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Google has quietly launched a GitHub competitor

214 points by pbreit 11y ago

pbreit 11y ago
Well, not quite a competitor. I presume it's expected to work better with Google Cloud than elsewhere?
- empyrical 11y ago
  Yeah, it looks like it's mainly a way to manage code you're running on Google Cloud services
- yeukhon 11y ago
  It just reminds me of Google App Script and its editor.
bradhe 11y ago
So interesting. This race for features between the cloud vendors feels crazy to me, but totally makes sense from a business perspective. Classic attempt at locking you in to a single platform.
- AdieuToLogic 11y ago
  > Classic attempt at locking you in to a single platform. Isn't that what happens immediately after one places their artifacts into "the cloud"?
  - bradhe 11y ago
    Nah, there are multiple cloud vendors out there. My platform runs in DO, AWS, and GCE for instance. The notion that cloud itself locks you in will disappear soon.
- fixermark 11y ago
  From the repository feature's docs (https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/ https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/): "Using Cloud Source Repositories is easy if you are familiar with Git. For example, you can add a Cloud Source Repository to a local Git repository as a remote, or you can connect it to a hosted repository on GitHub or Bitbucket" If the goal is lock-in, they're doing it wrong.
camhenlin 11y ago
Can't wait to see how long it takes them to get rid of this one like they did with Google Code
- clintonc 11y ago
  Well, it could last ten years, like Google Code did. :P
- baby 11y ago
  Except git is the shit right now
  - grepz 11y ago
    Can you elaborate on that? Just wondering.
    - baby 11y ago
      I think I posted that on the wrong comment :D
- fixermark 11y ago
  It's integrated directly into the cloud product. Since its purpose is not to host your code, but make your code visible to the cloud product itself, expect it to live as long as the cloud product. ... and since the cloud product actually offers a direct way for Google to generate revenue from the service, I'd assume it'd live for awhile. ;)
exacube 11y ago
This article is just click bait. Pretty sure this product is just so you can store your code/repo for your project using Google's cloud services. It's part of a whole for their cloud offering.
- mwilcox 11y ago
  Yep, more of a competitor to Microsoft's Visual Studio Online than any of the social coding platforms: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-studio-online-vs.aspx https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-s...
  - mynameisvlad 11y ago
    Well, one part of VSO, since that includes Bugs/Build/Test. I don't really know many private source-only hosting providers though.
    - mariusmg 11y ago
      VSO is pretty great actually. Private source control, bug tracker / agile planner thingababoo and build all in once place. With the possibility to auto deploy on Azure if you need it.
      - lawira 11y ago
        Didn't know much about this. Thanks for your sharing it here.
- stickfigure 11y ago
  Yeah. One consequence is that stacktraces in the appengine log viewer are clickable and take you to actual code. Modest but useful.
- downboy 11y ago
  Much like any PaaS provider. Heroku, Openshift etc.
- 11y ago
thekevan 11y ago
This just seems to be a place to have the code that you run on Google Cloud Platform. Not exactly a competitor.
- jfoster 11y ago
  It's certainly Google Cloud branded, but it appears to have somewhat equivalent functionality to Github. For Google to launch something purely as a "Github competitor" would be silly because those using Github would quickly dismiss it; "we already have Github!" So Google are playing up the integration with the rest of Google Cloud, integrating with Github and Bitbucket, and offering additional features. You have to extrapolate a bit to realize it, and Google probably won't admit it, but this is definitely intended as a Github/Bitbucket competitor.
  - skj 11y ago
    No, GP was correct. It is intended as a way to get your source into the platform. They're private repos to which only people in your projects have access.
personjerry 11y ago
Hasn't Google Code existed for ages? No one seemed to like it. Heck, Google didn't seem to like it enough to give it any love, just check out the UI on the site: https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3aPython https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3aPython
- detaro 11y ago
  google code is EOL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/03/farewell-to-goo...
wasd 11y ago
Sure, it'll compete with GitHub but I think a more exciting possibility is that it'll compete with Heroku. CodeCommit (similar service offered by AWS) integrates with other AWS services to help manage deployment and releases but I still find the entire AWS platform to be very difficult to use. I would love to see Google add pressure to all three companies to make their respective products better.
- campers 11y ago
  GCP has a push-to-deploy https://cloud.google.com/tools/repo/push-to-deploy https://cloud.google.com/tools/repo/push-to-deploy That along with the cloud debugging from their git repo are some nice to haves.
mdekkers 11y ago
...because google code worked out so well....
- skj 11y ago
  It did. When googlecode.com launched, it was an immediate market leader (keep in mind that it displaced the wretched sourceforge.com). When the new wave of source hosting (github, bitbucket, etc) made its way up, googlecode fell by the wayside and, after becoming a distinctly third-rate offering, was end-of-lifed.
stock_toaster 11y ago
So they killed Google code to... launch another code hosting thing? Does Google have too many siloed product managers? Maybe you can only advance up the corporate ladder by releasing new products, and fuck all if they get killed later, because you got your promotion? No clue what the cause. Just seems weird looking on from the sidelines.
- Juha 11y ago
  A while ago I remember hearing in some podcast from googler that they internally have separate source code management system (not related to Google Code). I wouldn't be surprised it he was talking about this one and they finally decided to make it public. Killing Google Code was probably just because not many people used it (externally or internally).
  - aiiane 11y ago
    It's far more likely the Googler was referring to Google's variant of Perforce, which is what is used for most internal projects.
- Kudos 11y ago
  Google code was project hosting, not just source hosting. This clickbait article is talking about a Google product that just does source hosting and is a part of the overall Google public cloud product strategy.
  - icefox 11y ago
    Google code did source hosting and was one of the primary features.
    - skj 11y ago
      Source hosting is the only feature of GCP source hosting. It's literally just a way to get your code into the platform, nothing more.
sergiosgc 11y ago
