GitLab moves from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud at the end of July

GitLab moves from Microsoft’s Azure to Google Cloud Platform. The service is preparing for the migration and the failover will take place on July 28. GitLab cites Kubernetes as the reason for the move.

Among other things, GitLab uses Geo for the migration, with which read-only GitLabs mirrors can be created in addition to the primary, manageable instances. For example, the service already has a secondary GitLab.com site running on Google’s Cloud Platform, with GitLab synchronizing 200TB of git data and 2TB of relational data in PostgreSQL. According to GitLab, there are no latency and bandwidth issues during synchronization.

Google Cloud Platform was chosen because of the desire to run GitLab on Kubernetes, the service writes. “Google invented Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine has the most robust and mature support for it,” according to GitLab. The Git platform already announced in early April that it would offer integration with Google Kubernetes Engine. Kubernetes allows container-based applications to be managed. Microsoft also supports Kubernetes with Azure.

The explanation of the switch from GitLab comes a month after it was announced that Microsoft is taking over GitHub. After that acquisition, GitLab said it had imported more than 100,000 repositories from GitHub. The GitHub acquisition sparked a commotion in the open source world, where Microsoft still doesn’t have a good reputation, though the company is increasingly pushing for open source initiatives.