 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Good afternoon, CUBE viewers. We are here at Microsoft Ignite at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Edward Thompson. He is the product manager at GitHub. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So the GitHub acquisition closed this time last year. For our viewers who are maybe unfamiliar with GitHub, explain what GitHub is, and then also tell us a little bit how it's going since the acquisition closed. I'd be happy to. So yeah, GitHub is like the home for software development. If you're a software developer, you know GitHub. We host most of the open source repositories in the world just to give you some stats. So at this time last year, about the time the acquisition happened, we announced at GitHub Universe, which is our annual developer conference, that we had 30 million developers on GitHub and 100 million repositories. So that's a huge number of developers. I haven't seen the latest numbers. We'll announce the newest at GitHub Universe this year, which is coming up next week. But the last number I saw was 40 million developers. So that's a growth of 10 million developers in just a year, unbelievable. And that also means that 25% of our developers on GitHub have joined within the last year. So that's just absolutely incredible. And so yeah, GitHub is that place for development. Yeah, it's really interesting. When I look at some acquisitions that Microsoft has made, back in 2016, they spent $26 billion for LinkedIn, which is most people's resume. And if you look last year, it was $7.5 billion for my friends in the software world. GitHub is their resume. That's right. And it's about how you do things online. So, Edward, you've got an interesting perspective on this because you've worked for Microsoft and GitHub a couple of times. So give us a little bit about the relationship. When you joined Microsoft 10 years ago, open source developers, developers, developers weren't exactly on everyone's lips. So give us a little bit of viewpoint through the various incarnations. Yeah, yeah. So as you said, I joined Microsoft about 10 years ago. I came in through a little acquisition. We were just a very small software company, but we were building enterprise cross-platform developer tools. And we were about five engineers. And when you're building for Mac OS, Linux, SunOS, all these different platforms, with so many people, with so few developers, you really need to take as much off the shelf as possible. You can't build all that yourselves. So if you needed a logging library, we would just go and use some open source products. We're not going to spend our time working on that when we could be building customer value instead. So when Microsoft acquired that company, they looked at, you know, they did their due diligence, they looked at the source code, and they saw all this open source. And they, I mean, it was almost a deal breaker. They really lost their mind. They were not geared up to deal with open source, to use open source, certainly not to contribute to open source. And so that's the Microsoft that I first saw. And to get from there to here is incredible. You know, over time, we worked closely with some open source tools. We worked closely with GitHub at Microsoft, and that was really one of the early sort of unions between Microsoft and GitHub, was starting to work together on some open source software. And so we kind of started to know each other. We started to understand each other's companies and each other's cultures. And we started to, I don't know, I dare say like each other. Like I still count some of those early GitHub employees that I met as some of my closest friends. And so at some point they became such close friends that I went to go work with them at GitHub. And then of course the Microsoft acquisition and so on. But I really think that the transformation in Microsoft between the 10 years ago Microsoft that really didn't get open source and today is just incredible. Well I'm interested in that culture and maybe culture clash a little bit the first time around because Microsoft developers have their own culture and their own uniform and their own way of interacting with each other, the hours that they work which is very different from Microsoft which is a pretty middle-aged Volvo driving kind of organization. So how does that work? And what has it been like the second time around the same way Microsoft? Well as a middle-aged Volvo driver I think you can do both. You can wear a hoodie and drive a Volvo. No I think it's been really great. The interesting thing about Microsoft is that it's not with so many people it's not just like a homogenous big company. We do have the developer tools division is a little bit different than office is a little bit different than Windows. And so they all have their own sort of unique cultures and now GitHub slots in as its own unique culture. And we can talk to each other and we can understand each other but we don't necessarily have to be all the same. We can, the GitHub team does kind of work. Some of us do work kind of weird hours and I think that somehow that works especially with new tools coming to the marketplace. Chat applications, we can be a lot less synchronous. We can be a lot more online and leave a message for each other. At GitHub we use GitHub issues and pull requests to collaborate on almost everything whether it's legal or our PR department and it's not just developers. So we're trying to take these tools and sort of apply them to allow us to have the culture that we want at GitHub. And I think Microsoft's doing the same thing as well. So speaking of new tools and capabilities you're speaking here at Ignite you're about to announce the new repository with lots of new capabilities enabling users to deploy to any cloud. So tell us a little bit about this new tool. Yeah, so we announced, we call it GitHub Actions we announced it last year at GitHub Universe again our annual developer conference and our goal with GitHub Actions was to allow people to take we've got 100 million repositories on GitHub. We wanted our users to take those repositories and automate common tasks. Let me give you a concrete example. A lot of times somebody will open an issue on a GitHub repository, you know hey this doesn't work I've got a bug report and they'll fill out an issue and often either they didn't understand things or the issue resolved itself you know who knows we call that an issue that goes stale. And so you can build a workflow around that repository that will look for these stale issues and it will you know just close them automatically that gets rid of the mental tax for somebody who for a developer who owns this repository to allow this you know this workflow to just do it automatically. And so that's an example of a GitHub Actions workflow some people don't like swearing in their repository and you know so if