This is clickbait. Nevertheless, my first thought was "GitHub is much better and much much safer than anything Google can offer". Back in the day, were Microsoft to offer a competitor to a small company's product and my reaction would be: "They're dead in the water". Food for thought...
- sagivo 11y ago
  Yes. Google now try to take it all like the old Microsoft. No wonder they get bad response for each new product like that people simply don't trust them anymore.
  - EGreg 11y ago
    I pretty much trust Google, Apple, Amazon etc. to safeguard my data better than others. What do you mean? Don't you use gmail, publish to the app store, and host with AWS? Do you use Stripe for payments? Google Maps? Facebook login? You are trusting these companies with a great deal.
    - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
      > I pretty much trust Google, Apple, Amazon etc. to safeguard my data better than others. Why? > Don't you use gmail, publish to the app store, and host with AWS? Do you use Stripe for payments? Google Maps? Facebook login? You are trusting these companies with a great deal. Believe it or not, most people do not do all of these things. Many do none.
      - EGreg 11y ago
        Many developers and startups do one or more of those things. Because trusting large companies that are trusted by many others and have invested in a large infrastructure makes it much more feasible to accomplish their goals. It is possible to trust no one, eg build on the blockchain or freenet, but there is so far much less audience, and it's only recently become feasible to go to marketwith that stuff. If your goal is to attract millions of customers who can understand how to get started with your technology, trusting large corporations is usually an acceptable tradeoff. And if you want to be competitive with what's out there using the features of native iOS or AWS or gmail or whatever these services offer that you can't simply get without trusting them, then you HAVE to trust them or users will use another product which did.
sologoub 11y ago
Anyone else notice that the photo they are using is the old Santa Monica office that Google has moved out of a while back?
hoodoof 11y ago
Does this have an API?
- piotrkaminski 11y ago
  The article says they'll open one up later this year.
guelo 11y ago
My team has just started looking for a github replacement because the code review workflow is just not working for us, we need something with more structure. I think there's plenty of space for feature and price competition, especially for private repos where github's social network effects don't matter as much.
- farkas 11y ago
  I'm the CEO of Atlassian (who run Bitbucket & Stash). Would love to get your feedback on what we can do to improve. We really pride ourselves on making products that have the right level of control in our products. Or email me - scott <at> atlassian.
- fezzik02 11y ago
  Hi! I'm a Developer Advocate over at Atlassian, and I'd like to point out that Stash offers extensible merge controls through merge request check plugins. In addition to pre-configured and third-party plugins, an open API allows you to make custom merge requirements. https://developer.atlassian.com/stash/docs/latest/tutorials-and-examples/controlling-when-pull-requests-can-be-merged.html https://developer.atlassian.com/stash/docs/latest/tutorials-... In Bitbucket, we don't support this yet, but we do allow branch restrictions to ensure only trusted users are able to merge sensitive branches and many teams find this to be a suitable proxy for that behavior. https://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/09/16/take-control-with-branch-restrictions/ https://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/09/16/take-control-with-bran...
- Matt138 11y ago
  Have you checked out any of the GitHub plugins that do this, something like https://www.zenhub.io https://www.zenhub.io could help you add more structure to GitHub
- skeeterbug 11y ago
  Doesn't BitBucket/Stash provide more structure for code reviews? You can lock down the main branch and force code to get merged via a PR.
- meric 11y ago
BenjiSujang 11y ago
Competition is always good. Looks good for Google cloud users. However certainly no GitHub competitor.
mirceal 11y ago
meh. this has zero chances of competing with github. I think it's meant more for Google Cloud Platform users to have a place where to store their code within the same "cloud"
alaskamiller 11y ago
While I was at Google one insight I had is that there's a copy of most internet products. Given the cadre of college grads they hire to work there, cloning something is almost like a fun little coding challenge. Dropbox? There's a clone. Pinterest? Clone. Everything. Then they dogfood it and if there's more interest they gather up more resources to inevitably pitch the idea to Marissa Meyer, who then plays with it, design the business case for it, and approve a proper budget for it. If the product is good then the news leaks or they launch it. After awhile if the Google audience doesn't like it they cut it loose. Which goes to say... any time some investor asks you what happens if Google comes into your space, you should say: good.
beefsack 11y ago
Competition in the Git hosting arena seems to be largely nullified by the fact that it's trivial to use multiple remotes.
geofft 11y ago
The reason people use GitHub is everything around the git hosting: the web interface, the account system, pull requests and issues, forking, comments, wikis, Pages, even the desktop and mobile apps. Hosting git repositories is straightforward, by design. This article is only slightly more sensible than claiming that S3 is a GitHub competitor because you can git clone over HTTP.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- shrineOfLies 11y ago
  Lately, the Web UI has been sucky, I relied on my username button quite a bit, now I have to perform two steps to go to my user page
  - mikekchar 11y ago
    To be honest, I think it has always been sucky in many ways. They change it quite frequently, but it doesn't actually seem to be changes that improve the UI. It only makes it frustratingly different than before. I often wonder if the projects my team works on ends up that way. We A/B test a lot of changes and often find that it makes absolutely no difference in conversion. In the end we often don't change things that seem to be "obvious" improvements for fear that we'll just frustrate our customers by changing things in ways they don't care about. UI design is hard :-)
    - Scarblac 11y ago
      Exactly this, it always sucks and it changes too often in completely random ways. Github's issue tracker is also very half baked, every real project has to has a Trac instance or so somewhere else. But _it has critical mass_, and pull requests and the way commenting them and testing them etc works is really awesome, and it'll be hard for a new competitor to get people to move.
      - nulltype 11y ago
joshuak 11y ago
