Generally, companies are not bought for culture. Folks say a lot about their most valuable resource being their people, but typically a purchaser wants to buy assets. In software that will be less about cash or inventory or plants and more about customer contracts, partnerships, brands, trademarks, patents, copyrights, existing sales organisations and so on.

> GitLab isn't a major money maker ... If Google wanted them they would have already bought.

They might buy simply to have a hedge against Github. Gitlab comes with a lot of independent brand awareness that Google has not, so far, been able to gain against Github in this area.

The cloud providers are involved in a no-prisoners effort to lock in customers while the market emerges for the first time. This is golden age of rail stuff, there are massive path dependencies that will be very difficult to unwind.

Each will grow aggressively on every edge of their current surfaces, whether by implementation, partnership or purchase. Or all three, in varying orders, as they think works best. They will rapidly copy each other to try and prevent competitors gaining an unassailable lead in some segment.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. We have partnerships with Google and Microsoft.

Completely irrelevant; Google does not version-control their projects substantially with Git. They used Perforce for a long time and now I understand they use some internal, proprietary VCS.

My experience with AKS is mostly with the Azure REST API (building security and compliance tools around AKS). Unfortunately AKS isn't within scope of MSFTs BAA yet, so my focus has mostly been on other services like Cosmos and App Service.