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Source Code Management Migration Trends in 2024
By Vishnu Vasudevan, Head of Product Engineering and Management at Opsera
Source Code Management (SCM) migration is the process of transitioning a software development team or organization from one version control or source code management system to another. Version control systems play a crucial role in tracking changes to source code, facilitating collaboration among developers, and ensuring the integrity and traceability of software development and delivery.
SCM migration enables the adoption of a more feature-rich or scalable version control systems, and the consolidation of development tools within an organization. The migration process involves transferring the entire version history, branches, and associated metadata from the existing SCM system to the new one, while minimizing disruptions to ongoing development efforts.
Today, developers are racing to prepare for February 15, 2024, which is when Atlassian will end support for On-Prem Bitbucket, its source code repository. Some organizations have tens of thousands of source code repositories in Bitbucket that need to be migrated, which has become a major pain point for developers and can significantly hinder innovation. GitHub has become a popular option for source code migration since they launched migration tools to move Atlassian users to GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Actions.
As SCM migration efforts to GitHub continue to grow in importance and scale, let’s take a look at seven key trends that will evolve in 2024:
- Increasing adoption of DevOps practices: DevOps methodologies emphasize collaboration, automation, and rapid delivery, which aligns perfectly with GitHub’s capabilities. As organizations embrace DevOps, they are increasingly migrating their source code to facilitate smoother integration and collaboration across their development teams.
- Adoption of Generative AI: With the advancement and benefits of Generative AI in software development and delivery, we expect to see a significant adoption to GitHub Copilot by many of the Fortune2000 enterprises in the next 12-18 months.
- Simplifying the migration process: GitHub and third-party vendors are making the migration process easier and more efficient than ever. This includes automated migration tools, comprehensive documentation, and dedicated support teams.
- Increased migration from self-hosted GitLab and Bitbucket: Companies will increasingly migrate from self-hosted GitLab and Bitbucket instances to GitHub to benefit from the cloud-based platform’s scalability, security, and ease of use.
- Rise of automated migration tools: Automated migration tools will become more sophisticated and widely adopted, making the migration process faster, easier, and less error-prone.
- Focus on security and compliance: Security and compliance will remain a top priority for companies migrating their source code, leading to increased adoption of GitHub’s security features and compliance certifications.
- More integration with other DevOps tools: GitHub will continue to strengthen its integration with other popular DevOps tools, creating a seamless workflow for development teams.
- Continued investment in GitHub by Microsoft: Microsoft, the owner of GitHub, is expected to continue investing heavily in the platform, further expanding its features and capabilities.
Migrating to GitHub can benefit development speed through improved collaboration and version control. Using GitHub with Copilot or integrating Azure OpenAI’s LLMs will help developers to fastrack the software delivery with the help of Copilot. Copilot uses a complex LLM to suggest code snippets and functions while developers are coding. This can save time and reduce boilerplate code, potentially increasing development speed.
Overall, 2024 is shaping up to be a significant year for SCM migrations, especially to GitHub. Companies are realizing the numerous benefits of migrating to this powerful platform, and the process is becoming easier and more accessible than ever. This trend is expected to continue in the coming years, making GitHub a dominant force in the SCM landscape.
For organizations looking for help in their SCM migration strategies, Opsera’s SCM Migration solution enables enterprises to accelerate time to value when utilizing innovations like GitHub Copilot and GitHub Actions. Opsera provides a seamless and automated migration process so that customers can migrate their on-prem SCM repositories and CI/CD pipelines to the cloud. Customers maintain support for Bitbucket, GitLab and GitHub features within the Opsera Unified DevOps Platform, while accelerating migrations to the cloud by 25x, with no down time and at scale.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vishnu Vasudevan is Director – Product engineering at Opsera (www.opsera.io), responsible for delivering SaaS products under Opsera and services for their customers by using advanced analytics, standing up DevSecOps products, creating and maintaining models, and onboarding new products. Previously, Vishnu worked in leading financial enterprises as a product manager and delivery leader, where he built enterprise PaaS and SaaS products for internal application engineering teams.
