Software is eating the world, as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen noted three years ago. Now it may not even be taking the time to chew carefully.
GitHub, a powerful tool for developing software, is expected to announce on Tuesday that its Enterprise version, a means by which thousands of companies work on new software projects, will be available directly in Amazon Web Services.
That is likely to greatly increase the number of software projects running on GitHub because it will speed the deployment of each new product via A.W.S. It also means people won’t need the budget approval or central management of a corporate information technology department to make new software.
Not that things were moving particularly slowly. According to Chris Wanstrath, co-founder and chief executive of GitHub, there are now 17 million repositories, or work projects, on GitHub. At the beginning of the year there were “just” 10 million.
Most of those repositories are software programs and apps, which people create on GitHub, exposing them to others to work on, either as open source projects or proprietary software with lots of creators. In the free version of the product, anyone can gain access to a repository. GitHub’s Enterprise version, which costs $20 a month per user (with volume discounts) has privacy and security protections, so companies can develop software out of the public eye.
Previously, companies using GitHub Enterprise had to maintain the product on their own computer servers. This has become a problem for some firms, according to Mr. Wanstrath. “We know a lot of smaller companies want to use A.W.S,” he said. “Now we’re also hearing from big companies that they’ve got top-down directives to get rid of their corporate data centers and move to the cloud.”
The move to offer an A.W.S. version of GitHub is likely to be the first of several such installations in public clouds, such as Google’s version and Microsoft Azure. “Amazon is the one we’re starting with,” Mr. Wanstrath said. “Over the next few years, some of the biggest companies will be shutting down practically all of their data centers.”
That 70 percent increase in GitHub repositories in just 10 months is particularly notable given GitHub’s recent history. In April, Tom Preston-Werner, the company’s other co-founder, stepped down as chief executive after an investigation into gender-based harassment at GitHub.
The company investigated charges of mistreatment by Mr. Preston-Werner and his wife of a female employee, and found no evidence to support those claims, Mr. Wanstrath wrote at the time, but did find “mistakes and errors of judgment” on Mr. Preston-Werner’s part.
In the tech community, where Mr. Preston-Werner’s behavior had been the subject of extensive commentary and discussion about gender in tech, GitHub endured a lot of bad publicity. That does not seem to have affected the use of GitHub itself, however, or sales of its enterprise product.
The GitHub announcement was made on the eve of A.W.S.’s annual user conference in Las Vegas. Judging from the number of emails sent to tech journalists over the past few weeks, A.W.S is poised for many other announcements about products and alliances over the next few days.