Calling a source code repo service a competitor to GitHub is like calling a online book store a competitor to Amazon. Hint: source code is not GitHub's value, just like books where not Amazon's. GitHubs true value is something Google is profoundly bad at.
- hoodoof 11y ago
  What is gtihub's true value?
  - medecau 11y ago
    Social.
10098 11y ago
It looks more like a beginning of an online IDE than a direct github competitor. It's just convenient if you're already using Google's cloud services.
- csells 11y ago
  I'm curious what kinds of additional features you'd be interested in here. In these comments so far I've heard code review, access control and online IDE. Would any of those be useful? What else would be useful? Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform
  - nulltype 11y ago
    GitHub has at least some good ideas in this area. Code review and issue tracking are nice, but everyone seems to want something different from those systems so I'm not sure how to do that in a reasonable way. Access control would be nice for deploys I guess? I hope that someone really does make an online IDE that means I don't have to use a local IDE anymore, but I'm not certain how feasible that is. Atom seems like a giant step in the right direction.
    - csells 11y ago
      Thanks, nt. Cloud-based IDEs are the future, I think. Too many good reasons to have them.
davidbanham 11y ago
> It can serve as a “remote” for Git repositories sitting elsewhere on the Internet or locally. That's not a feature of this product, it's just how git works.
- catshirt 11y ago
  sources say it allows you to "host" your "repository" in the "cloud"
- csells 11y ago
  Of course, we're pretty proud of our git support. We also support "connected repos" where we keep a repo in Cloud Source Repositories in sync with a repo you specify on GitHub or BitBucket; if you make a change on GH or BB, it's reflected into GCSR and vice versa. The idea is that you should be able to integrate with the features we're building on top of GCSR without making you move away from GH or BB. Useful? Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform
hoodoof 11y ago
WTH does this mean? Are they saying it is not secure? https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/ https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/ Note Cloud Source Repositories are intended to store only the source code for your application and not user or personal data. Do not store any Core App Engine End User Data (as defined in your License Agreement) in a Cloud Source Repository. To use a hosted Git repository with a Cloud Source Repository, you must first open an account with GitHub or Bitbucket (independent companies separate from Google). If you push source code to a Cloud Source Repository, Google will make a copy of this data which will be hosted in the United States.
- skj 11y ago
  It means only put code in source hosting, not user data. That is, follow best practices with your repository.
jabo 11y ago
Off topic, but the image in the article is of a building in Santa Monica that Google moved out of atleast 2 years ago.
- bradabrams 11y ago
  Ha! thanks... I was wondering about that :-)
jokoon 11y ago
Anecdote: I remember using mercurial on google code, at some point it did not work, a push was just timing out for some reason. I switched to bitbutcket and then used github. Google answered the issue, but I already made the switch, and I don't even know if they fixed it.
- mineo 11y ago
  Fun fact: google code now has a " We have some known issues with hg repositories. " banner up since a few days ago.
  - jokoon 11y ago
    Well I had this issue with mercurial 2 years go.
sidcool 11y ago
Hasn't Google been moving code to GitHub itself?
- skj 11y ago
  Yes. Open source GCP projects are hosted either on github or googlesource.com, an unindexed place for git and codereview. (eg https://go.googlesource.com https://go.googlesource.com is where the go language is hosted). And keep in mind, googlesource.com is not the same service as the one talked about in this article. Not even the same backend.
sidcool 11y ago
Hasn't Google been moving code to GitHub itself?
shrineOfLies 11y ago
I would've liked it better, if it also had auto-deploy to gce, and auto load-balancing, scaling, health-checks and service discovery.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  So, if it was AWS?
  - shrineOfLies 11y ago
    im ok with that
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- skj 11y ago
  The first one, sure, but all the others don't really seem like features of source hosting...?
  - shrineOfLies 11y ago
    Its not about source hosting, I'm talking about automating the entire workflow, cutting out devops, cutting costs. Its the future man
k_bx 11y ago
To me, this more looks like a Google's cloud IDE (targeted Java), for which it would of course make sense to have code-hosting there also. It makes sense for Google to have one, unlike just a GitHub competitor, imho.
hliyan 11y ago
1. Requires credit card number for free trial 2. No built in issue tracker or wiki (?)
- skj 11y ago
  That's because it's not actually project hosting, despite what the article may claim. It's a way to get your code onto the platform.
xsace 11y ago
When I go to princing and quota I get: > This Beta release of Cloud Source Repositories is free and can be used to store up to 500 MB of source files. No thanks! I still remember what happened with AppEngine.
- nulltype 11y ago
  What happened with AppEngine?
  - campers 11y ago
    The SDK's were slow to update, the Java App Engine doesn't support Java 8 yet the Python and/or PHP version are behind a bit I think. There's a bunch of bugs which haven't been resolved after a long time. The instances were underpowered for the price, Java ones took a long time to start up which compounded issues with the auto-scaler. I used it a little bit a few years ago and despite the issues with the original platform I'm quite interested in the new Docker based managed-vm app engine platform, where you can build your own images and have much better control, and compute engine pricing.
  - xsace 11y ago
    When they went out of beta/preview, the prices skyrocketed to absurdness and many people had to shutdown their app because of everything being coupled to their specific API and the notice being to short to adapt. So yeah, don't invest into something when you don't know what the final pricing will be.
im1983 11y ago
Sorry, but I just can't trust them. I am absolutely sure that Google will shut it down in X years.
- eatonphil 11y ago
  I don't understand the reasoning here, or you would benefit from dependent types. I am /also/ absolutely sure that /everything/ will shut down in X(company) years.
  - im1983 11y ago
    GitHub will not shutdown in X years. That's their main business. While Google has the tendency to shutdown products after their beta phase. From Google POV that's a side project to their ad biz.
    - fixermark 11y ago
