Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, in a move that was nervously received by the developer community at the time. The company has mostly remained independent at Microsoft since then, but the resignation of former CEO Thomas Dohmke less than two months ago has shaken up how GitHub operates.
GitHub is now gearing up for a huge migration over to Microsoft’s own Azure servers, just months after Dohmke’s resignation memo. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell me that GitHub is moving to Azure over the next 12 months, in a move that’s being positioned internally as existential for the developer platform.
The change is part of GitHub moving even more closely into Microsoft’s CoreAI team, something that started happening when GitHub moved into Microsoft’s developer division back in 2021. I’m told that GitHub has been accelerating its integration into Microsoft in recent weeks, ahead of a broader return to office mandate from Microsoft that will impact GitHub employees next year.
Vladimir Fedorov, GitHub’s chief technology officer, made the Azure migration announcement internally earlier this week, noting that GitHub is currently struggling with data center capacity. GitHub is currently hosted on the company’s own hardware, centrally located in Virginia. “We are constrained on data server capacity with limited opportunities to bring more capacity online in the North Virginia region,” Fedorov writes in a note to GitHub employees, or GitHubbers as they’re known internally.
“We have to do this,” Fedorov writes. “It’s existential for GitHub to have the ability to scale to meet the demands of AI and Copilot, and Azure is our path forward.”
Fedorov also said that Microsoft’s senior leadership team is, unsurprisingly, backing GitHub’s move. “CoreAI and Azure are mobilizing to get us the capacity and anything else we need to unlock us,” Fedorov says.
GitHub had already been moving some projects to Azure servers, like Git in Azure and Azure Sites Automation, and Fedorov says that past migrations haven’t gone to plan. “I know this is not the first time we said GitHub is moving to Azure,” Fedorov writes. “I also know that these types of migrations (some of which we’ve tried before) can drag on, and the longer they drag on, the more likely they are to fail.”
To ensure the move to Azure is completed within 12 months, GitHub’s leadership team is asking employees to delay new features in favor of the Azure migration. “We will be asking teams to delay feature work to focus on moving GitHub,” Fedorov says. “We have a small opportunity window where we can delay feature work to focus, and we need to make that window as short as possible.”
GitHub is now aiming to move fully off its own data centers within two years. This gives GitHub 18 months to execute its migration, with a six-month buffer for any delays. Most of the work will be completed over the next 12 months, according to Fedorov.
GitHub confirmed the migration in a statement to Notepad. "GitHub is migrating to Azure over the next 24 months because we believe it’s the right move for our community and our teams,” says Kyle Daigle, GitHub chief operating officer. “We need to scale faster to meet the explosive growth in developer activity and AI-powered workflows, and our current infrastructure is hitting its limits."
The Azure migration will make GitHub even less independent inside Microsoft; it no longer has a single leader, and responsibility for GitHub is increasingly aligned with the CoreAI leadership team inside Microsoft. A migration of this size could not just delay new features, but also lead to potential outages along the way — especially as GitHub manages complex MySQL clusters. GitHub experienced an outage with its Actions service in June, followed by GitHub Enterprise Importer problems in July, and then search issues in August. GitHub also had a major outage last year.
In another sign of GitHub’s deeper integration, a source also tells me that GitHub is increasingly moving toward using Microsoft productivity tools. While GitHub employees have traditionally used Slack to communicate, they’re now being encouraged to use Microsoft Teams for calls and meetings. I’m told the workflow changes are designed to make it easier for Microsoft employees to communicate with GitHub employees, and vice versa.
