Jump to Content
Google Cloud

Google Cloud and GitHub collaborate to make CI fast and easy

July 26, 2018
Melody Meckfessel

VP of Engineering

Today, Google Cloud and GitHub are delivering a new integrated experience that connects GitHub with Google’s Cloud Build, our new CI/CD platform. Together, we will provide fast, frictionless, and convenient Continuous Integration (CI) for any repository on GitHub, integrated directly into the GitHub developer workflow.

Millions of developers trust GitHub today to store and collaborate around source code. Working with GitHub, we realized we had an opportunity to help make it significantly easier for any repository to add CI, integrate DevOps practices, and improve velocity and productivity. We set out to build that together, and today’s release is the first step in that collaboration.

Continuous Integration drives developer productivity

Continuous integration is a crucial element of modern software development, but historically one that has required development teams to invest significant effort in patching together disparate software products and services to build a working, streamlined pipeline. This is an area where partners with adjacent offerings can add real value by pre-integrating the necessary pieces to deliver a seamless experience. This is what GitHub and Google have set out to do.

Rachel Stephens, Analyst, RedMonk

Software development is built on trust. We work in teams and trust our fellow developers to write the right code together. We use open-source operating systems, tools, and libraries so we can focus on the code that we need to write. We trust cloud platforms so we can develop, test, run, and manage our applications securely, at scale. Google Cloud builds on that trust by developing and using open technologies such as Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and Go.

DevOps is also built on trust. Trust is what lets us go faster. We know that mistakes and errors happen and that we will learn from them. We create a culture of trust through transparency and data-driven decisions, through a spirit of shared-fate and blameless post-mortems for continuous improvement. We use automation everywhere, especially CI, to create a safety net. Trust in our tests and our tools lets us go faster. Cloud Build provides the DevOps tools to unleash developer productivity, and help teams go faster.

Collaborations are built on trust too. Google and GitHub have a long history of working together to make software development better for all developers. We have a shared belief in the principles and practices of open source, and a shared vision of productive developers and software teams. We have worked together on improvements to the Git client and protocol, as well as other projects. And Google uses GitHub too: Googlers contributed to nearly 30,000 repos on GitHub last year, some of which are among the most popular projects on GitHub.

Cloud Build and GitHub, better together

GitHub is excited to partner with Google to make CI for cloud-native application development painless. The ability to use Cloud Build for CI as a part of the GitHub workflow is just the start of this partnership and we look forward to building more in the future with Google.

Jason Warner, SVP of Technology at GitHub

The integration of Cloud Build with GitHub makes it quick to adopt CI and validate changes by integrating code early and often, bringing a host of benefits to developers, directly from their GitHub workflow.

Zero-config Docker builds: In one step, you can run automated container builds and tests on changes pushed to a GitHub repository as a part of every pull request. GitHub will automatically detect and recommend CI for repositories that contain a Dockerfile.

Scalability: Cloud Build meets the growing needs of your organization. You can go from a single build on your local machine to multiple builds in parallel in the cloud across numerous projects, all in a matter of minutes.

Security: The builds run on infrastructure protected by Google’s security. You get full control over who can create and view your builds, what source code can be used, and where your build artifacts are stored.

Flexibility: For advanced use cases, you can include a cloudbuild.yaml file when setting up CI using Cloud Build. This lets you define custom build steps, speed up builds by caching a Docker image, build leaner containers, and deploy directly to Google Kubernetes Engine, Google App Engine, on-prem clusters (in alpha soon), or another cloud provider.

Insights: Once the build is complete, details about build times, failures and artifacts are available within GitHub through the Checks API, so you can understand and diagnose build results from within the familiar GitHub environment. Full logs and history are available in Cloud Build’s UI in the Google Cloud Console.

Join us

Today’s integration is already available in the GitHub Marketplace. Smart CI recommendations will be rolled out to all GitHub users on a phased basis. Please try it out, and share your feedback with us.

Google and GitHub have had a long relationship serving developers, and this is just the next step. We know there are many other ways we can make software development better for developers. We trust you’ll join us on this journey.

Posted in