      Main businesses do fail (witness poor, beleaguered SourceForge). Meanwhile, Google's cloud ecosystem is a revenue-generator for the company; that does decrease the odds that it'll have the plug pulled. I wonder how many people shy away from AWS on the thought that web services aren't Amazon's core business model.
      - im1983 11y ago
        I agree, but some companies such as Twitter and Google have a track record. Time will tell.
bsimpson 11y ago
500 MB lifetime storage doesn't seem like a whole lot.
- csells 11y ago
  To be clear, this is the current limit in beta and it's per repo, so if you have multiple cloud projects, you get multiple repos. We're thinking about adding support for multiple repos per project in the future. Would that be useful? Also, and we're planning on upping the limit once we reach GA. What do you think a reasonable limit should be for a git repo? Our goal is to strike the right balance between usefulness and abuse. Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform
  - bsimpson 11y ago
    You should absolutely support multiple git repos per project. If someone writes npm-compatible modular JavaScript code, it wouldn't be hard to have a dozen proprietary repos supporting a single reasonably sized project.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - nulltype 11y ago
    Is it weird if you just charge GCS-style pricing for git data?
sytse 11y ago
Every IaaS provider (Google, Amazon, Azure) has added a code hosting service or will do so in the future. Having your code hosted here will increase lock-in which is the best way for the IaaS provider to increase margins in the future. However, code hosting is not the essence of that GitHub, BitBucket and we at GitLab offer. The essence is code collaboration: mentioning people, doing a code review, activity streams, etc. Getting this right is hard and I wonder if many IaaS providers will get this right. The code delivery pipeline consists of issues, IDE, code hosting, CI, code review, configuration management, Continuous Delivery (CD) and a PaaS service. Code hosting is a first step and getting all the rest right is a lot of work. Services working on getting the IDE right are Koding, Nitrous.io, Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy. And I suspect that GitHub Atom is running in a web-browser so they can effortlessly offer it online in the future. For configuration management you want to integrate with Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt and Docker. At GitLab we offer CI and CD via GitLab CI. We hope for a multi-cloud future where organizations will deploy to different cloud providers. They will use PaaS software that spans the different IaaS providers. Cloud independent PaaS software offerings are CloudFoundry, OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Mesos DCOS, Docker Swarm and Flynn. We want to ensure that GitLab is the best option to do code collaboration upstream from these offerings.
- mchahn 11y ago
  > And I suspect that GitHub Atom is running in a web-browser so they can effortlessly offer it online in the future. A note about atom ... It does not run in a web browser and it would be damn hard to port it to the web since it runs on Node. It uses chromium for displaying the DOM but is not in a browser.
- dkhenry 11y ago
  So one thing GitLab and others don't offer that Google can is tight integration with Deployment. Yeah we have all used the CI servers to do a form of Continous Delivery, but can google and amazon surpass those offerings by giving a tighter integration that a third part can't offer.
  - sytse 11y ago
err4nt 11y ago
Thats cool...until the day Google decides to close it and shuts down the service and all projects trapped on it. But until then, its pretty cool!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- err4nt 11y ago
  Google Notebook, Google Sites, Google Wave, Feedburner…
fixxer 11y ago
Github really owns the "organization aspect". For my personal projects, I'm fine with my own git server on a cheap vm, but for work I've been really happy with Github's issue tracker and org membership administration (with which we use OAUTH heavily for internal tools, several of which queue background computation). Github issues are much easier for tracking job submissions from analysts than integrating with the company email, and developers prefer it. I looked at GitLab a year ago. I liked it, but it was a little funky (avatars weren't working; obviously not mission critical, but little shit like that erodes confidence -- either support a feature or don't, but never half ass it because I'm not going to admin over a server when I've got a chorus analysts bitching about it being hacky). GitLab people: this was a digitalocean prepared image version of GitLab, in case you're listening. Version control is really the most minor and easy to replicate part of Github's value proposition.
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for looking at GitLab and sorry to hear that avatars didn't work. There was an issue with avatars and using relative urls 7 months ago: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/369 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/369 This was fixed. But if you used relative urls please consider switching to a full hostname, it is a better experience. We recommend installing packages from our package server https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ since templates on cloud providers might be out of date.
finnjohnsen2 11y ago
Post Snowden I'm looking to move away from cloud services and not entangle myself further.
- fixermark 11y ago
  I see this sentiment quite often, and I'm not really sure how to respond to it (other than the snarky, obvious "Enjoy your cave"). Hacker News is a cloud service---we share comments on news stories in a collaborative fashion. I assume this means something closer to "I don't want my personal, sensitive data hosted by anybody and I'm willing to pay for the inefficiency and inconvenience of only being able to access it from a handful of nodes (or having to maintain my own hosting solution on my own hardware)" than the alternative interpretation "I'm a Luddite; down with the Internet?"
  - finnjohnsen2 11y ago
    You assume correctly. Any service, especially served abroad like in the US, where I share any of my data, I no longer feel as good about using.
skj 11y ago
Calling the GCP source hosting a competitor with github is nonsense. No public access to these repos, for one, so they're completely unsuitable for general project hosting.
peter303 11y ago
Google abandoned its previous Github comptetitor. Unlikely many outside of the Go-phers will use the new one.
samfisher83 11y ago
Google had googlecode way before github. They just didn't do much with it.
arbuge 11y ago
Sites like GitHub thrive on the community they engender. Google no doubt has the tech chops to compete with anybody on a pure technical basis, but community is not their forte. Witness Google Plus.
sova 11y ago
The _actual_ link should lead to https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/ https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/

