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Microsoft turns to AWS as GitHub faces AI capacity crunch
- locusofself 4mo agoI have to imagine this is very temporary.
- fortran77 4mo agoStill, it’s mostly text. You’d think it wouldn’t be that much of an issue.
- csbrooks 4mo ago> commits were on pace to hit 14 billion in 2026, up from 1 billion in 2025 So AI means 14x the checkins? That's not 14x features completed, but still... wow.
- nomel 4mo agoSeems very reasonable, from my use. I commit much more often, as checkpoints, with branch rules that prevent force pushes/deletions, so the agents can't delete anything. And, suspect MS is only counting commits, and not the eventual squashes to one commit.
- larusso 4mo agoAnd every checking runs a whole CI run? We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state. We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons. We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.
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- nomel 4mo agoNope. You can configure CI to not run for every commit of every branch (seems insane to have full CI for every commit, unless you don't allow your devs to push until done with something, which also seems insane).
- N_Lens 4mo agoAI has 100x'd our productive capacity such that we're moving at unforeseen speeds at digging holes and refilling them!
- shimman 4mo agoThis is too generous, they aren't even filling in the holes.
- californical 4mo agoIt’s filling in a lot of the holes, but it’s putting a very convincing paper cover over the ones it misses. So it’s very hard to find the ones it didn’t fill, better hope your most valuable customers don’t walk over the paper ones!
- BobbyTables2 4mo agoIs that even a lot? Spread over a year, roughly estimating a generous 4 kbytes of data per commit, comes out to a throughput of a little under 2 MB/s. Of course, it isn’t spread out uniformly and there is also a lot of hashing and other things going on. Maybe pulls and clones drive more I/O ?
- 3eb7988a1663 4mo agoI suspect there is a cacophony of work that happens when a commit hits the server. That request needs to get replicated, git repositories need to be repacked, pull requests need to calculate diffs, CI jobs need to execute, on and on. That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.
- jamesfinlayson 4mo agoRecalculate percentage of each language in the repo, recalculate top contributors, recalculate the stats for the committer's profile etc etc.
- BobbyTables2 4mo agoScalable algorithms and data structures have existed for decades. Even if they had 10 billion users with 10 billion repositories it shouldn’t be a big deal on a home PC.
- 3eb7988a1663 4mo agoI am surprised it is that low. The Bun Zig-to-Rust AI port was 6755 commits in like two weeks. If you make 10 commits per working day, that is 2500/year. While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.
- Aperocky 4mo agoThat commit count alone should not become any problem for infrastructure, even for Azure. They probably developed some ungodly mess with actions that did not/could not translate very well on Azure infrastructure.
- kcartlidge 4mo agoWith agentic stuff there's also a large amount of commits which are not code. For instance with OpenClaw and similar, they often simulate institutional and short term memory with markdown files in folders. Other tooling that runs companies using agents as staff, for example, do the same - but also with files for inputs, outcomes, handovers etc. All of this means a lot of extra churn as these kinds of files can be changing with every interaction not just every traditional commit point.
- ashishb 4mo agoI wonder what percentage of pull requests are cascading updates caused by dependabot and multiple code review bots reviewing those PRs. My belief is it is likely 1% or more. And likely coming in as an avalanche.
- jf 4mo agoI helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner. One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.
- jiggawatts 4mo agoWait, are you trying to tell me that 1/100th the speed at 50x the price isn’t a great offer for Microsoft’s customers!? Heathen lies! Oh, wait… we have to use it? Oh, that’s terrible…
- winrid 4mo agoI had a feeling this was all related to someone trying to run a database on networked disks. every fucking time
- not_kurt_godel 4mo agoSaving this for the next time someone trots out the "All cloud providers are the same" line
- dr_kretyn 4mo agoIf they pull out "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." on AWS then I'm going to be impressed beyond mad.
- citizenpaul 4mo agoMy favorite part of this is that MS is just bending over to take it lest the gods scorn their "free" training data temple.
- pjmlp 4mo agoSo this is an Hotmail moment?
- UnlockedSecrets 4mo agoIs this in reference to something that should be linked for those not alive or in the know at the time?
- kqgnkqgn 4mo agoI'm not sure if it was entirely true, but there are stories that after Microsoft bought Hotmail in the mid-90's, they quickly attempted to move them from FreeBSD (?) to Windows NT. But it failed miserably, and they went back to the original stack for another ~decade.
- jeffrallen 4mo agoYes. This happened.
- enigmo 4mo agothe FreeBSD migration didn’t take that long - iirc this was the frontend migration to an IIS ISAPI. the Solaris bits (storage and routing tables) took far longer - and again iirc the frontend had been rewritten in C# before all the Sun hardware had been decommissioned.
- rickette 4mo agoEasy to criticize this, but I rather see GitHub survive than fail under its own success. So thanks for acting on this MS!
