GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) e-manual

Businesses use GitHub’s Enterprise products to improve their software development lifecycle from beginning to end. If your developers save 45 minutes a day, and onboarding and training time is reduced by 40%, the return on investment (ROI) for adopting GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) is considered high.

Keep reading to learn more about the platform, migrating, artificial intelligence features, i.e., GitHub Copilot, how to make the most of your investment using extensions, and more.

Table of content

PART 1

What is GitHub Enterprise Cloud?

PART 2

Migrating to GitHub Enterprise Cloud

PART 3

GitHub Enterprise Cloud features

Part 1: What is GitHub Enterprise Cloud?

GitHub is a version control platform based on Git. GitHub Enterprise Cloud is a cloud-based deployment option of GitHub’s highest plan tier—GitHub Enterprise.

It provides all the capabilities of GitHub along with enhanced flexibility, scalability, and cloud hosting. The Enterprise level serves as an overarching umbrella for GitHub organizations, allowing you to create and manage multiple businesses under a single structure.

GHEC is designed for businesses that need advanced security and authentication, administrative control, and compliance features. GitHub Enterprise release notes often include enhancements to these areas.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud vs GitHub Enterprise Server vs hybrid

With a GitHub Enterprise plan, you can choose between the following deployment options:

GitHub Enterprise Cloud: Hosted on GitHub's infrastructure, this is ideal if your business is in need of a fully-managed scalable service.
GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES): Deployed on-premise or via a private cloud, GitHub Enterprise Server gives you complete control over your infrastructure and data, making it best suited to organizations with strict compliance or security needs.
Hybrid deployments: Combine GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server with GitHub Connect for flexibility and scalability as well as control over critical assets and data.

Standard GHEC vs GHEC with Enterprise Managed Users

GitHub Enterprise Cloud offers two account types—standard and Enterprise Managed Users (EMU).

The standard model takes users’ personal accounts and links them to an enterprise for access to company resources.

With Enterprise Managed User accounts, all users are fully owned and managed by the GitHub Enterprise account. Which one suits you depends on your use case, but typically, for companies that are more into open source, the standard model suffices.

For companies wanting full control over user accounts, EMU is often the preferred option.

AI-powered enterprise-scale DevOps platform

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of all our lives to some degree, especially those in the software development world. GitHub Enterprise Cloud leverages AI to enhance the development process end-to-end, improve code quality, streamline workflows, and ensure standard and advanced security.

Its AI-powered features give intelligent recommendations, automate repetitive tasks, and support your developers in writing better code faster. GitHub Copilot, along with other AI-powered tools, is integrated into GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

These features, along with GitHub Copilot, allow developers to stay in the zone, remain in the same Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and have expert advisory through the GenAI chat function.

Key tools like GitHub Copilot are integrated directly into the platform, providing not only coding suggestions but also real-time chat assistance. Additionally, the platform supports bring-your-own-data models, also known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models, allowing you to customize and optimise your AI tools with specific datasets.

These advanced capabilities help developers overcome challenges more efficiently, maintain high code quality, and stay at the forefront of technological innovation.

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered code completion and assistance tool. It provides real-time code suggestions and helps you write code based on context and natural language inputs. It also helps the GenAI chat functionality remain focused while searching for advice or alternatives.

By incorporating advanced security measures and leveraging artificial intelligence, GitHub Enterprise Cloud protects your code and data and improves the overall development experience.

The combination of robust security and intelligent automation helps you build secure, high-quality software more efficiently.

Want to transform your software development practices with the help of GitHub’s AI pair programmer, Copilot?

Watch the webinar

GitHub Advanced Security

The security features of GHEC are designed to protect code and data throughout the development lifecycle, helping your users identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in a way that’s compliant with industry standards.

GHEC comes with a sufficient bundle of security features by default with extended functionality, like code scanning and secret scanning, available as add-ons through GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) licenses.

Top tip: GitHub Advanced Security tools are free to use in public repositories.

Key security features include:

Dependabot alerts (part of GHEC by default): Analyzes project dependencies for known vulnerabilities and provides alerts when insecure dependencies are identified.

Code scanning: A Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tool that continuously scans code for vulnerabilities and issues and gives your developers detailed reports and actionable recommendations. You can customize scanning rules and integrate third-party applications to meet your specific security needs.

Secret scanning: Automatically scans repositories for secrets like API keys, personal access tokens, and passwords, which may have been accidentally committed.

Alerts and remediation: Notifies your administrators and developers of detected secrets, allowing for prompt remediation to prevent unauthorized access.

