GitHub down • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub down

#81

Post by nik736 » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

rplnt wrote: post #74

While I kind of hate Atlassian products (bloated, horrible APIs), and Bitbucket has some serious UX problems (Find), it's still better than have your repos be offline. There's not much that can go wrong on a single instance with a local database. Have a failover in case the HW fails and you are good to go, and it's faster. The pricing is not great, but perhaps that's something GitLab can solve. But being hip and bein…

Did you actually notice that BitBucket was down yesterday for several hours and still has huge issues?

Re: GitHub down

#82

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

Back when hurricane Sandy took out my employer's upstream Mercurial server for several days straight, I was pretty chuffed to be able to tell my boss, "You know how we migrated to a new source control system a couple months ago? Well, thanks to that, we can keep working pretty much uninterrupted. We should double check that XXX is getting frequent offsite backups, though."

My current company uses a self-hosted option, so this doesn't affect me. But I can't help but think that this time it's different, and we'd be hosed. The git part would still work without too much hassle, but we are heavily dependent on a bunch of additional things that GitHub offers, such as the pull request interface. That's slightly worrisome, I suppose.

All that said, I want to steer clear of knee-jerk assuming, "We don't have this problem b/c we self-host." There's a sickening sense of not really being in control of your own fate when a cloud provider goes down, but, realistically, I wouldn't be the person in charge of getting one of our self-hosted services back up, either. What really matters is % downtime. My experience has been that, compared to many in-house IT departments, folks like GitHub are generally very good at keeping the lights on.

Re: GitHub down

#83

Post by dehef » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

nezza-_- wrote: post #2

We centralized a decentralized version control system.

No way to build my npm dependencies. So the day github would really crash/lost some files, the package decency system thing is dead. That is a very exciting scenario... as exiting as if google would forget to renew google.com and would have no legal right to get it back.

Re: GitHub down

#84

Post by jcelerier » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

dom96 wrote: post #33

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Issues and other GH infrastructure is arguably a bigger problem. That metadata is locked within the Github silo with no easy way to export it elsewhere.

This is indeed the crux of the problem. I've been thinking about this a lot (and I wouldn't be surprised if it exists already), we need a decentralised method of storing issues and other things inside our git repos.

it's an issue for issues, but wikis at least are also git repos : https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

Re: GitHub down

#85

Post by zbentley » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #66

coding123 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just did.

No. We need a proper whitepaper explaining how to make GitHub decentralized with blockchain tokenization using distributed smart-contracts. ;) (Did I forget any important buzzword?)

Did I forget any important buzzword?

Nah, but you could always add some Serverless and Lambada to make it more Agile.

Re: GitHub down

#86

Post by piaste » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

bobcallme wrote: post #64

This is why it pays to host your own source repositories. It is kind of shocking that many people with the skills and means are too cheap to host their own. I personally could not risk github deleting my repositories or (in this case) going down for any length of time.

Though in an alternate universe where somebody's self-hosted server went down in flames (possibly literally), one could just as easily say:

This is why it pays to have your own source repositories in the cloud. It is kind of shocking that many people with the awareness and means are too cheap to pay for a GitHub private repo. I personally could not risk a careless sysadmin deleting my repositories or (in this case) going down for any length of time.

The obvious answer is to have both, but smooth synchronization isn't always easy or even available.

Re: GitHub down

#87

Post by swiley » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

bobcallme wrote: post #64

This is why it pays to host your own source repositories. It is kind of shocking that many people with the skills and means are too cheap to host their own. I personally could not risk github deleting my repositories or (in this case) going down for any length of time.

Eh, self hosting stuff is a hassle and I'd be willing to bet most people are more concerned about the time/reliability than the cost.

I use gh pages for the static parts of my own site even though I have a web server (which I use for quickly sharing files and whatnot) because GitHub is less likely to leave things broken than I am.

Re: GitHub down

#88

Post by dx034 » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

rplnt wrote: post #74

While I kind of hate Atlassian products (bloated, horrible APIs), and Bitbucket has some serious UX problems (Find), it's still better than have your repos be offline. There's not much that can go wrong on a single instance with a local database. Have a failover in case the HW fails and you are good to go, and it's faster. The pricing is not great, but perhaps that's something GitLab can solve. But being hip and bein…

Isn't Gitlab at least as hip as Github?

Re: GitHub down

#89

Post by lykr0n » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

dorfsmay wrote: post #70

runeks wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying that if I put up my own Git server (for a fee), it’s likely to have better uptime statistics than GitHub? I can’t push changes to the decentralized Git protocol, only to a (centralized) server instance.

Setting up your own instance of a bit server is free. If you want issues, CI etc... Then you need a local version of github which you will pay for.

Or GitLab. That's free and easy to self host.

Re: GitHub down

#90

Post by rplnt » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #50

vuldin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that the features we use along with git, many of which github provides, are not decentralized. The true but tired argument that git will continue to work when github goes down totally ignores this issue. Yes, git still works. But we don't just rely on the features git provides.

So this isn't really anything to do with Git then is it? So why joke we centralised Git when really we centralised a bunch of other things that are not really anything to do with Git?

It's also the issue with git, if it goes down and you don't update your local clones ~daily (or as other mentioned don't have system in place that would allow you to update somewhat locally).