somebody were to open a bug report you know they might be angry and so you could actually have a GitHub workflow that looks for certain words and then replies and says hey here's our code of conduct that's not the way we roll here. And actually a lot of people find that that feedback coming from a robot is a lot easier to take than feedback coming from a human. Because they might want to argue with a person can't argue with a robot. Well, not successfully. I think I have argued with a chat bot in my day but anyway that's another story. So that's what we did a year ago and we opened it up into the beta program and we really quickly got feedback that people liked it and people were doing some really innovative things but the one thing that people really wanted to automate was their builds. They wanted to be able to build their code and deploy it and we were just not set up for that. We didn't build GitHub Actions as that platform in 2018. So we kind of had to pause our beta program. You know, they say that no good plan survives first contact with the customer. So we had to hit pause on that and we retooled. We just sort of, I don't know, iterated on it I guess. And we basically built a new platform that supported all of that repository automation capability that we had planned for in the first place but also allowed for continuous integration build and deployments. So we brought Mac OS, we brought Linux and we brought Windows runners that we host in our cloud that people can use to build their software and then deploy it. And again, yeah, we want to be absolutely tool agnostic. So any operating system, any language and cloud agnostic we want to let anybody deploy anywhere whether it's to a public cloud or on-premises. So Edward, this is the second year we've done our program at this show and we really feel it's gone through a transformation. This is a multi-decade windows office, the business applications, cloud seeped in, developers are all over the place here. The day two keynote was all about app dev. I'd love to get a little compare and contrast as to what you see here at Microsoft Ignite versus I guess what I would call a pure dev show next week GitHub Universe happening in San Francisco. It's true, GitHub Universe is pretty much a pure dev show. We have fewer booths, we have smaller booths but and honestly we have fewer sort of, I don't know, enterprise sort of IT pro crowd is what we used to call them. But we do of course have a lot of dev ops. So GitHub Universe has a lot of developers but we're seeing a lot of dev ops. So there's a lot of meeting in the middle because I started out my career as assistant man actually. So I remember just doing everything manually. But that's not the way we do things anymore. We automate all of our deployments, we automate all of our builds. I don't want to sit there and type something into a console because I'm going to get it wrong. I've accidentally deleted config files on production servers and that's no good. So I think that there, GitHub Universe is very different to Ignite. It's much smaller, it's more intimate but at the same time there's a lot of overlap especially around dev ops. Yeah, Satya Nadella yesterday in the keynote talked about the citizen developer as a big push for Microsoft. He said 61% of job openings for developers are outside the tech sector. What do you see in that space? The different developer roles these days? I think it's absolutely fascinating. When I started my career, you were a developer and you wrote code probably at a development company. But now like everybody is automating tools, everybody's adopting machine learning. When I look around at some of my friends in finance, it's not about anything but tech anymore. That's, they're putting technology into absolutely everything that they do to succeed. And I think that it's amazing. Like I said earlier, 25% of developers on GitHub have joined within the last year. So it's clear that it's just exploding. Everybody's doing software now. Is there something for the citizen developer on GitHub though or is it too high level? I don't think it's too high level. I think that that's a great challenge that we need to really step up to. So Edward, one of the other big themes we heard here is talking about trust. So we talked about how Microsoft is different today than it was in the past. But I'm curious what GitHub's seen because in social media when the acquisition first happened, it was, wait, I love GitHub, I love all those people, but hey, GitLab, hey, some of these other things, I'm fleeing for the woods. And every time I've seen an open source company get bought by a public company, there's always that online backlash. What are you seeing? How has the community reacted over the last year? I understand that skepticism. I would be skeptical of any sort of change really the whole notion of who moved my cheese. But I think that the only way that we can counter that is just to prove ourselves. And I think that we have. I think that Microsoft has allowed GitHub to operate independently. And I think that, I think a lot of people expected all of a sudden everything to change. And I don't think everything did change. I think that GitHub now has more resources than it used to to be able to tackle bigger and more challenging problems. I think that GitHub now can hire more and deploy to more places. And so I really just think that we're just going to keep doing exactly what we've been doing just better. So I think it's great. So universe happening next week teed up a little bit for us. What are some of the most exciting things that you're looking forward to? What kinds of conversations will you be having? Presentations? So the big one for me is actions. I've been just completely heads down working on GitHub actions. So I'm really excited to be able to put that out there and finally give it to everybody. Cause we've been in beta now. Like I said, we've been in beta for a year which sounds like a ridiculous amount of time. But it did involve a lot of retooling and rethinking and iteration with our beta testers. And so the biggest thing for me is talking to people about actions and showing what they can do with actions. I'm super excited about that. But we've got a lot of other interesting stuff. We've done a lot in the last year since our last universe. We've done a lot in the security space. We've both built tools and we've acquired some. And so we'll be talking about those. GitHub package registry, which goes along really well with GitHub actions. I'm super excited about that too. But yeah, I mean my calendar is just booked. It's great. So many people want to sit down and talk that I'm super excited about it. Excellent. Well, great note to end on Edward Thompson. Thank you so much for coming on The Cube. We appreciate it. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of The Cube's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.