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> You have relinquished so much control, why be surprised if that stares you back in the face? We live in a market-based economy with highly specialized divisi

by whack 6y ago

> You have relinquished so much control, why be surprised if that stares you back in the face? We live in a market-based economy with highly specialized division of labor. The idea of "keeping control" of all our necessities and dependencies, is an archaic one. The system generally works, because we create sensible laws that foster trust, vet for partners who are trustworthy, and name-and-shame entities that violate our trust. If you're a behemoth the size of FANG or a nation-state, maybe it is worth the effort needed to insulate yourself against these black-swan scenarios. But for a startup or small-medium-business that no one has heard of? That just sounds like bad prioritization. All of which is to say... we should absolutely be surprised when a vendor like GitHub blocks an entire company because of an employee logging in from Iran while on travel. And this surprise, and the resulting name-and-shame, is what keeps the wheels of our economy turning.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
There is plenty of solutions that are keeping the data in-house. Or allow for easy exporting/importing (github is not too bad in this regard though). None of these solutions go against the "highly specialized division of labor". This is a question about what kind of solutions we build, not how labor is divided or not.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  None of those solutions are as plug-and-play as hosted GitHub/GitLab, nor without maintenance costs. Those add up to quite a bit of money too, usually making hosted the more cost effective option. Although this can happen, the truth is 99% of the time it doesn't, so most companies continue to use hosted solutions as it is far more likely they go bankrupt due to poor business rather than US embargos.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 6y ago
A customer of mine use GitHub, Travis and Slack. If GitHub is offline we can still setup a git server somewhere. I could offer my own for a quick startup. Mailing patches to each other, Linux kernel style, is not a viable backup plan. The cultural gap is too wide. If Travis is down we can run tests locally. We build the deployment artifact on one of our servers. If that one is down probably our production server is down too. If Slack is down, ah, I was on vacation yesterday. I guess the fastest backup for us would be WhatsApp Web.
- u801e 6y ago
  When we ran services like this in-house, I don't really recall a time where any of them failed. Now that we have a 3rd party run those services, it's easy to recall multiple instances where one or more of them were down for some reason.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Don't be surprised when the "name-and-shame" doesn't work anymore.
- darod 6y ago
  So true. It already doesn't work in politics. Only a matter of time till it's the same with big companies
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I think it's the opposite. When you're FANG or a nation state preparedness doesn't matter. You have strings to pull to get fair treatment. If you're a small guy you get screwed and have no practical means of recourse. The little people are the ones who need to care about this kind of stuff.
oytis 6y ago
Spinning up your own git server is not a huge effort though even for a startup. As to what is archaic - I believe a point can be made that the division of labor thing can suit poorly our brave new cloud software world. You can't just buy things (or software) from others, and completely own them. If you are outsourcing some part of your business to others, you also lose a lot of sovereignty that is crucial to stay flexible and move fast. Apart from the fact that all these solutions are bundled with analytics that will play against you as soon as your supplier wants to become your competitor. And as I said before, staying in control is actually not that hard as soon as you know what you are doing, and can be a huge competitive advantage.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Spinning up your own git server is not a huge effort though even for a startup. At a previous job we self hosted Git and it worked fairly well. At my current job we use GitHub and while we could migrate away, it would hurt. Personally, I think GitHub's value is more about the fact that it integrates so well with so many other services. Without GitHub we would lose: - Most of our PR/ Code Review flow - Integration with Pivotal (our ticketing/ story system) - Integration with our Travis server for CI - Integration with our hosting service for automated deployment. All of this stuff can be done independent of GitHub, but most of it takes a lot of time and effort you could be spent delivering the product you are trying to ship. You also lose a lot of flexibility.
  - oytis 6y ago
    Yes, integrations are a real value. I've seen a lot of it working in self-hosted Gerrit, but there was a dedicated maintainer for the project who among other things implemented these.
hospadar 6y ago
I very much agree - the likelihood that your business will die because it just isn't great at selling stuff seems much greater than the likelihood that it will die because you get really unlucky with a service provider. THAT SAID, it seems worth it for even a really tiny company to spend a half hour thinking about "what would I do if github (or AWS or google or the app store or whatever) cut me off?" Probably in a lot of cases the answer is "call them and beg forgiveness" (i.e. if it's AWS), but for something like github it seems like "switch to gitlab" (or "deploy git server" or anything else) is a pretty easy move.

