Our quest for finding the base for the One Ring to rule them all was a challenging adventure, but today we have a platform that meets our stringent requirements. To be clear, we have no affiliation with GitHub; our choice is purely based on merit. GitHub provides a balanced combination of features that enable us to build a unified solution capable of efficiently managing your R&D operations, all while being cost-effective and scalable according to your needs.
Although we have settled on GitHub for now, we continuously evaluate other platforms to ensure that we stay ahead of any shifts in the market. Now, let’s delve into the key reasons we selected GitHub in a market already crowded with alternatives:
Broad Customer Base
GitHub’s market presence is unparalleled. With a vast user base, it’s highly likely that your source code already resides on GitHub. The familiar GitHub interface simplifies code management and user adoption, making it a logical extension for further CI/CD operations. This ubiquity allows us to integrate seamlessly into your existing workflow.
Flexible Pricing Plans
Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise, GitHub offers flexible tiers and plans to suit your size and requirements. From small teams to organizations with thousands of developers, GitHub scales with your business. It allows you to start at minimal cost and scale up as you grow, maintaining a favorable cost-to-value ratio. Unlike other platforms that target either small organizations with limited scalability or large enterprises with costly features, GitHub offers a balanced approach.
Robust Features and Roadmap
Over the past five years, we have evaluated GitHub multiple times. Initially, it lacked certain features to fully handle CI/CD pipelines, often requiring supplementary paid solutions. However, GitHub’s strong development roadmap promised significant improvements. Microsoft’s experience with TFS and Azure DevOps has clearly influenced many of GitHub’s advanced, configurable features in very positive way.
Our most recent evaluation in September 2023 showed that GitHub had finally closed all gaps, enabling us to implement a complete CI/CD pipeline within a single platform. This includes managing processes, providing visibility, and offering flexibility over access control and delegation. While there is always room for improvement, GitHub’s commitment to backward compatibility and gradual adoption of new features stands out, making transitions seamless.
Lowering Organizational Risk
One more compelling reason for our GitHub selection is risk mitigation. Though we possess proprietary tools capable of running an entire CI/CD pipeline independently, relying solely on a small company like ours can pose risks related to long-term commitment and investment. By leveraging a widely-used platform like GitHub, we ensure that you are not solely dependent on us. GitHub’s widespread adoption and robust support network mean that your CI/CD pipeline remains manageable and transferable. This ensures that you can take over your pipeline whenever you are ready, maintaining control over your intellectual property and minimizing vendor dependency.
Unified Solution
One of our main drivers for choosing GitHub is the ability to consolidate various aspects of the development lifecycle into one platform. From managing code repositories and branching strategies to enforcing change management, building artifacts, managing packages and containers, running automation, deploying applications, and monitoring health—GitHub covers it all. It even extends to creating audit logs for compliance and building comprehensive security policies.
Conclusion
Is GitHub the future? It undoubtedly represents the present. However, we remain vigilant, constantly evaluating other solutions to ensure we provide the best possible tools and platforms to solve modern R&D challenges. Our ultimate goal is to offer a seamless experience in a single portal for R&D organizations, and we are committed to evolving with the industry to meet that goal.
Remember, our commitment to you is to deliver a unified CI/CD platform that grows and adapts with your business. And as we continue to evaluate and adapt to new technologies and trends, rest assured that GitHub’s feature-rich, scalable, and user-friendly platform forms a strong foundation for your R&D success.