“The idea here is to make Git approachable for every enterprise team and the beauty is workflows and that comes from two main workflow types–branching and forking,” said Giancarlo Lionetti, group product manager for Atlassian’s developer products.

Forking allows an authorized contractor to access the code and get a copy to work on it, but won’t allow changes to flow back into the main project until they pass muster with admins, said Lionetti. Branching allows team members to take code off, work on it and then flow it back into the main repository.

Stash 2.4 also allows developers to build personal code repositories and, as needed, assign permissions to colleagues.

Stash competes with  Collabnet as well as Github Enterprise, a formidable task, given  the traction that Github has gotten among open-source oriented web developers. Stash claims some impressive customers including NASA, Nike, Intuit, eBay and Orbitz.

London-based Server Density, is a  Github shop, but CEO David Mytton  said via email that Atlassian is strong in the enterprise market, especially with its  JIRA bug tracking tool. That could give Atlassian a leg up vis-a-vis Github overall with enterprises. Mytton characterized Github’s issue tracking tool as “fairly basic.”

And for those web developers outside the firewall, Atlassian competes with Bitbucket.

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Cloudmunch CEO Pradeep Prabhu

Cloudmunch portrays its offering as a “full stack continuous delivery” system that handles continuous integration, automated testing and continuous deployment. It supports both Github and Opscode Chef. Users can sign in with their Github ID to start what it now promises will be an integrated process to take their code from cradle to end user device.

This is part of the whole trend toward “democratizing” pieces of IT so that developers can develop what they want without having to wrestle with the set up and maintenance and updates of their tools.

“This illustrates the rather sexy notion of continuous development and delivery of code,” said Bryan Hale, VP of online services for Opscode.

Right now developers at smaller companies probably look at things like Werker which won GigaOM’s Launchpad Europe competition, Electric Cloud, CloudBees, CircleCI and Atlassian Bamboo to attack the continuous integration part of this problem. Larger companies might look at Nolio or legacy offerings from BMC and IBM for deployment and release automation.

Cloudmunch CEO Pradeep Prabhu acknowledges all of that competition, but maintains that his platform puts all the pieces of the puzzle together.  And, he notes, for $25  per month for one code repo and five nodes, CloudMunch lets developers focus just on their code by providing a “complete continuous delivery platform hosted, managed and maintained.”

If it’s as easy as advertised, that could be a compelling story.

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MapR’s decision to open source parts of it code is significant, but not groundbreaking. The company is only releasing its improvements to a handful of Hadoop-related Apache projects that are included in the MapR distribution of Hadoop, but not the proprietary code that’s MapR’s real competitive advantage in the contentious Hadoop market. While it’s still not flying the all-open-source banner like Hortonworks is, the code release puts MapR more on par with competitor Cloudera, which bolsters its open source aspects with some proprietary software for managing Hadoop clusters.

MapR also took another step in the open source direction on Thursday, announcing a partnership with Canonical that integrates MapR’s M3 distribution with the Ubuntu Linux operating system. The two also have plans to ease the installation of MapR’s Hadoop software on OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure.

I wrote recently in relation to MapR’s $30 million VC investment that the company is in a tricky position when it comes to open source. The Hadoop ecosystem was built on open source and still values it immensely, but some customers are definitely willing to pay money for products that deliver the features they want, open source or not.

As for Yelp, well, it’s just following in the footsteps of many companies — Netflix and everyone doing something on Kaggle (including GigaOM) — in trying to find new ways to use its data. The data set it’s releasing is from the Phoenix, Ariz., area and include 11,537 businesses, 8,282 checkin sets, 43,873 users and 229,907 reviews. The deadline for entries is May 20, and they can be submitted in pretty much any form you can imagine.

Hopefully, for Yelp’s sake, it doesn’t step in it the way other companies — including Netflix and AOL — have when they released supposedly anonymous data sets that were later de-anonymized. Releasing data sets gives clear benefits to both the source companies and institutions or individuals accessing the data, but privacy snafus have a away sneaking up and mitigating some of the goodwill.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Jakub Krechowicz.

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Twitter down for you right now? Fear not, we open sourced our JavaScript component framework so you can build your own. twitter.github.com/flight/—
Ben Ward (@BenWard) January 31, 2013

The Github post describes Flight as a “lightweight, component-based JavaScript framework that maps behavior to DOM nodes.”

It differs from other frameworks because it doesn’t dictate the approach developers must take to providing data to the application.

“It’s agnostic to how requests are routed, which templating language you use or even if you render your HTML on the client or the server. While some web frameworks encourage developers to arrange their code around a prescribed model layer, Flight is organized around the existing DOM model with functionality mapped directly to DOM nodes.”

DOM refers to the Document Object Model – which is the standard representation of a web page and its elements — links, images etc. —  in the browser available to JavaScript.

Flight is the latest of several projects Twitter has put up on the shared Github code repository and versioning system.