by whack 6y ago

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

There is plenty of solutions that are keeping the data in-house. Or allow for easy exporting/importing (github is not too bad in this regard though). None of these solutions go against the "highly specialized division of labor". This is a question about what kind of solutions we build, not how labor is divided or not.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
None of those solutions are as plug-and-play as hosted GitHub/GitLab, nor without maintenance costs. Those add up to quite a bit of money too, usually making hosted the more cost effective option. Although this can happen, the truth is 99% of the time it doesn't, so most companies continue to use hosted solutions as it is far more likely they go bankrupt due to poor business rather than US embargos.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pmontra 6y ago

A customer of mine use GitHub, Travis and Slack. If GitHub is offline we can still setup a git server somewhere. I could offer my own for a quick startup. Mailing patches to each other, Linux kernel style, is not a viable backup plan. The cultural gap is too wide. If Travis is down we can run tests locally. We build the deployment artifact on one of our servers. If that one is down probably our production server is down too. If Slack is down, ah, I was on vacation yesterday. I guess the fastest backup for us would be WhatsApp Web.

u801e 6y ago
When we ran services like this in-house, I don't really recall a time where any of them failed. Now that we have a 3rd party run those services, it's easy to recall multiple instances where one or more of them were down for some reason.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

Don't be surprised when the "name-and-shame" doesn't work anymore.

darod 6y ago
So true. It already doesn't work in politics. Only a matter of time till it's the same with big companies

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

I think it's the opposite. When you're FANG or a nation state preparedness doesn't matter. You have strings to pull to get fair treatment. If you're a small guy you get screwed and have no practical means of recourse. The little people are the ones who need to care about this kind of stuff.

oytis 6y ago

Spinning up your own git server is not a huge effort though even for a startup. As to what is archaic - I believe a point can be made that the division of labor thing can suit poorly our brave new cloud software world. You can't just buy things (or software) from others, and completely own them. If you are outsourcing some part of your business to others, you also lose a lot of sovereignty that is crucial to stay flexible and move fast. Apart from the fact that all these solutions are bundled with analytics that will play against you as soon as your supplier wants to become your competitor. And as I said before, staying in control is actually not that hard as soon as you know what you are doing, and can be a huge competitive advantage.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Spinning up your own git server is not a huge effort though even for a startup. At a previous job we self hosted Git and it worked fairly well. At my current job we use GitHub and while we could migrate away, it would hurt. Personally, I think GitHub's value is more about the fact that it integrates so well with so many other services. Without GitHub we would lose: - Most of our PR/ Code Review flow - Integration with Pivotal (our ticketing/ story system) - Integration with our Travis server for CI - Integration with our hosting service for automated deployment. All of this stuff can be done independent of GitHub, but most of it takes a lot of time and effort you could be spent delivering the product you are trying to ship. You also lose a lot of flexibility.
- oytis 6y ago
  Yes, integrations are a real value. I've seen a lot of it working in self-hosted Gerrit, but there was a dedicated maintainer for the project who among other things implemented these.

hospadar 6y ago

I very much agree - the likelihood that your business will die because it just isn't great at selling stuff seems much greater than the likelihood that it will die because you get really unlucky with a service provider. THAT SAID, it seems worth it for even a really tiny company to spend a half hour thinking about "what would I do if github (or AWS or google or the app store or whatever) cut me off?" Probably in a lot of cases the answer is "call them and beg forgiveness" (i.e. if it's AWS), but for something like github it seems like "switch to gitlab" (or "deploy git server" or anything else) is a pretty easy move.