5 ms·

How stupid are we all to rely so heavily on this single point of failure which is so unstable? I cannot count the times it's been down or had temporary instabi

How stupid are we all to rely so heavily on this single point of failure which is so unstable? I cannot count the times it's been down or had temporary instability. It's easy to draw the conclusion that it happened after MS took over, but I honestly no longer remember how it was before.

rvz 3y ago
It is every month, something in Github (especially GitHub Actions) goes down. The last time this happened was less than a month ago. [0] [1] At this point, It is so unreliable that if I was to bet anyone that something in GitHub would go down next month, I will win each time. Guaranteed. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359212 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35325709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35325709
acatton 3y ago
It was worse before MS took over. But their status page displayed live metrics, it was more transparent, so people were less frustrated. As opposed to now, where the status dashboard is updated by a human. IMHO, the issue is not the unstability. I'm really concerned that so much of our software infrastructure relies on one single service owned by Microsoft.
- gladiatr72 3y ago
  You seem to have had a different pre ms github experience than I. Github didn't really embrace the Suck til it foisted Actions on the world. Gitlab had a lot of downtime for a few years (shockingly mostly to do with CI related mechs).
- melx 3y ago
  It was worse but I'm not sure people were less frustrated. Some outages back in 2012-2014 periods were so long that our dev team went for few pints to nearest pub.
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    Is reliability always a good thing? I could do with a few myself.
- w4ffl35 3y ago
  There are many github alternatives. Are you saying you'd prefer your ci/cd pipeline to be scattered across services, or that you'd like a github backup if it goes down? You could probably mirror your code on gitlab and host a Jenkins server on aws instead of relying a single point of failure. Personally I'll take the single point of failure downtime in exchange for lower maintenence
  - acatton 3y ago
    There are many github alternatives, sure. But sofware is still centralized on github. I double dare you to "pip install", "cargo build", or "go get" without hitting github. Your project can be hosted on repo.or.cz, gitlab or codeberg, you will still need github to build it locally, or to build it on your self hosted CI. The solution is P2P git hosting. Dare I say magnet-links git repo urls?
    - w4ffl35 3y ago
      Ok this makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
- handsclean 3y ago
  I remember it very differently. I remember remarkably good reliability, to the point that HN would regularly laud GitHub for “doing it right” by investing heavily in infrastructure and reliability and being “boring”. I remember some GitHub leader or founder affirming that sentiment, that they’ve always felt their value proposition depends greatly on reliability. I remember it didn’t change as soon as MS took over, but a year or so later, and that for the first few years of diminishing reliability people would always point fingers at the MS takeover.
vbezhenar 3y ago
Because it is free.
- s_dev 3y ago
  It has a free tier but GitHub has plenty of paying customers and is very much a monetized service.
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    And thankfully not monetised like SourceForge did.
Hamuko 3y ago
We're a primarily GitLab shop so I have a biased view, but I haven't noticed that much disruption from GitHub's instability. We do get a lot of packages from GitHub too and I haven't noticed a ton of CI jobs failing or anything.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  > We do get a lot of packages from GitHub too Do you get them directly from GH or from a local mirror of the GH repo? The latter makes you immune to GH hiccups at the cost of some disk space (assuming you run GL yourself).
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    Should be directly from GitHub except with some caching involved (like our Docker build cache). (We don't run GitLab ourselves.)

rvz 3y ago

It is every month, something in Github (especially GitHub Actions) goes down. The last time this happened was less than a month ago. [0] [1] At this point, It is so unreliable that if I was to bet anyone that something in GitHub would go down next month, I will win each time. Guaranteed. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359212 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35325709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35325709

acatton 3y ago

It was worse before MS took over. But their status page displayed live metrics, it was more transparent, so people were less frustrated. As opposed to now, where the status dashboard is updated by a human. IMHO, the issue is not the unstability. I'm really concerned that so much of our software infrastructure relies on one single service owned by Microsoft.

gladiatr72 3y ago
You seem to have had a different pre ms github experience than I. Github didn't really embrace the Suck til it foisted Actions on the world. Gitlab had a lot of downtime for a few years (shockingly mostly to do with CI related mechs).
melx 3y ago
It was worse but I'm not sure people were less frustrated. Some outages back in 2012-2014 periods were so long that our dev team went for few pints to nearest pub.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  Is reliability always a good thing? I could do with a few myself.
w4ffl35 3y ago
There are many github alternatives. Are you saying you'd prefer your ci/cd pipeline to be scattered across services, or that you'd like a github backup if it goes down? You could probably mirror your code on gitlab and host a Jenkins server on aws instead of relying a single point of failure. Personally I'll take the single point of failure downtime in exchange for lower maintenence
- acatton 3y ago
  There are many github alternatives, sure. But sofware is still centralized on github. I double dare you to "pip install", "cargo build", or "go get" without hitting github. Your project can be hosted on repo.or.cz, gitlab or codeberg, you will still need github to build it locally, or to build it on your self hosted CI. The solution is P2P git hosting. Dare I say magnet-links git repo urls?
  - w4ffl35 3y ago
    Ok this makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
handsclean 3y ago
I remember it very differently. I remember remarkably good reliability, to the point that HN would regularly laud GitHub for “doing it right” by investing heavily in infrastructure and reliability and being “boring”. I remember some GitHub leader or founder affirming that sentiment, that they’ve always felt their value proposition depends greatly on reliability. I remember it didn’t change as soon as MS took over, but a year or so later, and that for the first few years of diminishing reliability people would always point fingers at the MS takeover.

vbezhenar 3y ago

Because it is free.

s_dev 3y ago
It has a free tier but GitHub has plenty of paying customers and is very much a monetized service.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  And thankfully not monetised like SourceForge did.

Hamuko 3y ago

We're a primarily GitLab shop so I have a biased view, but I haven't noticed that much disruption from GitHub's instability. We do get a lot of packages from GitHub too and I haven't noticed a ton of CI jobs failing or anything.

the_third_wave 3y ago
> We do get a lot of packages from GitHub too Do you get them directly from GH or from a local mirror of the GH repo? The latter makes you immune to GH hiccups at the cost of some disk space (assuming you run GL yourself).
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Should be directly from GitHub except with some caching involved (like our Docker build cache). (We don't run GitLab ourselves.)