Google is re-entering the source code cloud hosting market with its Cloud Source Repositories service

Jun 25, 2015 15:37 GMT  ·  By

When a company is dominating its market like GitHub is doing with cloud-based source code hosting, people tend to take their eyes off the competition.

In the last few months, GitHub has been busy trying to raise a new private funding round, but so have its competitors, quietly moving in the shadows and waiting for GitHub's mistakes.

Google is re-entering the game

After closing down Google Code this winter, Google is apparently back in the business through its Cloud Source Repositories service, which has entered a beta testing period.

This new tool provides developers with the ability to host Git repositories on Google's Cloud Platform, a Web-based source code editor, debugging tools, and the ability to inter-connect and synchronize with repositories on GitHub and BitBucket.

VentureBeat's Jordan Novet was the first to notice Google's new offering, and in an email exchange with Google's Cloud Platform product manager Chris Sells, the latter had the following to say: "We’re in beta right now, but expect Google Cloud Source Repositories to get even better as we move towards the full release."

Google's Cloud Source Repositories service may not have anything in common with the Google Code service which runs on classic Rietveld installations, but expect it to be something similar to Microsoft's Visual Studio Online, specifically targeting medium-to-large businesses.

GitLab may be a more solid competitor than Atlassian

While Google seems a scary competitor, experts see GitLab as the top dog, even stronger than Atlassian, the company behind BitBucket.

GitLab is exactly like GitHub, only developers can install it on their own servers, or they can optionally pay for hosting on GitLab's servers.

Even if GitLab is not a classic competitor (in the sense of stealing GitHub's clients and integrating them into its own revenue), its largely freemium model does put a dent in GitHub's bank accounts.

GitLab currently makes enough money to keep it afloat from its enterprise accounts, and according to TheNextWeb in 2014, paying customers accounted for only 0.1% of its entire userbase.

Nevertheless, the service is used by a wide number of users, many of them being big companies which would eventually have been on GitHub's business offering if GitLab hadn't been around.

GitLab's interface for the self-hosted version
GitLab's interface for the self-hosted version

Even if GitLab acquired Gitorious in March, the service doesn't seem to have a solid monetization plan in place for its future.

On the other hand, Atlassian sure has one, the company announcing at the start of the month plans to open its service for third-party integrations, a page out of the Twitter and Slack game plans, services which opened their arms to developers and never looked back afterwards.

Nevertheless, GitLab still has developers on its side, and in growing numbers with each day that passes. You can see multiple blog posts like this, where developers are spreading the love and giving GitLab the thumbs up over both BitBucket and GitHub.

Amazon's in on it too, already preparing two new cloud services

The fact that Git has become an unofficial standard in the Web-dev industry has also not gone by with other companies, Amazon Web Services announcing last year two new cloud services to be launched in 2015: CodeCommit and CodePipeline.

The first is a source code hosting system similar to BitBucket and GitHub, ironically Amazon's competitors and partners at the same time, CodeCommit being a collaboration between the three.

CodePipeline, on the other hand, is a CI (Continuous Integration) system running in the cloud, something that GitHub, Google, or Microsoft are not offering.

GitLab, the self-hosted GitHub (6 Images)

GitHub's competition is ramping up
GitLab's interface for the self-hosted versionGitLab's interface for the self-hosted version
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