The only reason Cloud Foundry doesn’t run on a pure GitHub-first model is because the developers needed capabilities that GitHub still lacks. VMware instead pumps pull requests through Gerrit (code review & approval, access control, etc) and Jenkins (continuous integration) before they hit GitHub.
Today, GitHub announced that it’s adding an API to attach statuses to individual commits. What does that mean? Suddenly, you can annotate commits with whether they pass continuous integration, whether they’re reviewed and by whom, whether the contributor has signed a license agreement, etc. This is a huge move because, in my opinion, it foreshadows GitHub’s likely move to take over the capabilities of Gerrit, Jenkins, and the entire ALM toolchain. It should be no news at this point that GitHub already includes an issue tracker. Last fall, GitHub integrated the ACE code editor (the editor behind the Cloud9 IDE), in one of the earlier steps toward becoming a one-stop shop for software development.
This should be a (if not the) major concern for anyone building ALM tools today. How are you going to compete with GitHub, particularly now that it’s using $100 million in VC funding to go after the enterprise?
Disclosure: GitHub, VMware (which founded Cloud Foundry), and CloudBees (which employs Jenkins founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi) are clients. Cloud9 and Google (which created Gerrit) are not clients.
Adron says:
September 4, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Seriously, this is the truth. How will others compete. Already TFS is a joke compared to Github, but the other crux is, how does one prevent Github from not becoming TFS while TFS is becoming more like Github. Everyone is aiming for that strange middle ground of usability, reasonable price, and the largest developer base.
…all the while, the goal being a lean, continual delivery of application capabilities for business value.
I feel like there is a high risk that somehow lean and agile ideals will be smothered eventually, as they are with TFS and most of the large Enterprise grade ALM tools.
…then it’ll be back to the drawing board for the next disruptive dev company. Regardless how this unfolds, at this point I’m stoked about Github’s progress.