Dependency review: Catches vulnerable dependencies before merging pull requests.

Security advisories: Allows maintainers to create and publish security advisories for their projects, informing your GitHub Enterprise managed users of vulnerabilities and recommended fixes.

Collaborative resolution: Allows project collaborators to privately discuss and resolve security issues before making advisories public.

Compliance and audit logs: Maintains detailed logs of user activities and changes within repositories, supporting compliance with industry regulations.

Audit reports: Generates comprehensive audit reports that help you meet the regulatory and compliance needs of your business.

GitHub Actions

An integral part of GitHub Enterprise Cloud, GitHub Actions allows you to automate workflows directly within your GitHub repositories. By enabling GitHub Actions, you can set up Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines so that code changes are automatically built, tested, and deployed, improving the reliability and speed of your development process.

These workflows can be triggered by various events, such as code pushes, pull requests, or issues, providing flexibility and responsiveness to your development cycle.

GitHub Actions also offers seamless integration with a wide range of external services and tools, such as cloud providers, security scanners, and deployment platforms. This lets you create comprehensive automation pipelines that encompass every aspect of your software development lifecycle.

Furthermore, Actions can automate routine tasks like dependency management, code linting, and versioning, freeing up developers to focus on more complex and creative aspects of their projects.

By leveraging GitHub Actions, you can enhance productivity, reduce manual error messages, and ensure a consistent and reliable workflow across development.

The integration of automation into the GitHub Enterprise Cloud ecosystem underscores the commitment to providing a robust, scalable, and efficient platform for modern software development.

Find out how to automate your workflow from idea to production, as well as GitHub Actions and how to use it.

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GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces is a pay-per-use feature that provides a customizable development environment hosted on cloud. This service allows developers to create, configure, and share environments that are pre-configured and instantly accessible from any location.

With Codespaces, you can spin up a development environment in seconds, complete with all the dependencies, tools, and settings you need for your project.

One of the key benefits of Codespaces is its flexibility. Developers can tailor environments to suit the specific needs of projects for consistency across different machines and team members. This eliminates the common "it works on my machine" problem by providing a standardized setup that can be easily replicated and shared.

Where Codespaces runs on cloud, it offloads the heavy lifting of compiling and running code from local machines to powerful cloud servers. This significantly speeds up development tasks and improves performance, particularly for resource-intensive projects.

Codespaces also integrates seamlessly with GitHub, allowing you to access your repositories, branches, and pull requests directly within your development environment.

The tight integration streamlines the workflow, making it easier for you to manage code, track changes, and collaborate with team members in real-time.

Overall, GitHub Codespaces improves productivity, reduces setup time, and makes for a consistent, high-performance development experience that scales with your needs.

GitHub Packages

GitHub Packages is a versatile feature integrated directly into GitHub, designed to simplify the management and distribution of software packages. It serves as a centralized repository where you can host various types of packages such as npm, Maven, Docker containers, and more.

This allows developers to store packages securely within their organisation or publicly for open source projects, leveraging GitHub's robust infrastructure for version control and access management.

GitHub Packages integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, allowing automated workflows for package deployment for consistency in software development processes.

By facilitating easy access, versioning, and sharing of packages, GitHub Packages promotes efficiency, collaboration, and reliability across development teams and projects hosted on GitHub.

How to reap the benefits of GitHub Enterprise

GitHub Enterprise can be thought of as a complete platform for DevOps with solutions for every stage of the development lifecycle, from planning and coding to testing, deploying, and monitoring.

Reaping the benefits of GitHub Enterprise involves leveraging its suite of features and integrations to streamline and enhance your entire DevOps workflow end-to-end.

Its robust user management capabilities allow you to manage user access, permissions, and roles across your organisation. This includes features like team management, granular access controls, and audit logging for compliance and security.

Utilizing the GitHub Enterprise platform and adopting it end-to-end for the development process can significantly reduce the time to market as well as increase developer productivity and overall happiness.

If you have GitHub Enterprise, the next steps you can take to maximise its benefits include adopting GitHub Copilot throughout your organisation, moving to GitHub Actions, and adopting GitHub Advanced Security.

Copilot is a leading AI-assisted development tool that many coders use in their daily work with GitHub.

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Part 2: Migrating to GitHub Enterprise Cloud

You may be looking to migrate to GitHub Enterprise Cloud to leverage the benefits of AI and Cloud-based solutions without the overhead of managing an on-premise infrastructure or alternative redundant software.

