GitHub vs. GitLab vs. Bitbucket: 100,000 Repos Moved in 24 Hours, and What Didn't Move With Them

In June 2018, Microsoft announced it was buying GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. Within hours, many open source developers decided they didn't want their code on a Microsoft-owned platform. GitLab, a rival, said it saw ten times its normal daily volume of repository imports, and its CEO reported more than 100,000 repositories migrating in 24 hours. GitLab was already hosting about 4 million projects before the spike, and it had to scale its infrastructure on the fly to keep up.

That story shows something important about Git hosting. The code itself moved easily, because Git is the same everywhere. What didn't move so easily was everything around the code: issues, pull request history, CI pipelines, webhooks, permissions, and the community that surrounds a project.

Today the gap in scale is large.…