5 ms·

Let's be honest here, the real reason is the crap that is Azure. GitHub was perfectly fine until then. They are just too bureaucratic to admit it. Worth readin

by neya 2mo ago

Let's be honest here, the real reason is the crap that is Azure. GitHub was perfectly fine until then. They are just too bureaucratic to admit it. Worth reading: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

TiredOfLife 2mo ago
So for the past 6 years the bad uptime was because of less than 12% of github being on azure?
- XzAeRosho 2mo ago
  Read the article. It's about Microsoft culture messing things up, not Azure themselves (though it may be a factor).
Medowar 2mo ago
actually, I think this time it is the other way around, Azure is more the solution than the problem. Github in the past ran on their own Hardware. That is fine, if your load is predictable and nto changing rapidly. However, the evolution of the past few months/years has shown, that the previous assumptions about growth are now outdated and scaling that capacity on your own metal is not that easy. Hardware has lead times of many weeks, especially in the current situation, datacenter capacity is even longer and more difficult, especially right now. Choosing not to deal with scaling the hardware is a valid choice in this situation. Yes, Azure is a bunch of servers held together with glue, duct tape and a lot of hope, but I think, the github hardware is not much better at the moment.
- neya 2mo ago
  Agreed on not hosting things yourself, but, I am not arguing against cloud hosting at all - just Azure. If they just came out and admitted it is a disaster and swallowed their pride and moved their services towards anything else at all - GCP, AWS or whatever else - I think their uptime would significantly improve. Of course, the fundamental problem here is the culture of the company itself. That's harder to fix.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Related: inside perspective on why it's a shitshow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
- inigyou 2mo ago
  A company suffering a spam attack would normally choose to deal with it by banning, and optionally prosecuting, the spammers.
randusername 2mo ago
I read the article and found it interesting. It's wild to me that when I think MS I think this article, Vista, Windows Phone, Zune, Metro, ads in the start menu, the pleated pants meme and so-on, but I have coworkers that are total evangelists for MS technologies and platforms. Clearly a lot of devs get value from the ecosystem.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  A lot of their platforms (not Azure) used to just work. Visual Studio and .NET were solid. The Windows NT line was pretty good for servers too (but different from Linux, and not as flexible by virtue of not being a bazaar). It was at Windows 8 era they turned it into shit, first by designing a UI for tablets (fine) and then putting that UI on desktops (wtf) and silently upgrading Windows 7 users without their consent.
  - theamk 1mo ago
    I remember running IIS and Apache side-by-side many years ago, and oh boy, was IIS a pain. Instead of a single config dir where you just deploy the configs and you are done, IIS settings were all over the registry. And don't forget component registration - a single, global registry per machine, used by IIS. Want to run staging and dev server on same machine? Tough luck. Random software installs can upgrade components and cause failures in completely unrelated failures...
klm127 2mo ago
The article doesn't mention any Azure outages, but a client had an Azure hosted container restart that day which caused problems due to configs being stored out of persistant storage.
markus_zhang 2mo ago
This looks familiar. Microsoft had similar experiences back in the early Word and Windows era. Too many bugs and too late to ship.

by neya 2mo ago

TiredOfLife 2mo ago

So for the past 6 years the bad uptime was because of less than 12% of github being on azure?

XzAeRosho 2mo ago
Read the article. It's about Microsoft culture messing things up, not Azure themselves (though it may be a factor).

Medowar 2mo ago

actually, I think this time it is the other way around, Azure is more the solution than the problem. Github in the past ran on their own Hardware. That is fine, if your load is predictable and nto changing rapidly. However, the evolution of the past few months/years has shown, that the previous assumptions about growth are now outdated and scaling that capacity on your own metal is not that easy. Hardware has lead times of many weeks, especially in the current situation, datacenter capacity is even longer and more difficult, especially right now. Choosing not to deal with scaling the hardware is a valid choice in this situation. Yes, Azure is a bunch of servers held together with glue, duct tape and a lot of hope, but I think, the github hardware is not much better at the moment.

neya 2mo ago
Agreed on not hosting things yourself, but, I am not arguing against cloud hosting at all - just Azure. If they just came out and admitted it is a disaster and swallowed their pride and moved their services towards anything else at all - GCP, AWS or whatever else - I think their uptime would significantly improve. Of course, the fundamental problem here is the culture of the company itself. That's harder to fix.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Related: inside perspective on why it's a shitshow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
inigyou 2mo ago
A company suffering a spam attack would normally choose to deal with it by banning, and optionally prosecuting, the spammers.

randusername 2mo ago

I read the article and found it interesting. It's wild to me that when I think MS I think this article, Vista, Windows Phone, Zune, Metro, ads in the start menu, the pleated pants meme and so-on, but I have coworkers that are total evangelists for MS technologies and platforms. Clearly a lot of devs get value from the ecosystem.

inigyou 2mo ago
A lot of their platforms (not Azure) used to just work. Visual Studio and .NET were solid. The Windows NT line was pretty good for servers too (but different from Linux, and not as flexible by virtue of not being a bazaar). It was at Windows 8 era they turned it into shit, first by designing a UI for tablets (fine) and then putting that UI on desktops (wtf) and silently upgrading Windows 7 users without their consent.
- theamk 1mo ago
  I remember running IIS and Apache side-by-side many years ago, and oh boy, was IIS a pain. Instead of a single config dir where you just deploy the configs and you are done, IIS settings were all over the registry. And don't forget component registration - a single, global registry per machine, used by IIS. Want to run staging and dev server on same machine? Tough luck. Random software installs can upgrade components and cause failures in completely unrelated failures...

klm127 2mo ago

The article doesn't mention any Azure outages, but a client had an Azure hosted container restart that day which caused problems due to configs being stored out of persistant storage.

markus_zhang 2mo ago

This looks familiar. Microsoft had similar experiences back in the early Word and Windows era. Too many bugs and too late to ship.