The plan to move to Google Cloud was in motion for many months, way before talks about a potential GitHub acquisition started. They adopted Kubernetes relative

The plan to move to Google Cloud was in motion for many months, way before talks about a potential GitHub acquisition started. They adopted Kubernetes relatively early, and as they progressed their reliance on Azure-specific services went down. At that point move to another cloud was a purely financial decision. The move to k8s was not strictly a means to allow cloud migration. GitLab sells their Enteprise product, and the Kubernetes-based deployment helps customers with product trial and adoption. Cloud migration is a welcomed side-effect of that initiative.