunch of
bugs which haven't been resolved after a long time. The instances were
underpowered for the price, Java ones took a long time to start up which
compounded issues with the auto-scaler.

I used it a little bit a few years ago and despite the issues with the
original platform I'm quite interested in the new Docker based managed-vm app
engine platform, where you can build your own images and have much better
control, and compute engine pricing.

------
err4nt
Thats cool...until the day Google decides to close it and shuts down the
service and all projects trapped on it. But until then, its pretty cool!

~~~
err4nt
Google Notebook, Google Sites, Google Wave, Feedburner…

------
sidcool
Hasn't Google been moving code to GitHub itself?

~~~
skj
Yes. Open source GCP projects are hosted either on github or googlesource.com,
an unindexed place for git and codereview. (eg
[https://go.googlesource.com](https://go.googlesource.com) is where the go
language is hosted).

And keep in mind, googlesource.com is not the same service as the one talked
about in this article. Not even the same backend.

------
beefsack
Competition in the Git hosting arena seems to be largely nullified by the fact
that it's trivial to use multiple remotes.

------
sologoub
Anyone else notice that the photo they are using is the old Santa Monica
office that Google has moved out of a while back?

------
peter303
Google abandoned its previous Github comptetitor. Unlikely many outside of the
Go-phers will use the new one.

------
im1983
Sorry, but I just can't trust them. I am absolutely sure that Google will shut
it down in X years.

~~~
eatonphil
I don't understand the reasoning here, or you would benefit from dependent
types. I am /also/ absolutely sure that /everything/ will shut down in
X(company) years.

~~~
im1983
GitHub will not shutdown in X years. That's their main business. While Google
has the tendency to shutdown products after their beta phase. From Google POV
that's a side project to their ad biz.

~~~
fixermark
Main businesses do fail (witness poor, beleaguered SourceForge). Meanwhile,
Google's cloud ecosystem is a revenue-generator for the company; that does
decrease the odds that it'll have the plug pulled.

I wonder how many people shy away from AWS on the thought that web services
aren't Amazon's core business model.

~~~
im1983
I agree, but some companies such as Twitter and Google have a track record.
Time will tell.

------
BenjiSujang
Competition is always good. Looks good for Google cloud users. However
certainly no GitHub competitor.

------
samfisher83
Google had googlecode way before github. They just didn't do much with it.

------
jokoon
Anecdote: I remember using mercurial on google code, at some point it did not
work, a push was just timing out for some reason. I switched to bitbutcket and
then used github. Google answered the issue, but I already made the switch,
and I don't even know if they fixed it.

~~~
mineo
Fun fact: google code now has a " We have some known issues with hg
repositories. " banner up since a few days ago.

~~~
jokoon
Well I had this issue with mercurial 2 years go.

------
hliyan
1\. Requires credit card number for free trial

2\. No built in issue tracker or wiki (?)

~~~
skj
That's because it's not actually project hosting, despite what the article may
claim. It's a way to get your code onto the platform.

------
bsimpson
500 MB lifetime storage doesn't seem like a whole lot.

~~~
csells
To be clear, this is the current limit in beta and it's per repo, so if you
have multiple cloud projects, you get multiple repos. We're thinking about
adding support for multiple repos per project in the future. Would that be
useful?

Also, and we're planning on upping the limit once we reach GA. What do you
think a reasonable limit should be for a git repo? Our goal is to strike the
right balance between usefulness and abuse.

Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform

~~~
bsimpson
You should absolutely support multiple git repos per project. If someone
writes npm-compatible modular JavaScript code, it wouldn't be hard to have a
dozen proprietary repos supporting a single reasonably sized project.

------
shrineOfLies
I would've liked it better, if it also had auto-deploy to gce, and auto load-
balancing, scaling, health-checks and service discovery.

~~~
seanp2k2
So, if it was AWS?

~~~
shrineOfLies
im ok with that

------
hoodoof
Does this have an API?

~~~
piotrkaminski
The article says they'll open one up later this year.

------
mdekkers
...because google code worked out so well....

~~~
skj
It did. When googlecode.com launched, it was an immediate market leader (keep
in mind that it displaced the wretched sourceforge.com). When the new wave of
source hosting (github, bitbucket, etc) made its way up, googlecode fell by
the wayside and, after becoming a distinctly third-rate offering, was end-of-
lifed.

------
finnjohnsen2
Post Snowden I'm looking to move away from cloud services and not entangle
myself further.

~~~
fixermark
I see this sentiment quite often, and I'm not really sure how to respond to it
(other than the snarky, obvious "Enjoy your cave").

Hacker News is a cloud service---we share comments on news stories in a
collaborative fashion. I assume this means something closer to "I don't want
my personal, sensitive data hosted by anybody and I'm willing to pay for the
inefficiency and inconvenience of only being able to access it from a handful
of nodes (or having to maintain my own hosting solution on my own hardware)"
than the alternative interpretation "I'm a Luddite; down with the Internet?"

~~~
finnjohnsen2
You assume correctly.

Any service, especially served abroad like in the US, where I share any of my
data, I no longer feel as good about using.

------
alaskamiller
While I was at Google one insight I had is that there's a copy of most
internet products. Given the cadre of college grads they hire to work there,
cloning something is almost like a fun little coding challenge.

Dropbox? There's a clone. Pinterest? Clone. Everything. Then they dogfood it
and if there's more interest they gather up more resources to inevitably pitch
the idea to Marissa Meyer, who then plays with it, design the business case
for it, and approve a proper budget for it.

If the product is good then the news leaks or they launch it. After awhile if
the Google audience doesn't like it they cut it loose.

Which goes to say... any time some investor asks you what happens if Google
comes into your space, you should say: good.

------
hoodoof
WTH does this mean?

Are they saying it is not secure?

[https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-
repositories/docs/](https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/)

Note Cloud Source Repositories are intended to store only the source code for
your application and not user or personal data. Do not store any Core App
Engine End User Data (as defined in your License Agreement) in a Cloud Source
Repository. To use a hosted Git repository with a Cloud Source Repository, you
must first open an account with GitHub or Bitbucket (independent companies
separate from Google). If you push source code to a Cloud Source Repository,
Google will make a copy of this data which will be hosted in the United
States.

~~~
skj
It means only put code in source hosting, not user data. That is, follow best
practices with your repository.