214 points by pbreit 11y ago

pbreit 11y ago

Well, not quite a competitor. I presume it's expected to work better with Google Cloud than elsewhere?

empyrical 11y ago
Yeah, it looks like it's mainly a way to manage code you're running on Google Cloud services
yeukhon 11y ago
It just reminds me of Google App Script and its editor.

bradhe 11y ago

So interesting. This race for features between the cloud vendors feels crazy to me, but totally makes sense from a business perspective. Classic attempt at locking you in to a single platform.

AdieuToLogic 11y ago
> Classic attempt at locking you in to a single platform. Isn't that what happens immediately after one places their artifacts into "the cloud"?
- bradhe 11y ago
  Nah, there are multiple cloud vendors out there. My platform runs in DO, AWS, and GCE for instance. The notion that cloud itself locks you in will disappear soon.
fixermark 11y ago
From the repository feature's docs (https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/ https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/): "Using Cloud Source Repositories is easy if you are familiar with Git. For example, you can add a Cloud Source Repository to a local Git repository as a remote, or you can connect it to a hosted repository on GitHub or Bitbucket" If the goal is lock-in, they're doing it wrong.

camhenlin 11y ago

Can't wait to see how long it takes them to get rid of this one like they did with Google Code

clintonc 11y ago
Well, it could last ten years, like Google Code did. :P
baby 11y ago
Except git is the shit right now
- grepz 11y ago
  Can you elaborate on that? Just wondering.
  - baby 11y ago
    I think I posted that on the wrong comment :D
fixermark 11y ago
It's integrated directly into the cloud product. Since its purpose is not to host your code, but make your code visible to the cloud product itself, expect it to live as long as the cloud product. ... and since the cloud product actually offers a direct way for Google to generate revenue from the service, I'd assume it'd live for awhile. ;)

exacube 11y ago

This article is just click bait. Pretty sure this product is just so you can store your code/repo for your project using Google's cloud services. It's part of a whole for their cloud offering.

mwilcox 11y ago
Yep, more of a competitor to Microsoft's Visual Studio Online than any of the social coding platforms: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-studio-online-vs.aspx https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-s...
- mynameisvlad 11y ago
  Well, one part of VSO, since that includes Bugs/Build/Test. I don't really know many private source-only hosting providers though.
  - mariusmg 11y ago
    VSO is pretty great actually. Private source control, bug tracker / agile planner thingababoo and build all in once place. With the possibility to auto deploy on Azure if you need it.
    - lawira 11y ago
      Didn't know much about this. Thanks for your sharing it here.
stickfigure 11y ago
Yeah. One consequence is that stacktraces in the appengine log viewer are clickable and take you to actual code. Modest but useful.
downboy 11y ago
Much like any PaaS provider. Heroku, Openshift etc.
11y ago

thekevan 11y ago

This just seems to be a place to have the code that you run on Google Cloud Platform. Not exactly a competitor.

jfoster 11y ago
It's certainly Google Cloud branded, but it appears to have somewhat equivalent functionality to Github. For Google to launch something purely as a "Github competitor" would be silly because those using Github would quickly dismiss it; "we already have Github!" So Google are playing up the integration with the rest of Google Cloud, integrating with Github and Bitbucket, and offering additional features. You have to extrapolate a bit to realize it, and Google probably won't admit it, but this is definitely intended as a Github/Bitbucket competitor.
- skj 11y ago
  No, GP was correct. It is intended as a way to get your source into the platform. They're private repos to which only people in your projects have access.

personjerry 11y ago

Hasn't Google Code existed for ages? No one seemed to like it. Heck, Google didn't seem to like it enough to give it any love, just check out the UI on the site: https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3aPython https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3aPython

detaro 11y ago
google code is EOL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/03/farewell-to-goo...

wasd 11y ago

Sure, it'll compete with GitHub but I think a more exciting possibility is that it'll compete with Heroku. CodeCommit (similar service offered by AWS) integrates with other AWS services to help manage deployment and releases but I still find the entire AWS platform to be very difficult to use. I would love to see Google add pressure to all three companies to make their respective products better.

campers 11y ago
GCP has a push-to-deploy https://cloud.google.com/tools/repo/push-to-deploy https://cloud.google.com/tools/repo/push-to-deploy That along with the cloud debugging from their git repo are some nice to haves.

mdekkers 11y ago

...because google code worked out so well....

skj 11y ago
It did. When googlecode.com launched, it was an immediate market leader (keep in mind that it displaced the wretched sourceforge.com). When the new wave of source hosting (github, bitbucket, etc) made its way up, googlecode fell by the wayside and, after becoming a distinctly third-rate offering, was end-of-lifed.

stock_toaster 11y ago

So they killed Google code to... launch another code hosting thing? Does Google have too many siloed product managers? Maybe you can only advance up the corporate ladder by releasing new products, and fuck all if they get killed later, because you got your promotion? No clue what the cause. Just seems weird looking on from the sidelines.