The different features available, such as improved disaster recovery, reduced operational costs, security, and the flexibility to scale resources up or down based on demands, are often influencers in the decision to migrate from GitHub Enterprise Server and the likes of source systems, e.g., Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, and Jenkins to GHEC.

Top tip: GitHub Enterprise Importer helps users migrate repositories from other platforms, such as Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, or another GitHub Enterprise version, i.e., Server.

Consolidating

Consolidations are a crucial step for a smooth transition to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, streamlining and centralizing the development workflow for a unified environment where all teams work cohesively. This leads to better collaboration, consistency, and code quality.

By merging disparate codebases, branches, or version control systems into GitHub Enterprise Cloud, you can leverage the advanced AI functionalities, enhanced security, and scalability. The transition not only reduces operational costs and improves disaster recovery capabilities but also ensures that the entire development process is efficient and effective.

Proper planning and a deep understanding of both the source and new environments are essential to a smooth migration.

They involve integrating various branches, repositories, and version control systems into a unified environment.

If migrating, your organisation needs to consolidate its codebase from disparate sources to streamline and centralize the development workflow. This will make sure that all of your teams are working within a single, cohesive framework for better collaboration, consistency, and code quality.

Solid planning will be key to your success as much as understanding both environments, i.e., the functionality, how to operate in the newly built GitHub environment, and how to reap the benefits.

How to consolidate repositories?

Consolidating repositories can simplify the migration process, making it easier to manage permissions, automate workflows, and apply security policies uniformly across all of your projects.

Step 1. To consolidate repositories in GitHub Enterprise Cloud, identify the repositories and branches you want to merge and create backups of each.

Step 2. Choose a target repository where all others will be consolidated. Clone this target repository locally and add the source repositories as remotes, fetching their branches.

Step 3. Create new branches in the target repository for each source repository's branch, then merge these into the target repository’s main branch, resolving any conflicts.

Step 4. Run tests to ensure functionality remains intact and push changes to GitHub to update all relevant documentation, informing your team of the consolidation.

You can also archive or delete old source repositories once you confirm everything is working in the consolidated repository. This process streamlines your codebase and enhances collaboration within your development team.

How do you configure repositories?

Configuring GitHub repositories is different from the process of consolidating repositories, and involves setting up various aspects such as repository-level settings, branches, collaborators, integrations, and more.

Here's a general overview of how you can configure GitHub repositories:

Access the repository on GitHub.
Click on the "Settings" tab.
Configure general settings such as repository name, description, visibility (public or private), and default branch.

Manage branches to control the flow of code changes and development stages.
Create new branches for feature development or bug fixes.
Set the default branch that GitHub will use when someone visits the repository.

Add collaborators to grant individuals or teams access to the repository.
Specify their permissions, e.g., read, write, admin, based on their role in the project.

Integrate with external services such as CI/CD pipelines (Azure Pipelines, Jenkins), code quality tools (SonarCloud), or issue trackers (Jira).
Configure webhooks to notify external services or trigger actions based on repository events.

Set up branch protection rules to enforce code review requirements and prevent direct pushes to certain branches.
Enable GitHub's Advanced Security features, such as code scanning and secret scanning, to enhance security practices.

Utilize GitHub Insights to view repository statistics, traffic, and contribution activity.
Monitor, manage, and update your instance health and community engagement through insights provided by GitHub.

Create automation workflows using GitHub Actions to build, test, and deploy your code.
Define custom workflows to automate repetitive tasks and streamline development processes.

Write and maintain documentation in the repository's README file.
Include project details, installation instructions, and usage and contribution guidelines.

By configuring these aspects effectively, you can optimise collaboration, security, and automation within your GitHub repositories for a smooth and efficient development lifecycle.

User permissions in GitHub

Managing permissions in GitHub repositories is essential for controlling access and ensuring that team members have appropriate privileges.

GitHub provides five levels of access, which allow users to have granular roles, giving them only the required access level. Adding collaborators involves inviting individuals or teams and assigning them specific access levels based on their roles.

Branch protection features enable enforcement of code review processes and restrictions on who can merge changes into protected branches.

GitHub offers tools to manage permissions across multiple repositories, consistently using teams to streamline access management. Regular audits of permissions, coupled with security measures like two-factor authentication and strong password policies, will help maintain repository security.

Clear documentation of permission guidelines and proactive communication of access changes ensure transparency and accountability within your development team.

By implementing these practices, you can optimise collaboration while safeguarding your repository's integrity and sensitive information.

GitHub integrations

More often than not, organizations tend to run two or more infrastructures, which can be achieved seamlessly with the GitHub Enterprise platform.