- theojulienne 4mo agoThey were originally on their own datacenters + huge amounts of burst and ancillary stuff in AWS, the internal push to move away from "the competitor's cloud" after the acquisition was huge and entirely stupid. I'm ex-GitHub and was one of the annoying people constantly saying GitHub should only move where it was provably the best option for GitHub - the third best major cloud provider is likely never it on merits alone. If this story is true, it's good that they finally realised that GitHub's performance and availability mattered more than using Microsoft's products. It would mean someone finally came to their senses rather than forcing a wholesale push to Azure - but I bet they still want to have it both ways even if they concede some AWS now.
- jeffrallen 4mo agoIn the early 2000's they did the same dumb thing to WebTV: forced a move from Solaris to Windows, that completely wrecked the engineering team's velocity and motivation.
- collabs 4mo agoThey did the same thing to Hotmail as well. It was fine running on FreeBSD/Solaris. Microsoft didn't need to switch to windows for no good reason.
- rickette 4mo agoThanks for the insight, changes my perspective.
- inopinatus 4mo agoIf there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand. This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.
- TurdF3rguson 4mo agoI wonder how that translates to Blue Origin and how they managed to be so completely outclassed by SpaceX.
- anonymousiam 4mo agoSpaceX had been doing their thing for a while before Blue Origin got started. It seems to me that Bezos never wanted to try to catch up with Musk. His approach is not "move fast and break things", but instead more old-school (try to get things done right as best you can, and only test when necessary). Despite the gap, Bezos is slowly gaining ground. He's flying passengers and he's winning government contracts. The USG likes to have a second source for everything, and they're fed up with Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed, ULA (who have all absorbed some of the other space and launch startups). So Bezos is capitalizing on the US government's desire to have real competition, and a second source for launch (besides ULA). There's also this funny outcome from the SpaceX IPO: https://x.com/ICannot_Enough/status/2065449141946253390 https://x.com/ICannot_Enough/status/2065449141946253390
- hvb2 4mo ago> Despite the gap, Bezos is slowly gaining ground. He's flying passengers and he's winning government contracts. He's flying passengers? They stopped new shepherd and that was suborbital to begin with. You can't compare the 2 at all. Getting people to orbit is much much harder than 'a hop'. On the government contracts, yes they did get some. Some through lawyers though and they still have to show that they can actually deliver. SpaceX has to deliver on HLS as well, but the ISS has one American ride up and that's crew dragon.
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- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoInteresting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon. (Probably just tea leaves. If you wanted to be extra spicy, you’d note that Jassy just threw Fable under the bus.)
- CSMastermind 4mo agoDoesn't most of Anthropics revenue come from AWS still?
- shrubble 4mo agoAWS gets a lot of money from both the unclassified government work they do plus the more secretive work. If they were required to disclose as part of that, they would disclose - why put all those contracts at risk?
- VirusNewbie 4mo ago>Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon. Anthropic has been very strategic about playing all the big cloud providers off each other. They're also in desperate need of inference, and I don't think AWS has the capacity to scale up as fast as they want. AWS may also be trying to 'force' them to use Graviton, and I don't think Anthropic is as big of a fan.
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- kuschku 4mo agoWhat kind of vibecoded website is this? - the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer - the title tag doesn't seem to work properly (just shows the URL in the tab title, on Chrome and Firefox) - 2007-style keyword stuffing in meta keywords - the entire page is client-side react with a completely empty body? The agency that built it even proudly states on their website that they vibecode everything: https://gradientnoise.com/ https://gradientnoise.com/ EDIT: Turns out, the articles are mostly AI-generated as well? https://blog.ryanmerket.com/how-i-built-runtimewire-a-one-person-mostly-autonomous-ai-newsroom-994319fd76da https://blog.ryanmerket.com/how-i-built-runtimewire-a-one-pe... > And this is the gate that lets me sleep: a story only auto-publishes if the editor says PASS, the risk score is comfortably low, a hero image exists, and it has at least one source
- Walf 4mo agoBut the hero image is an AI homage to cute paper-craft, to remind us that people cannot or will not put in that level of effort any more, so it's okay!
- ilreb 4mo ago[flagged]
- MallocVoidstar 4mo agoDo you think everyone on HN sees every submission?
- palmotea 4mo ago> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440448 this had >300 upvotes with a link from runtimewire.com and you didn't even criticize it then. why now? There are so many bad and false assumptions baked into your short comment, it's hard to begin. For instance: in what world does someone have provide justification for their critique of an AI-written website, because they didn't happen to respond to some previous post?
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- amazingman 4mo agoNature abhors a monoculture.
- alibarber 4mo agoI was recently looking at a Python project to learn a bit about RTC and just generally hack around and try something out. https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc It was fun and I found the code nice and helpful. I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.
- N_Lens 4mo agoAfter a decade and hundreds of billions in spend, Microsoft has finally upgraded from Azure to AWS.
- sreekanth850 4mo agoSoon we can see limits on free github account. I guess that is clean way to end this AI slop fiasco.
- aykutseker 4mo agoGitHub used to get code after someone had thought about it. Agents are starting to use it while they think.
- daft_pink 4mo agoThey should have made it work with hono workers so they could scale to infinity with free edge deployment on cloudflare - Senior JS Developer (Kai Lentit)
- fuckinpuppers 4mo agoAzure is hot garbage