When Microsoft acquired GitHub, a lot of open-source GitHub users weren't happy. At least 100,000 of them were upset enough to move to a leading GitHub rival, GitLab. Now, GitLab is moving its code repositories from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Andrew Newdigate, GitLab's Google Cloud Platform Migration Project Lead, explained GitLab was making the move to improve the service's performance and reliability.
Specifically, the company is making the move because it believes Kubernetes is the future. Kubernetes "makes reliability at massive scale possible." GCP was their natural choice because of this desire to run GitLab on Kubernetes. After all, Google invented Kubernetes, and GKE has the most robust and mature Kubernetes support.Kubernetes, or K8s, is a container-orchestration system which essentially automates the process of converting applications to run in their own "containers," or "jails," virtual machines which run their operating systems in isolation from the system as a whole. K8s was designed by Google, and was designed to work with Linux; Microsoft's Azure includes similar functionality, which also works with Linux, but it seems that trust is still in short supply where MSFT are concerned, if a hundred thousand former GitHub contributors have left GitHub/Azure for GitLab/K8s simply because the corporate acquisition happened.
That's not the only reason that Google is making Linux news feeds, though; GOOG has also just upped its support of Linux, and of Open Source software development, by a couple of very large steps.