GitLab's move off Azure to Google cloud totally unrelated to Microsoft's GitHub acquisition. Yep

From the department of "yeah, right" comes news that GitLab is shifting its platform from Azure to Google in order to take advantage of the ad giant's Kubernetes technology.

It is, of course, absolutely nothing to do with cosying up to developers still anguished following Microsoft's purchase of GitHub. Nope, absolutely not. Been planned for ages.

The reason given for the move is GitLab's near-evangelical belief in all things Kubernetes and Google's implementation of the container wrangler in the form of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). And, hey, "Google invented Kubernetes".

Of course, this conveniently skirts the fact that Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) went to general availability earlier in June, and one of the co-founders of the Kubernetes project, Brendan Burns, is, er, a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft.

To further distance itself from suspicions that this is a reaction to the GitHub furore, GitLab pointed out in its announcement that it has maintained a secondary GitLab.com site, containing some 200TB of Git data, on the Google Cloud Platform using GitLab's own Geo mirroring technology for a "few months".

GitLab also trumpeted its native integration with GKE earlier this year, so the move is logical even if the timing might raise an eyebrow.

Migration aside, developers will be relieved to learn that GitLab actually has a mirroring and backup strategy in place after 2017's heart-stopping accidental data deletion.

The move is not for the faint of heart. As well as the Geo transfer, GitLab plans to shift all file artifacts to Google Cloud Storage (GCS). Until recently, GitLab kept this data stashed on servers using the NFS file system, which the source shack reckons is a single point of failure and difficult to scale. A move to GCS will, GitLab asserted, "help to improve our own availability and remove single-points-of-failure from our stack".

The Register asked Microsoft what it thought about GitLab's migration. A spokesperson responded with "no comment".

Developers can look forward to what GitLab promises will be a smooth failover from Azure to Google's cloud on Saturday, 28 July. The team continues to rehearse and refine the process, including the all-important failback procedure to back out the changes if something unexpected and unfortunate happens.

Those who shifted their projects to GitLab in order to escape the imagined evils of Redmond may want to have a good hard think about the imminent prospect of their data being catapulted into Google's cloud. ®