Juha 11y ago
A while ago I remember hearing in some podcast from googler that they internally have separate source code management system (not related to Google Code). I wouldn't be surprised it he was talking about this one and they finally decided to make it public. Killing Google Code was probably just because not many people used it (externally or internally).
- aiiane 11y ago
  It's far more likely the Googler was referring to Google's variant of Perforce, which is what is used for most internal projects.
Kudos 11y ago
Google code was project hosting, not just source hosting. This clickbait article is talking about a Google product that just does source hosting and is a part of the overall Google public cloud product strategy.
- icefox 11y ago
  Google code did source hosting and was one of the primary features.
  - skj 11y ago
    Source hosting is the only feature of GCP source hosting. It's literally just a way to get your code into the platform, nothing more.

sergiosgc 11y ago

This is clickbait. Nevertheless, my first thought was "GitHub is much better and much much safer than anything Google can offer". Back in the day, were Microsoft to offer a competitor to a small company's product and my reaction would be: "They're dead in the water". Food for thought...

sagivo 11y ago
Yes. Google now try to take it all like the old Microsoft. No wonder they get bad response for each new product like that people simply don't trust them anymore.
- EGreg 11y ago
  I pretty much trust Google, Apple, Amazon etc. to safeguard my data better than others. What do you mean? Don't you use gmail, publish to the app store, and host with AWS? Do you use Stripe for payments? Google Maps? Facebook login? You are trusting these companies with a great deal.
  - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
    > I pretty much trust Google, Apple, Amazon etc. to safeguard my data better than others. Why? > Don't you use gmail, publish to the app store, and host with AWS? Do you use Stripe for payments? Google Maps? Facebook login? You are trusting these companies with a great deal. Believe it or not, most people do not do all of these things. Many do none.
    - EGreg 11y ago
      Many developers and startups do one or more of those things. Because trusting large companies that are trusted by many others and have invested in a large infrastructure makes it much more feasible to accomplish their goals. It is possible to trust no one, eg build on the blockchain or freenet, but there is so far much less audience, and it's only recently become feasible to go to marketwith that stuff. If your goal is to attract millions of customers who can understand how to get started with your technology, trusting large corporations is usually an acceptable tradeoff. And if you want to be competitive with what's out there using the features of native iOS or AWS or gmail or whatever these services offer that you can't simply get without trusting them, then you HAVE to trust them or users will use another product which did.

sologoub 11y ago

Anyone else notice that the photo they are using is the old Santa Monica office that Google has moved out of a while back?

hoodoof 11y ago

Does this have an API?

piotrkaminski 11y ago
The article says they'll open one up later this year.

guelo 11y ago

My team has just started looking for a github replacement because the code review workflow is just not working for us, we need something with more structure. I think there's plenty of space for feature and price competition, especially for private repos where github's social network effects don't matter as much.

farkas 11y ago
I'm the CEO of Atlassian (who run Bitbucket & Stash). Would love to get your feedback on what we can do to improve. We really pride ourselves on making products that have the right level of control in our products. Or email me - scott <at> atlassian.
fezzik02 11y ago
Hi! I'm a Developer Advocate over at Atlassian, and I'd like to point out that Stash offers extensible merge controls through merge request check plugins. In addition to pre-configured and third-party plugins, an open API allows you to make custom merge requirements. https://developer.atlassian.com/stash/docs/latest/tutorials-and-examples/controlling-when-pull-requests-can-be-merged.html https://developer.atlassian.com/stash/docs/latest/tutorials-... In Bitbucket, we don't support this yet, but we do allow branch restrictions to ensure only trusted users are able to merge sensitive branches and many teams find this to be a suitable proxy for that behavior. https://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/09/16/take-control-with-branch-restrictions/ https://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/09/16/take-control-with-bran...
Matt138 11y ago
Have you checked out any of the GitHub plugins that do this, something like https://www.zenhub.io https://www.zenhub.io could help you add more structure to GitHub
skeeterbug 11y ago
Doesn't BitBucket/Stash provide more structure for code reviews? You can lock down the main branch and force code to get merged via a PR.
meric 11y ago

BenjiSujang 11y ago

Competition is always good. Looks good for Google cloud users. However certainly no GitHub competitor.

mirceal 11y ago

meh. this has zero chances of competing with github. I think it's meant more for Google Cloud Platform users to have a place where to store their code within the same "cloud"

alaskamiller 11y ago

While I was at Google one insight I had is that there's a copy of most internet products. Given the cadre of college grads they hire to work there, cloning something is almost like a fun little coding challenge. Dropbox? There's a clone. Pinterest? Clone. Everything. Then they dogfood it and if there's more interest they gather up more resources to inevitably pitch the idea to Marissa Meyer, who then plays with it, design the business case for it, and approve a proper budget for it. If the product is good then the news leaks or they launch it. After awhile if the Google audience doesn't like it they cut it loose. Which goes to say... any time some investor asks you what happens if Google comes into your space, you should say: good.

beefsack 11y ago

Competition in the Git hosting arena seems to be largely nullified by the fact that it's trivial to use multiple remotes.

geofft 11y ago

The reason people use GitHub is everything around the git hosting: the web interface, the account system, pull requests and issues, forking, comments, wikis, Pages, even the desktop and mobile apps. Hosting git repositories is straightforward, by design. This article is only slightly more sensible than claiming that S3 is a GitHub competitor because you can git clone over HTTP.

deleted 11y ago
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shrineOfLies 11y ago
Lately, the Web UI has been sucky, I relied on my username button quite a bit, now I have to perform two steps to go to my user page
- mikekchar 11y ago
  To be honest, I think it has always been sucky in many ways. They change it quite frequently, but it doesn't actually seem to be changes that improve the UI. It only makes it frustratingly different than before. I often wonder if the projects my team works on ends up that way. We A/B test a lot of changes and often find that it makes absolutely no difference in conversion. In the end we often don't change things that seem to be "obvious" improvements for fear that we'll just frustrate our customers by changing things in ways they don't care about. UI design is hard :-)
  - Scarblac 11y ago
    Exactly this, it always sucks and it changes too often in completely random ways. Github's issue tracker is also very half baked, every real project has to has a Trac instance or so somewhere else. But _it has critical mass_, and pull requests and the way commenting them and testing them etc works is really awesome, and it'll be hard for a new competitor to get people to move.
    - nulltype 11y ago

joshuak 11y ago

Calling a source code repo service a competitor to GitHub is like calling a online book store a competitor to Amazon. Hint: source code is not GitHub's value, just like books where not Amazon's. GitHubs true value is something Google is profoundly bad at.

hoodoof 11y ago
What is gtihub's true value?
- medecau 11y ago
  Social.

