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GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

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Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#21

Post by jddj »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #7

Alright, cue the usual: Monoculture bad Microsoft bad Git is distributed but all the things around it that we really need aren't You can set up git to push to multiple remotes automatically Nobody is actually using git in distributed mode Did I forget anything?

The conspiracy about how much infrastructure has been going down this summer, and how it's probably interns / a state actor / people pushing to get things in production before performance reviews / people being on holiday / that we've reached peak complexity.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#22

Post by dspillett »

smartmic wrote: post #10

Git is designed as distributed VCS, so an outage of a centralized server should not matter too much. So far, the theory. Using Github excessively is the way back to centralization, nowadays handing control over to Microsoft. Everybody who is concerned (probably not too much) should have a look into alternatives.

Git itself is decentralised, but many (most? (all?)) of the workflows people build around it are not.

Individuals and teams who already have what they need in the local repos can continue to work through an outage of the VCS part of github, but at the points where they need to collaborate (merging each other's changes, issue tracking, etc.) the workflows break down. Yes you could share changes in a more distributed manner, or workaround the outage in other ways, but in reality people will stop and wait for the central repo to be available again. Also, pulling changes from my repo to yours directly to avoid that part of the downed service doesn't solve the issue tracker or CI manager also being down. The clue is in the name: git HUB.

That said, the issue is similar to how people see the results of aviation accidents: a jumbo going down takes out a lot of people but statistically, considering all air journeys, that is a lot less than the deaths that would happen due to equivalent car journeys. I suspect that everyone being a bit inconvenienced for a while when github/gitlab/other-centralised-service has issues like today doesn't add up to as much as the many small individual inconveniences they'd experience over time with their own local instances of, for example, gitlab, especially if including the routine maintenance time required which doesn't exist as much when using github, or gitlab managed instead of self-hosted - the outage just feels bigger than all the little problems because everyone is affected at once.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#23

Post by megous »

objclxt wrote: post #19
u801e wrote: post #13

I see posts like this make the front page of hacker news every so often, but I don't recall seeing posts about things like making list outages for something like the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) or an IRC network like Freenode.

Perhaps because Freenode has about 0.25% the number of users of Github - ~100,000 vs 40 million?

No, it's just the US tech bubble. When my whole country and some was suddenly denied all google services for several hours, including CDNs, DNS, all cloud, gmail, android app store, gdocs, all everything, it didn't make any news here either, despite being much more disruptive, affecting 10+ million people, and being a much more intersting reminder of how much techies make other people and themselves dependent on this megacorp.

All kinds of stuff broke, including "the entire internet" for people who were made to use 8.8.8.8 by their ISPs. E-shops that load jQuery from google stopped working, for no real reason whatsoever, people getting lost because they couldn't navigate anymore in the real world, etc.

Since then I try to flag all this repetitive nonsense about slack/github going down for a few minutes, to no avail. It keeps comming back to the first page of HN. :D

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#24

Post by djsumdog »

jmisavage wrote: post #20

I kind of wish HN wouldn't show these outages unless they're going on for multiple hours or at least hide them after they're back up. Usually by the time I see them and then check myself the site is already back up. Maybe I just need to read HN more often.

Yea, there are a lot of outage posts. It does kinda illustrate how many people depend on these core services though; and how little distributeiness or elasticity is built into the system.

Linux repos and ISO download sites have TONS of mirrors, sometimes contributed by companies, but also a lot of universities, government and public institutions.

Why is one of the largest core open source repositories centralized and private? Why are we so dependent on AWS, Google and others for large chunks of Internet services to be accessible?

There is a deeper question here than just the outages; but rather why they affect so many people.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#25

Post by unixhero »

mschuetz wrote: post #14
arghwhat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a decent list of competitors, all of which have similar or sometimes better offerings. There are also plenty of fully free and open source solutions, should you want to do things yourself. The Github monopoly is driven by its users.

I tried gitlab but I hated the web interface. It was lacking in so many departments. Any other alternatives to github to try?

What was lacking? The GUI on Gitlab is phenomenal imo.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#26

Post by reacweb »

smartmic wrote: post #10

Git is designed as distributed VCS, so an outage of a centralized server should not matter too much. So far, the theory. Using Github excessively is the way back to centralization, nowadays handing control over to Microsoft. Everybody who is concerned (probably not too much) should have a look into alternatives.

There are so many ways we become dependent of github, that nobody will shame on us because we are impacted by a github outage. In this context, is it useful to protect against outages ? It may be cheaper to do nothing.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#27

Post by cameronbrown »

megous wrote: post #23
objclxt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because Freenode has about 0.25% the number of users of Github - ~100,000 vs 40 million?

No, it's just the US tech bubble. When my whole country and some was suddenly denied all google services for several hours, including CDNs, DNS, all cloud, gmail, android app store, gdocs, all everything, it didn't make any news here either, despite being much more disruptive, affecting 10+ million people, and being a much more intersting reminder of how much techies make other people and themselves dependent on this…

> When my whole country and some was suddenly denied all google services

> didn't make any news here either

Denied by government by any chance? Makes sense why it din't hit the news.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#28

Post by prepend »

krzkaczor wrote: post #2

Events like this make me realize how much I rely on my CI/CD pipeline for working on new features, deploying etc. I am often too lazy to run E2E tests on my machine if I know that on CI it will take only a few minutes to be done.

I feel guilty because I’ve never installed GitLab’s CI process locally and have only run it for the past few years through git commits. I keep expecting someone to complain, but so far, so good.

I expect similar poor behavior testing GitHub’s actions because it’s so convenient to only run through the service.

It is important though that it’s possible to run without CI/cd. If it wasn’t available I would complain because of the risk of lock-in.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#29

Post by vallismortis »

jmisavage wrote: post #20

I kind of wish HN wouldn't show these outages unless they're going on for multiple hours or at least hide them after they're back up. Usually by the time I see them and then check myself the site is already back up. Maybe I just need to read HN more often.

I find the post-mortems helpful. I don't want to make the same mistakes with my infrastructure, and it gives me something to reference when, for instance, the upper management decides they want to migrate to one of these services.

Re: GitHub Outage Currently Ongoing – Issues, PRs, Notifications

#30

Post by megous »

cameronbrown wrote: post #27
megous wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's just the US tech bubble. When my whole country and some was suddenly denied all google services for several hours, including CDNs, DNS, all cloud, gmail, android app store, gdocs, all everything, it didn't make any news here either, despite being much more disruptive, affecting 10+ million people, and being a much more intersting reminder of how much techies make other people and themselves dependent on this…

> When my whole country and some was suddenly denied all google services > didn't make any news here either Denied by government by any chance? Makes sense why it din't hit the news.

Denied by google engineers making a mess with router misconfiguration. The internet traffic at key points went down by ~30% just by google taking itself offline.

Also what was fun was everyone being blocked from all services that use reCAPTCHA.

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