5 ms·

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll self-host a service." Now they have two problems.

by riffic 8y ago

Xylakant 8y ago
There’s variety of reasons to self-host. Having in internal git service can be nice if your connectivity is bad or spotty. An extreme case of that would be an airgapped network. Company policy might require that code does not leave the company network. You might legal be compelled to have full control over your code and where it goes (think: code under export restrictions). All of these people self-host and it solves a problem for them.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > There’s variety of reasons to self-host. Having in internal git service can be nice if your connectivity is bad or spotty. It's also hard to justify routing traffic through different continents if all you want to do is share a repository with someone sitting at a desk right next to you.
- dijit 8y ago
  I think it also comes down to the availability of service or even not agreeing about the future of your hosting provider. Prime example is obviously github, why would my company host on github if they never made profit? that service could go away any time or the service could change in a way that is a pain for my company to migrate. It swings for other things you'd host, if I use services on Azure (such as Thunderhead) and I'm developing games, well Microsoft also develops games. I put my IP at risk.
sigi45 8y ago
I was working on a project which uses github.com. I never knew before how often github is actually down. A business is often enough to spend that extra cash to be independend from a thirdparty. The risk of not being able to deploy anything, because github is down, is real.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  As is the risk of not being able deploy because your self hosted service is down.
  - miguelmota 8y ago
    Touché, although the main difference is that you have full control and transparency in the self-hosted system and you're not at the mercy of the third party's slow hotfix release process
    - mdekkers 8y ago
      Exactly. Also, very likely for self-hosted to have a lot less moving parts, so less likely to go down
  - rhizome 8y ago
    self-hosted git isn't going to go down in the complicated ways that running it for zillions of people does. a lot of things are relatively set-it-and-forget-it on the server side at the scale of most companies (let's BS it as <200ppl).
    - asdkhadsj 8y ago
      Yea, I feel like the "going down" metric is completely different. With Github, it's very possible that their seemingly frequent outages will cause problems for your deploys/etc. Yet, those problems will likely be short lived. On the flipside, your tiny instance of Git will likely be more stable than Github, but if it does go down you better hope you had proper backups, can spin those backups easily, etc. It might be down for days. It's unlikely to happen, but you can't just go get coffee. Though, with the right self hosted solution, it should be fairly trivial to deploy a new instance, restoring from backup/etc. The concern would be data loss, but even at that, it's Git so you're likely fine due to distributed backups.
      - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
In many cases it's very true, but really, if you can do away with some non-essential features, you'll be very happy with Gogs/Gitea.
AlexCoventry 8y ago
On the other hand, it's kind of amazing that startups are so blasé about trusting confidential source code to an external company.
- syshum 8y ago
  <<sarcasm>> The cloud is a magical place of perfect security and data preservation... Trusting in the clouds means everything will be ok... far better than I could ever achieve onprem, far better than admins with 20+ years experiance could do, only the cloud can provide for today's modern systems.... <</sarcasm>>
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Microsoft isn’t going to steal my source code. If I worry about all this shit I will never ship.
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    No one would have thought that way about Microsoft in the 90s.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll self-host a service." Now they have two problems.

by riffic 8y ago

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll self-host a service." Now they have two problems.

There’s variety of reasons to self-host. Having in internal git service can be nice if your connectivity is bad or spotty. An extreme case of that would be an airgapped network. Company policy might require that code does not leave the company network. You might legal be compelled to have full control over your code and where it goes (think: code under export restrictions). All of these people self-host and it solves a problem for them.

geezerjay 8y ago
> There’s variety of reasons to self-host. Having in internal git service can be nice if your connectivity is bad or spotty. It's also hard to justify routing traffic through different continents if all you want to do is share a repository with someone sitting at a desk right next to you.
dijit 8y ago
I think it also comes down to the availability of service or even not agreeing about the future of your hosting provider. Prime example is obviously github, why would my company host on github if they never made profit? that service could go away any time or the service could change in a way that is a pain for my company to migrate. It swings for other things you'd host, if I use services on Azure (such as Thunderhead) and I'm developing games, well Microsoft also develops games. I put my IP at risk.

sigi45 8y ago

I was working on a project which uses github.com. I never knew before how often github is actually down. A business is often enough to spend that extra cash to be independend from a thirdparty. The risk of not being able to deploy anything, because github is down, is real.

jjeaff 8y ago
As is the risk of not being able deploy because your self hosted service is down.
- miguelmota 8y ago
  Touché, although the main difference is that you have full control and transparency in the self-hosted system and you're not at the mercy of the third party's slow hotfix release process
  - mdekkers 8y ago
    Exactly. Also, very likely for self-hosted to have a lot less moving parts, so less likely to go down
- rhizome 8y ago
  self-hosted git isn't going to go down in the complicated ways that running it for zillions of people does. a lot of things are relatively set-it-and-forget-it on the server side at the scale of most companies (let's BS it as <200ppl).
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    Yea, I feel like the "going down" metric is completely different. With Github, it's very possible that their seemingly frequent outages will cause problems for your deploys/etc. Yet, those problems will likely be short lived. On the flipside, your tiny instance of Git will likely be more stable than Github, but if it does go down you better hope you had proper backups, can spin those backups easily, etc. It might be down for days. It's unlikely to happen, but you can't just go get coffee. Though, with the right self hosted solution, it should be fairly trivial to deploy a new instance, restoring from backup/etc. The concern would be data loss, but even at that, it's Git so you're likely fine due to distributed backups.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

In many cases it's very true, but really, if you can do away with some non-essential features, you'll be very happy with Gogs/Gitea.

AlexCoventry 8y ago

On the other hand, it's kind of amazing that startups are so blasé about trusting confidential source code to an external company.

syshum 8y ago
<<sarcasm>> The cloud is a magical place of perfect security and data preservation... Trusting in the clouds means everything will be ok... far better than I could ever achieve onprem, far better than admins with 20+ years experiance could do, only the cloud can provide for today's modern systems.... <</sarcasm>>
scarejunba 8y ago
Microsoft isn’t going to steal my source code. If I worry about all this shit I will never ship.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  No one would have thought that way about Microsoft in the 90s.