If you're considering migrating to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, it’s crucial to assess the compatibility of your existing tools and services with the target platform.

Understanding the integration capabilities of GitHub Enterprise Cloud with services like Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google will allow you to evaluate how seamlessly your current workflows can be transitioned to the new environment.

The availability of robust integrations may also influence your decision to migrate, so investigating the possibilities is essential in assessing the feasibility and benefits of migrating.

Cost savings during the integration should also be considered. During the evaluation phase, you should compare the consolidation possibilities with integrations. More often than not, there are double functionalities in both systems that, when combined, lead to significant cost savings.

Ultimately, the choice of infrastructure depends on your organisation's specific needs, goals, and challenges. You must evaluate the implications of your infrastructure choices in the migration process and the long-term success of your deployment in GitHub Enterprise Cloud and Hyperscaler environments.

Microsoft Azure integration

You can automate workflows, deploy applications, and manage your infrastructure directly from your GitHub repositories using Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions (more on this further down).

Azure and GitHub are constantly working towards more integrations. GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps (GHAzDO) is one example, along with the ability to transact the GitHub metered items via Azure payment mechanisms.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Similarly, integrations with the Google Cloud Platform facilitate tasks like deploying applications, accessing cloud services, and managing resources.

Azure DevOps vs. GitHub Enterprise

Microsoft is actively investing in both platforms, but the choice between Azure DevOps and GitHub Enterprise often hinges on factors like team preferences, existing infrastructure, and the need for advanced development and collaboration features.

While Azure DevOps offers robust capabilities for application lifecycle management, GitHub Enterprise is often seen as the go-to platform for modern software development, collaboration, and DevOps practices.

Ultimately, you need to weigh up the considerations and determine the platform that aligns best with your business needs.

Eficode earns the DevOps with GitHub on Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization.

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Part 3: GitHub Enterprise features

Using additional features in GitHub helps with productivity, automation, and collaboration in development teams, providing a cohesive and efficient ecosystem for development and operations. Let’s take a look at them and explore the benefits of each:

An integral part of GitHub Enterprise, Actions allow you to automate workflows directly within your GitHub repositories. They enable CI/CD pipelines, integrate with external services, and automate routine tasks.

Powered by OpenAI's GPT technology and available within GitHub Enterprise, it provides intelligent code suggestions and completions. It’s designed to work within GitHub repositories, enhancing the coding experience and productivity.

Codespaces is a pay-per-use feature. It's a customizable development environment hosted in the cloud.

Enhances the functionality of GitHub Enterprise by providing a streamlined, command-line-based approach to managing GitHub features.

It brings pull requests, issues, GitHub Actions, and other GitHub Enterprise Cloud features to your terminal so you can do all your work in one place.

Here’s how it integrates:

Automation: Combine GitHub CLI with GitHub Actions to create powerful automation scripts that can be triggered and managed from the command line.
User management: Manage repository permissions and user access using the CLI (especially useful for enterprise environments where bulk user management is necessary).
Efficiency: Developers can perform common tasks without switching contexts from the terminal to the web interface.
Scripting and DevOps: Enhances DevOps workflows by integrating GitHub CLI commands into CI/CD pipelines.

Discover how to integrate GitHub Copilot into your workflow and how other large-scale organizations have benefitted.

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Optimise development with GitHub Enterprise Cloud

The flexible deployment options of GitHub Enterprise, including GitHub Enterprise Cloud (with or without managed users), GitHub Enterprise Server instances, and hybrid, cater to various needs, whether it's leveraging a fully managed service, maintaining complete control over on-premise infrastructures, or balancing approaches for scalability and control.

You can explore extensibility further on GitHub Marketplace, where you will find a variety of third-party tools and actions that can be integrated to streamline your development process.

You can also leverage code written by others in the community, incorporating existing solutions to accelerate your projects and enhance your development capabilities. Utilizing these capabilities will result in a cohesive and integrated DevOps environment that will help your developers drive innovation and success for your business.

GitHub Enterprise offers service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure high availability and support for its customers.

Moving to GitHub Enterprise on your DevOps journey can be daunting. GitHub support portal options and services are available.

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GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) e-manual

Moving to GitHub Enterprise on your DevOps journey can be daunting. GitHub Enterprise support options and services are available.

Table of content

Part 1: What is GitHub Enterprise Cloud?

GitHub Enterprise Cloud vs GitHub Enterprise Server vs hybrid

Standard GHEC vs GHEC with Enterprise Managed Users