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Boomer opinion but trusting third parties to be critical infrastructure, especially with no SLA in sight, will always end in tears. "The cloud" is very convenie

Boomer opinion but trusting third parties to be critical infrastructure, especially with no SLA in sight, will always end in tears. "The cloud" is very convenient, but its providers will never care about your infrastructure or your customers as much as you will.

BryanBeshore 2mo ago
Truly a boomer opinion. Respect!
Maxion 2mo ago
Older millennial here and I agree. If you rely on Github you should at least be have your processes such that you can work around it.
- whynotmaybe 2mo ago
  That's the reason why my build agent is self-hosted
raffael_de 2mo ago
+1 (as a millenial) ... especially given that setting up a git server for non-OSS company code isn't too much of a challenge really. also, no need to self-denigrate this reasonable opinion in preemptive obedience.
- otterley 2mo ago
  GitHub is way more than just a git repo host. It manages code reviews, merge (pull) requests, and has an entire CI/CD workflow engine in it. Replicating all that is a challenge that most orgs are not up to.
SideburnsOfDoom 2mo ago
People are already saying things like "We need a plan B in case we urgently need to deploy a fix to production, and GitHub Actions is unavailable again". But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house. And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.
TZubiri 2mo ago
Boomer who has never had a business? Depending on third party suppliers is business as usual.
- pigeons 2mo ago
  Well it's not business at all today!
  - TZubiri 2mo ago
    Arguably, git is decentralized, so contingency plans, like working with local and server repos, should still work.
poisonborz 2mo ago
How did this become a boomer opinion? It is proved truth thousand times a day. Not that you shouldn't use third parties - but in this industry you can shrink this exposure to the minimum, and have plan B for anything else.
aenis 2mo ago
Boomer here as well, but I'd add that trusting your own org for critical infra usually also ends in tears. Most everything in IT involves failure, including in well designed systems designed by great engineers. I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.
- 6031769 2mo ago
  At this point github is barely managing one nine.
  - aenis 2mo ago
    True. I'd be very annoyed if I had anything mission critical on github. While we have everything in the cloud, we do actually self-host that part.
otterley 2mo ago
3P-maintained infrastructure is what makes civilizations work efficiently. We're not all digging our own wells, generating our own electricity, and burning or burying our own garbage.
- kalaksi 2mo ago
  You are still supposed to be prepared for outages.
  - otterley 2mo ago
    Agreed. So is the issue really then that people were inadequately prepared with backup plans and now they're suffering the consequences? It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.
ethagnawl 2mo ago
You're right. However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...
swills 2mo ago
Agree. But also, it's affecting everyone equally, whether they have a free personal account or are part of an enterprise account with SLA. Understanding the practical value of an SLA is an interesting problem.
advisedwang 2mo ago
Eeh, you always rely on someone else's infrastructure. Even if you are off cloud entirely and own your own datacenter, you still need peering/transit. You still need power (or at least fuel). You can't avoid depending on a DNS infrastructure. Github does have an SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla. But like virtually all SLAs, it's really just a token gesture. I have never seen an SLA that pays the losses you suffer due to the outage.

BryanBeshore 2mo ago

Truly a boomer opinion. Respect!

Maxion 2mo ago

Older millennial here and I agree. If you rely on Github you should at least be have your processes such that you can work around it.

whynotmaybe 2mo ago
That's the reason why my build agent is self-hosted

raffael_de 2mo ago

+1 (as a millenial) ... especially given that setting up a git server for non-OSS company code isn't too much of a challenge really. also, no need to self-denigrate this reasonable opinion in preemptive obedience.

otterley 2mo ago
GitHub is way more than just a git repo host. It manages code reviews, merge (pull) requests, and has an entire CI/CD workflow engine in it. Replicating all that is a challenge that most orgs are not up to.

SideburnsOfDoom 2mo ago

People are already saying things like "We need a plan B in case we urgently need to deploy a fix to production, and GitHub Actions is unavailable again". But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house. And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.

TZubiri 2mo ago

Boomer who has never had a business? Depending on third party suppliers is business as usual.

pigeons 2mo ago
Well it's not business at all today!
- TZubiri 2mo ago
  Arguably, git is decentralized, so contingency plans, like working with local and server repos, should still work.

poisonborz 2mo ago

How did this become a boomer opinion? It is proved truth thousand times a day. Not that you shouldn't use third parties - but in this industry you can shrink this exposure to the minimum, and have plan B for anything else.

aenis 2mo ago

Boomer here as well, but I'd add that trusting your own org for critical infra usually also ends in tears. Most everything in IT involves failure, including in well designed systems designed by great engineers. I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.

6031769 2mo ago
At this point github is barely managing one nine.
- aenis 2mo ago
  True. I'd be very annoyed if I had anything mission critical on github. While we have everything in the cloud, we do actually self-host that part.

otterley 2mo ago

3P-maintained infrastructure is what makes civilizations work efficiently. We're not all digging our own wells, generating our own electricity, and burning or burying our own garbage.

kalaksi 2mo ago
You are still supposed to be prepared for outages.
- otterley 2mo ago
  Agreed. So is the issue really then that people were inadequately prepared with backup plans and now they're suffering the consequences? It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.

ethagnawl 2mo ago

You're right. However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...

swills 2mo ago

Agree. But also, it's affecting everyone equally, whether they have a free personal account or are part of an enterprise account with SLA. Understanding the practical value of an SLA is an interesting problem.

advisedwang 2mo ago

Eeh, you always rely on someone else's infrastructure. Even if you are off cloud entirely and own your own datacenter, you still need peering/transit. You still need power (or at least fuel). You can't avoid depending on a DNS infrastructure. Github does have an SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla. But like virtually all SLAs, it's really just a token gesture. I have never seen an SLA that pays the losses you suffer due to the outage.