10098 11y ago

It looks more like a beginning of an online IDE than a direct github competitor. It's just convenient if you're already using Google's cloud services.

csells 11y ago
I'm curious what kinds of additional features you'd be interested in here. In these comments so far I've heard code review, access control and online IDE. Would any of those be useful? What else would be useful? Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform
- nulltype 11y ago
  GitHub has at least some good ideas in this area. Code review and issue tracking are nice, but everyone seems to want something different from those systems so I'm not sure how to do that in a reasonable way. Access control would be nice for deploys I guess? I hope that someone really does make an online IDE that means I don't have to use a local IDE anymore, but I'm not certain how feasible that is. Atom seems like a giant step in the right direction.
  - csells 11y ago
    Thanks, nt. Cloud-based IDEs are the future, I think. Too many good reasons to have them.

davidbanham 11y ago

> It can serve as a “remote” for Git repositories sitting elsewhere on the Internet or locally. That's not a feature of this product, it's just how git works.

catshirt 11y ago
sources say it allows you to "host" your "repository" in the "cloud"
csells 11y ago
Of course, we're pretty proud of our git support. We also support "connected repos" where we keep a repo in Cloud Source Repositories in sync with a repo you specify on GitHub or BitBucket; if you make a change on GH or BB, it's reflected into GCSR and vice versa. The idea is that you should be able to integrate with the features we're building on top of GCSR without making you move away from GH or BB. Useful? Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform

hoodoof 11y ago

WTH does this mean? Are they saying it is not secure? https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/ https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/ Note Cloud Source Repositories are intended to store only the source code for your application and not user or personal data. Do not store any Core App Engine End User Data (as defined in your License Agreement) in a Cloud Source Repository. To use a hosted Git repository with a Cloud Source Repository, you must first open an account with GitHub or Bitbucket (independent companies separate from Google). If you push source code to a Cloud Source Repository, Google will make a copy of this data which will be hosted in the United States.

skj 11y ago
It means only put code in source hosting, not user data. That is, follow best practices with your repository.

jabo 11y ago

Off topic, but the image in the article is of a building in Santa Monica that Google moved out of atleast 2 years ago.

bradabrams 11y ago
Ha! thanks... I was wondering about that :-)

jokoon 11y ago

Anecdote: I remember using mercurial on google code, at some point it did not work, a push was just timing out for some reason. I switched to bitbutcket and then used github. Google answered the issue, but I already made the switch, and I don't even know if they fixed it.

mineo 11y ago
Fun fact: google code now has a " We have some known issues with hg repositories. " banner up since a few days ago.
- jokoon 11y ago
  Well I had this issue with mercurial 2 years go.

sidcool 11y ago

Hasn't Google been moving code to GitHub itself?

skj 11y ago
Yes. Open source GCP projects are hosted either on github or googlesource.com, an unindexed place for git and codereview. (eg https://go.googlesource.com https://go.googlesource.com is where the go language is hosted). And keep in mind, googlesource.com is not the same service as the one talked about in this article. Not even the same backend.

sidcool 11y ago

Hasn't Google been moving code to GitHub itself?

shrineOfLies 11y ago

I would've liked it better, if it also had auto-deploy to gce, and auto load-balancing, scaling, health-checks and service discovery.

seanp2k2 11y ago
So, if it was AWS?
- shrineOfLies 11y ago
  im ok with that
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
skj 11y ago
The first one, sure, but all the others don't really seem like features of source hosting...?
- shrineOfLies 11y ago
  Its not about source hosting, I'm talking about automating the entire workflow, cutting out devops, cutting costs. Its the future man

k_bx 11y ago

To me, this more looks like a Google's cloud IDE (targeted Java), for which it would of course make sense to have code-hosting there also. It makes sense for Google to have one, unlike just a GitHub competitor, imho.

hliyan 11y ago

1. Requires credit card number for free trial 2. No built in issue tracker or wiki (?)

skj 11y ago
That's because it's not actually project hosting, despite what the article may claim. It's a way to get your code onto the platform.

xsace 11y ago

When I go to princing and quota I get: > This Beta release of Cloud Source Repositories is free and can be used to store up to 500 MB of source files. No thanks! I still remember what happened with AppEngine.

nulltype 11y ago
What happened with AppEngine?
- campers 11y ago
  The SDK's were slow to update, the Java App Engine doesn't support Java 8 yet the Python and/or PHP version are behind a bit I think. There's a bunch of bugs which haven't been resolved after a long time. The instances were underpowered for the price, Java ones took a long time to start up which compounded issues with the auto-scaler. I used it a little bit a few years ago and despite the issues with the original platform I'm quite interested in the new Docker based managed-vm app engine platform, where you can build your own images and have much better control, and compute engine pricing.
- xsace 11y ago
  When they went out of beta/preview, the prices skyrocketed to absurdness and many people had to shutdown their app because of everything being coupled to their specific API and the notice being to short to adapt. So yeah, don't invest into something when you don't know what the final pricing will be.

im1983 11y ago

Sorry, but I just can't trust them. I am absolutely sure that Google will shut it down in X years.

