According to the latest press release of gitlab, arm open source has decided to migrate multiple open source projects of the company from GitHub to gitlab In the press release, gitlab outlined the important reasons why arm open source chose its platform: maximizing selection and cost-effectiveness and minimizing supplier lock-in.
The software created by arm plays the role of enabling pieces and can integrate other software on its architecture. At present, more than 95% of mobile devices use ARM processors, and these open-source projects cover many fields from sensors to cloud computing.
Andrew wafaa, an outstanding engineer and senior director of the software community at arm, explained: "in itself, these features are not so magical, but when you combine them with other software components from other communities and other projects, they have magical effects.".
He added that our goal is to provide software developers with the essence of arm architecture. Enablers take advantage of many functions of the arm architecture, which enables people to take advantage of these functions and integrate them with other stacks.
Currently, arm hosts the source code on GitHub. But most of the new core infrastructure that arm is deploying is on proprietary hardware.
"GitHub is a black box, so we have to work with them or let them do this work, and it's not necessarily correct. Then we have to do a review. We don't have to do a patch review because it's private and proprietary code... That's an important factor in our choice of gitlab," wafaa said.
In addition, they are concerned about the code ownership of OSS projects hosted on GitHub. Therefore, operating system solutions such as gitlab will be the best choice, which can maximize the choice, be cost-effective, and minimize the lock-in of suppliers. The self hosting transferred to gitlab supports effective collaboration and enables arm software to be hosted on ARM technology.
A big benefit for arm is that gitlab is open source. The company hopes to use its own tools to support its open source ecosystem. "Using an open source product makes sense in the end. Another important factor is that gitlab is an enterprise product that provides a workflow very similar to that used by arm on GitHub. Moving from GitHub to gitlab is very easy; the terms are very similar, as are the look and feel," wafaa said.
In addition, gitlab is a self managed enterprise product. It is very important for arm to have good customer support in case of problems. Of course, cost is also a consideration, which makes arm finally choose gitlab. Wafaa said: "when we consider future growth plans, it is certainly equivalent to reasonable savings".
Arm's open source project has about 200 external contributors, and gitlab is very attractive in cost. "It's just icing on the cake," wafaa said. He added that usually, the number of contributors will be more, but arm had to reduce it when migrating the project to gitlab.
Arm is moving as much of its infrastructure as possible to run on the arm architecture. Although gitlab did not initially support arm, the company "is very happy to work with us and our engineering team to ensure that it does support arm," wafaa said, creating integration with infrastructure.
Wafaa said: "it is a great blessing for us that we can have this kind of fine access control, and we can replicate globally on Amazon's infrastructure, so that we have sufficient redundancy and disaster recovery requirements to meet our it needs".