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The Hacker News itempointed readers to DNS lookup information posted early Monday that the popular project hosting and code sharing site was unavailable to users in Beijing, Shenzen and other Chinese localities.

Poor Chinese Developers, #GitHub is blocked in China! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700—
Vianney Lecroart (@acemtp) January 21, 2013

Update: According to a newer post on the HN thread:

“I believe the blocking is directly related to an automated train ticket polling plugin that had brought down Github just days ago. Due to upcoming Chinese New Year, newly released train tickets are sold within minutes. That plugin introduces huge traffic to already crumbling ticket vending site, and it has obviously made railroad bureau angry. Blocking Github makes that plugin immediately malfunction because it makes reference to javascript files hosted on Github pages. The bureau has also paid a visit to the plugin’s author, for the purpose of intimidation perhaps.”

San Francisco-based Github is the most popular project hosting and code sharing site — last week it said it passed the 3-million user mark. It is not alone when it comes to companies that run afoul of Chinese censorship. YouTube, Facebook and news sites have been blocked, and last year Chinese users were unable to download a new version of Node.js because its version number was the same number as the date of the Tiananmen Square uprising.

As many on Twitter commented this morning and as GigaOM has reported before, these roadblocks not only hinder the flow of news and information for citizens, they hurt the ability of Chinese developers to compete — and in this case collaborate — on a global basis.

This story was updated at 07:55 a.m. PT with new information from the Hacker News post 

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user matt512

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The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular web sites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready — not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment or some variation on that theme and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. So while it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.

There’s no good time for downtime in an always-on world

The rationale for doing these sorts of continuous deployments vary, but most fall into four categories. The first is that there really is no good time for downtime anymore, but if you break it, wouldn’t you rather have happy and awake staff on the clock ready to fix it? Jesse Robbins, the chief community officer of Opscode points out that even good times for downtime can vary across customers.

“One of Opscode’s earliest customers is a popular dating website, and their peak traffic is on Friday night when people are exchanging phone numbers to go on dates… the exact opposite of peak time for a CRM,” says Robbins.

Plus, as Robert Treat, COO of OmniTI, a consulting firm that helps web sites scale out their business points out, sometimes deploying at off hours means little because the site won’t actually break until it experiences peak loads. For many of these sites using continuous code deployments scaling its users is what caused the need for new code in the first place. Until the site experiences that load they don’t know if the fixes worked or not.

Just in time code-deployment

The second category is economic. When you wait to deploy your code in these massive quarterly installs, you’re deciding to avoid the efficiencies that the new code could bring to the site today. This thinking is more common to companies who view their web operations as a fundamental cost of doing business as opposed to some sort of cost center that keeps email up and running.

“Code that has been written but not yet deployed is very similar to inventory,” says Mark Imbriaco of Github. “You’ve paid the cost to develop the software, but are not yet getting any of the benefit from it. Shipping that code to production sooner means that you and your customers can benefit from it much faster. This is a pretty serious competitive advantage for companies that deliver features faster than their competitors.”

Routine code deployments makes for happy developers

Thinking of code deployment as a Big Fat Hairy Deal adds layers of stress and process to getting it into production, but if it’s a routine part of the job, developers can try things out and deploy code and move on with their lives. This reduces stress around the deployment, but it also frees their minds up for new problems and jobs, notes Johns Allspaw of Etsy. Plus he says, “Fast and frequent feedback is what allows for developers to be productive. Developers hate being bored.”

Punishing your site makes it stronger

(L to R) Alexei Rodriguez – VP of Operations, Evernote Corporation; Adrian Cockcroft – Director, Architecture, Netflix ; Aditya Agarwal – VP Engineering, Dropbox
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

The third school of thought is popularized by Netflix and is basically an invitation to break things because a system that is so fragile that one code upgrade brings it down, clearly isn’t resilient enough. In many ways Netflix takes the idea of building out an architecture that’s dependent on a genius IT professional and his version of delicate pieces and crazy glue and flips it on its head. Instead of a fragile model car Netflix is building the Tonka trucks of IT –ready to take a few glitches and keeping on serving up videos.

“Systems that contain and absorb many small failures without breaking and get more resilient over time are “antifragile” as described in [Nassim] Taleb’s latest book,” explains Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix. “We run chaos monkeys and actively try to break our systems regularly so we find the weak spots. Most of the time our end users don’t notice the breakage we induce, and as a result we tend to survive large-scale outages better than more fragile services.”

That’s the rationale behind those software updates that might cause a momentary web service outage or two. As the devops movement spreads, more businesses will likely find reasons to move toward continuous code deployment. Plus, as Allspaw of Etsy points out, the tools to test code and instantly monitor the effects of new deployments are getting better and faster. That means if you accidentally break a site, the dev teams notices it faster and fixes it. So maybe there are more outages, but they shouldn’t last as long.