eatonphil 11y ago
I don't understand the reasoning here, or you would benefit from dependent types. I am /also/ absolutely sure that /everything/ will shut down in X(company) years.
- im1983 11y ago
  GitHub will not shutdown in X years. That's their main business. While Google has the tendency to shutdown products after their beta phase. From Google POV that's a side project to their ad biz.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    Main businesses do fail (witness poor, beleaguered SourceForge). Meanwhile, Google's cloud ecosystem is a revenue-generator for the company; that does decrease the odds that it'll have the plug pulled. I wonder how many people shy away from AWS on the thought that web services aren't Amazon's core business model.
    - im1983 11y ago
      I agree, but some companies such as Twitter and Google have a track record. Time will tell.

bsimpson 11y ago

500 MB lifetime storage doesn't seem like a whole lot.

csells 11y ago
To be clear, this is the current limit in beta and it's per repo, so if you have multiple cloud projects, you get multiple repos. We're thinking about adding support for multiple repos per project in the future. Would that be useful? Also, and we're planning on upping the limit once we reach GA. What do you think a reasonable limit should be for a git repo? Our goal is to strike the right balance between usefulness and abuse. Chris Sells PM, Google Cloud Platform
- bsimpson 11y ago
  You should absolutely support multiple git repos per project. If someone writes npm-compatible modular JavaScript code, it wouldn't be hard to have a dozen proprietary repos supporting a single reasonably sized project.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nulltype 11y ago
  Is it weird if you just charge GCS-style pricing for git data?

sytse 11y ago

Every IaaS provider (Google, Amazon, Azure) has added a code hosting service or will do so in the future. Having your code hosted here will increase lock-in which is the best way for the IaaS provider to increase margins in the future. However, code hosting is not the essence of that GitHub, BitBucket and we at GitLab offer. The essence is code collaboration: mentioning people, doing a code review, activity streams, etc. Getting this right is hard and I wonder if many IaaS providers will get this right. The code delivery pipeline consists of issues, IDE, code hosting, CI, code review, configuration management, Continuous Delivery (CD) and a PaaS service. Code hosting is a first step and getting all the rest right is a lot of work. Services working on getting the IDE right are Koding, Nitrous.io, Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Codio and CodeEnvy. And I suspect that GitHub Atom is running in a web-browser so they can effortlessly offer it online in the future. For configuration management you want to integrate with Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt and Docker. At GitLab we offer CI and CD via GitLab CI. We hope for a multi-cloud future where organizations will deploy to different cloud providers. They will use PaaS software that spans the different IaaS providers. Cloud independent PaaS software offerings are CloudFoundry, OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Mesos DCOS, Docker Swarm and Flynn. We want to ensure that GitLab is the best option to do code collaboration upstream from these offerings.

mchahn 11y ago
> And I suspect that GitHub Atom is running in a web-browser so they can effortlessly offer it online in the future. A note about atom ... It does not run in a web browser and it would be damn hard to port it to the web since it runs on Node. It uses chromium for displaying the DOM but is not in a browser.
dkhenry 11y ago
So one thing GitLab and others don't offer that Google can is tight integration with Deployment. Yeah we have all used the CI servers to do a form of Continous Delivery, but can google and amazon surpass those offerings by giving a tighter integration that a third part can't offer.
- sytse 11y ago

err4nt 11y ago

Thats cool...until the day Google decides to close it and shuts down the service and all projects trapped on it. But until then, its pretty cool!

deleted 11y ago
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err4nt 11y ago
Google Notebook, Google Sites, Google Wave, Feedburner…

fixxer 11y ago

Github really owns the "organization aspect". For my personal projects, I'm fine with my own git server on a cheap vm, but for work I've been really happy with Github's issue tracker and org membership administration (with which we use OAUTH heavily for internal tools, several of which queue background computation). Github issues are much easier for tracking job submissions from analysts than integrating with the company email, and developers prefer it. I looked at GitLab a year ago. I liked it, but it was a little funky (avatars weren't working; obviously not mission critical, but little shit like that erodes confidence -- either support a feature or don't, but never half ass it because I'm not going to admin over a server when I've got a chorus analysts bitching about it being hacky). GitLab people: this was a digitalocean prepared image version of GitLab, in case you're listening. Version control is really the most minor and easy to replicate part of Github's value proposition.

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for looking at GitLab and sorry to hear that avatars didn't work. There was an issue with avatars and using relative urls 7 months ago: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/369 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/369 This was fixed. But if you used relative urls please consider switching to a full hostname, it is a better experience. We recommend installing packages from our package server https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ since templates on cloud providers might be out of date.

finnjohnsen2 11y ago

Post Snowden I'm looking to move away from cloud services and not entangle myself further.

fixermark 11y ago
I see this sentiment quite often, and I'm not really sure how to respond to it (other than the snarky, obvious "Enjoy your cave"). Hacker News is a cloud service---we share comments on news stories in a collaborative fashion. I assume this means something closer to "I don't want my personal, sensitive data hosted by anybody and I'm willing to pay for the inefficiency and inconvenience of only being able to access it from a handful of nodes (or having to maintain my own hosting solution on my own hardware)" than the alternative interpretation "I'm a Luddite; down with the Internet?"
- finnjohnsen2 11y ago
  You assume correctly. Any service, especially served abroad like in the US, where I share any of my data, I no longer feel as good about using.

skj 11y ago

Calling the GCP source hosting a competitor with github is nonsense. No public access to these repos, for one, so they're completely unsuitable for general project hosting.

peter303 11y ago

Google abandoned its previous Github comptetitor. Unlikely many outside of the Go-phers will use the new one.

samfisher83 11y ago

Google had googlecode way before github. They just didn't do much with it.

arbuge 11y ago

Sites like GitHub thrive on the community they engender. Google no doubt has the tech chops to compete with anybody on a pure technical basis, but community is not their forte. Witness Google Plus.

sova 11y ago

The _actual_ link should lead to https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/ https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/