Enhance your DevOps experience with GitHub
GitHub is where developers collaborate to shape the future of software. It provides a complete range of features irrespective of whether you are a hobbyist, contributing to an Open-Source Software (OSS) project, or working within an Enterprise on commercial projects; providing features that scale with your needs
Key features of all GitHub versions include:
Version Control: GitHub uses Git, the industry standard version control system, but enriches it with tools that allow people to share and collaborate on the files they’ve created. It’s a place where developers can review code, manage Git repositories, track bugs, and work on features together.
Collaboration: GitHub encourages teams to work together. Providing real-time collaboration tools to allow the effective tracking of work to be done and facilitate the rapid resolution of issues found
Action Workflows: GitHub Actions automates build, test, and deployment workflows with simple and secure CI/CD. However, unlike other DevOps products they are not limited to only CI/CD style operations. They allow workflow automation for any part of the GitHub system, hence allowing common business operations to be automated
Enterprise users have requirements beyond those of the individual or small OSS team. To address these needs there is GitHub Enterprise Server (GHE).
In addition to the features above it offers:
A key requirement for most Enterprises is the need to centralise access control to services using a central directory and single sign on (SSO). This is possible for GHE through its integration via SAML or oAuth to a variety of industry standard directories. Thus, allowing much easier management of who can access which resources within the enterprise
Closely linked to SSO access control is the requirement to track what authenticated users are doing. GHE provides detailed audit logging so that all actions within the organisation can be tracked. An important feature in regulated development environments.
GHE is most commonly accessed as a cloud service (GHEC). However, there is also the option to host your own instance of GHE either on premises or in any cloud provider using the container based GHE Server images (GHES). This means there is infinite flexibility in hosting architecture. The choice of using GHEC and GHES is not binary as a hybrid solution can be built using GitHub Connect. Allowing the synchronisation of contributions, searches, alerts and licenses. Making for a powerful platform to deliver exactly your organisation’s needs.
GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) provides a range of security tools for code scanning, for managing dependencies (Dependabot), and secret scanning. Together these features reduce the time to fix vulnerabilities and help prevent inadvertent human errors before they become production issues
A common problem many organisations suffer is that it is slow for someone to get working on a codebase. GitHub, via Codespaces offers a way to address this problem by offering customisable, cloud hosted development environments scoped to specific Git repositories. These allow a developer to be up and running with a working development environment that is perfectly setup for a projects needs in minutes.
Copilot is GitHub‘s AI pair programmer, in studies 88% of respondents said it improved their productivity. Copilot is available to anyone with a GitHub account for a monthly fee, but with Copilot for Business on GHE the offering is enhanced adding centralise administration and an indemnity backed by Microsoft in case of any claims of use of publicly licensed code.
