June 4th, 2018

VSTS and GitHub

Today, Satya announced the exciting news – our intent to acquire GitHub!

GitHub and Microsoft have been partnering on several levels for years. Specifically, the VSTS team has worked closely with GitHub on Git at a technical level and on other open source projects such as libgit2, GVFS, and Git LFS. It’s been a great partnership, one where we both contribute to the overall Git community and ensure our mutual customers have a great experience when using our combined products. I’m excited about the opportunity to work even more closely with GitHub.

When the acquisition completes, GitHub will remain independent and it is important it stays the trusted, open environment it is today. We aim to invest in GitHub’s social fabric to ensure the OSS community thrives, and GitHub becomes an even more trusted developer home for all developers on all platforms.

I want to share some thoughts on today’s acquisition of GitHub and what that means for all of you, our customers using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Commitment to the best solutions for developers

Microsoft has always valued and invested in developers, from our earliest days with Bill, to the present day with Satya. GitHub joining Microsoft reflects our enduring developer commitment. In fact, Microsoft is doubling down on our mission to provide developers with the best possible experiences.

The VSTS Team will continue to invest in the Git open source ecosystem to benefit all Git offerings as we have with Git, libgit2, Git for Windows, GVFS, etc.

More flexibility, same deep integrations

VSTS and TFS are stronger with the addition of GitHub. Some customers prefer a simple integrated solution, others want to adopt DevOps tools incrementally, assembling tailored solutions. For years, we’ve been adding extensibility and integration capabilities into the product. Today both VSTS and TFS integrate with GitHub and that integration will continue to deepen. GitHub offers a great developer social platform and version control system with broad developer appeal. VSTS has a wide range of DevOps services that scale to the largest enterprises. Together, teams can get the best of both worlds, selecting the pieces they want.

As a part of this, VSTS is becoming more modular. For the last year we have been working on an initiative to offer VSTS both as a single integrated suite and as a set of individual services. You will see VSTS and TFS deliver more flexibility to enable incremental and mixed adoption patterns. To make this even easier we’re giving VSTS an updated, more modern UI that better enables mixed adoption and we hope you find simpler to use.

After the acquisition completes, GitHub will become another first class offering for VSTS customers. It will not live in the same portal as VSTS, but GitHub will have the same integration and traceability as our existing version control offerings. Over time we expect to grow GitHub to support the breadth of customer needs including enterprises. We are committed to you, our customers, and the solutions will live as parallel alternatives. Our intent is to provide TFS and VSTS services the same degree of traceability from code to cloud with GitHub as well as the current Git and TFVC version control solutions already hosted in VSTS and TFS.

As a result, VSTS and TFS will be both great modular and great end to end solutions for development teams. You will continue to see new capabilities released on VSTS every 3 weeks and regular updates to TFS. In fact, we just released TFS 2018 Update 2 and we are working on Update 3 as well as the next major version of TFS. We have a large and growing customer base with VSTS and TFS, we love your feedback and our interaction with you, and we want to make sure you have a great set of DevOps tools that help your development teams collaborate and modernize.

A bright future

Together with GitHub, we have an incredibly bright future. Microsoft is investing and innovating in developer experiences more than we ever have. We will make sure open source communities thrive. Enterprises can work in the same collaborative workflows when working internally in their organization. Whatever your choice, we are committed to making this journey a great one for you. The possibilities of what we can do for developers are now greater than they have ever been and our commitment to continue to earn your trust and business remains as strong as ever.

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