Google LLC has scored a small victory over Microsoft Corp. with the news Monday that GitLab Inc. is moving the entirety of its code repositories from the Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform.

GitLab provides a central code-control repository, issue-tracking environment, collaboration forum and documentation hosting service for open-source software developers. It’s probably the biggest rival to the much better-known developer platform GitHub Inc., which caused huge controversy earlier this month when it announced it was being acquired by Microsoft.

That acquisition sent shockwaves through the open-source community, as it placed a privately owned service that many developers regard as a quasipublic utility under the control of commercial company with which many of them compete. Indeed, developers were so worried by the acquisition that more than 100,000 of them reportedly switched to GitLab soon after the deal was announced.

As a result, GitLabs’ decision to migrate from Azure to Google could be interpreted as a move to distance itself from Microsoft. However, Andrew Newdigate, the Google Cloud Platform migration project lead at GitLab, said in a blog post Monday that’s not the case, since the switch was planned long in advance of GitHub’s acquisition — which actually seems likely because cloud migrations are not undertaken lightly.

Instead, Newdigate said, the move was designed to take advantage of Google’s lead in Kubernetes. That software deploys and manages software that’s run in application containers, which allow applications to run unchanged in many computer environments.

Kubernetes “makes reliability at massive scale possible,” Newdigate said, adding that the Google Container Engine service has more robust and mature support than any other.

GitLab said it’s planning to make its move to Google’s cloud on July 28. Once GitLab has migrated its code, Newdigate said, his team will focus on bumping up the stability and scalability of GitLab.com.

The migration will not be an easy one, however. GitLab needs to transfer some 200 terabytes of data from Microsoft Azure’s US East 2 region in Virginia to GCP’s us-east1 region in South Carolina.

Image: GitLab