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Amsterdam-based Wercker, a finalist in GigaOM’s Structure Europe Launchpad Competition, targets companies where developers focus on web applications. “There are other vendors that try to do this, but they’re either open-source solutions that you have to install on-premise and [for which you have to] buy hardware or rent a VM. Our differentiation is that we’re SaaS and we support multiple languages,” co-founder and CEO Micha Hernandez van Leuffen told me.

Cloudbees, for example, offers the Jenkins continuous-integration tool on a virtual machine, but it’s a Java-only solution, he added.

Another design point is that the service will weave in a social networking element to the process — providing a sort of Facebook-like wall so team members know what their colleagues are doing or have done. That is especially important as development teams — which already rely on Github and other tools to keep work updated and track versions — are more geographically dispersed than ever.

“The social element adds value– it shows who broke what. This whole continuous development movement is about enabling trust and for that you have to be very transparent,” he said.

While the company is based in Amsterdam, its target market is thousands of miles west — in Silicon Valley because, he said “That’s where most of the developers are.”

You have to love a company that has big plans and a flair for characterizing them. Here’s how Wercker describes the current software situation on its website:

Your source control is now hosted in the cloud with Github. You run your application on a platform cloud like Heroku so you do not have to deal with infrastructure. The step that is missing in the middle is testing and deploying your code. The Universe is broken.

Werker is one of five finalists in our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, which will take place on October 16th in Amsterdam. More information can be found here.

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While Github is the repository and versioning system of choice in the open-source world, Bitbucket — which supports both Git and Mercurial repositories — is strong in private repositories and private coding teams, said Jay Simons, president of Atlassian. Bitbucket customers include Zillow, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Verizon, Orbitz and NASA, according to the company.

When GigaOM reported on a Github outage a few weeks ago, one commenter said that more developers will start looking for redundant repositories and that Bitbucket is a viable option. “It might be a good idea to mirror the central repo with multiple providers when it comes to [version control system] hosting,” commenter JohnB wrote. “It’s already becoming a best practice to do that with cloud hosting in general.”

Bitbucket user interface before (left) and after.

Atlassian also updated Stash, its 5-month-old on-premises Git-based code repository/version management offering, with support for pull requests. That means a developer using that piece of software at the time can be alerted of the update and sync up as needed. Stash targets companies that want to keep their code development inside the firewall.

While Github keeps a running count of active developers and repositories supported, Bitbucket is more interested in development teams and claims 20,000 of them use the service.  Bitbucket is free for teams of up to 5 developers who can use an unlimited number of repositories. There is a nominal $1 per user per month charge for each additional user. Github is free for open source developers but the company also offers price plans based on number of repositories used.

Other code repositories include Google Code and CodebaseHQ.

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After giving a kind of whirlwind tour of the open-source movement in his talk, including the rise of Linux, Shirky devoted much of his discussion to Github — a kind of crowdsourced platform for maintaining code that Linux creator Linus Torvalds also created, which allows anyone to edit, to “fork” or create their own version, and to track the changes that others make. It’s not a big stretch to get from that idea to the idea of crowdsourcing legislation, which is what Shirky seems to have in mind, and there have already been some attempts at doing this via Github: for example, a German software developer has uploaded all of Germany’s laws to the platform so that citizens can recommend and track changes.

It’s an intriguing idea: that a simple software platform aimed at collaboration could change the way legislation is developed and implemented, much like the process that powers Wikipedia has created a crowdsourced encyclopedia that evolves and changes over time. But is it realistic? There were plenty of skeptics who said Wikipedia would never succeed, and yet it has an excellent track record when it comes to reliability, despite some hiccups in the process, such as the recent incident involving author Philip Roth. That said, however, there are also plenty of critics who believe that the “cabal” of editors who control the crowd-powered encyclopedia have too much authority.

Of course, some would argue that we’re already in that kind of situation with most governments anyway, and therefore Github couldn’t make things any worse. And Shirky is not the only one to make this argument: developer Abe Voelker has proposed a “Github for laws” that would take exactly the same approach to crafting and crowdsourcing legislation. There have also been some initial experiments with similar ideas — including Iceland’s new constitution and similar types of project in Finland and Ireland — which shows that others are also open to the concept.

One of the problems with applying a technical solution like Github to a massive cultural and political process like government, however, is that creating laws — even small ones — is very different from changing a piece of code so that Linux can duplicate Windows-style typefaces, or changing the Wikipedia entry on George Bush. And if even those kinds of prosaic examples can lead to the equivalent of a Linux or Wikipedia holy war, which in many cases they have, what hope do we have that politicians can actually use a similar process to change the way that government works? As Shirky suggests in his talk, there’s also a pretty entrenched bureaucracy that has become part of most governments and likely has no interest in relinquishing that control to the crowd.

In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Shirky described the potentially massive impact of crowdsourcing and crowd-powered social change, and his admiration of Github seems to be part of an attempt to find tools that will help us deal with the tidal wave of human-driven collaboration. This is something we clearly need, so it’s worthwhile to start looking at solutions — and while Github may not be the answer, at this point just about anything is probably worth a shot.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Fabio Venni

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