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GitHub Actions Down

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Re: GitHub Actions Down

#21

Post by Sebb767 »

Aeolun wrote: post #18
david_draco wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be interesting to track the uptime of such cloud services. Two decades ago, companies prided themselves with 4 or 5 nines (99.99% uptime). Not anymore. Worse is better won yet again ;-) Companies and programmers should be aware what they get into when they build such dependencies. Distributed git is a thing, but distributed CI/CD that you could also run locally isn't (yet?).

The fact that it’s down is not the problem, but it’s painful that there’s nothing I can do to fix it. That’s the part I like about self hosting. It may ultimately be down more often, but I never have to tell someone “Nothing to be done, we wait.”.

Which is better for you, but for your company, "wait, I'm on it" and "wait, they're on it" does not make a world of difference.

What's better, on the other hand, is that you can schedule expected and possible downtimes to a time that causes the least impact to your company; with a SaaS, an update might cause you problems any time.

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#22

Post by talolard »

danielheath wrote: post #19
purerandomness wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this normal with hosted solutions? IIRC, GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab.com are all unusable for a few hours at least once a month as far back as I can remember. Isn't this just commonly accepted as a tradeoff for not having to manage the servers yourself?

I would say it's normal for businesses which are engaged in competitive feature development. Stability & reliability are relatively easy to achieve if you aren't changing the software frequently.

This is a profound insight.

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#23

Post by giorgioz »

pilif wrote: post #15
sebmellen wrote: post #10

We build an Electron app for MacOS regularly. We run these builds on Github’s MacOS VMs. The internet fails to connect when running yarn install about 3 out of every 5 times. We’ve gotten multiple refunds for this issue, but it’s still a complete mess. Unfortunately we’ve built much of our process around GH Actions... if not I’m sure we would be on CircleCI or TravisCI already. We’ve also considered switching to self…

We’re running everything on self-hosted runners and it works like a charm. They are also way, way faster than what GitHub can provide. We get the advantages of the huge GitHub Actions ecosystem while having impressive (and fully controllable) performance and very easy access to out infrastructure for deployments.

What do you use to run the self-hosted runners?

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#24

Post by iBotPeaches »

giorgioz wrote: post #23
pilif wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re running everything on self-hosted runners and it works like a charm. They are also way, way faster than what GitHub can provide. We get the advantages of the huge GitHub Actions ecosystem while having impressive (and fully controllable) performance and very easy access to out infrastructure for deployments.

What do you use to run the self-hosted runners?

In our case, we use a mac mini solely for building mobile applications via fastlane with a self-runner. Doing that with the GitHub runner on Mac would be mega expensive. The rest of the CI/test process runs on GitHub runners.

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#25

Post by desert_boi »

sebmellen wrote: post #10

We build an Electron app for MacOS regularly. We run these builds on Github’s MacOS VMs. The internet fails to connect when running yarn install about 3 out of every 5 times. We’ve gotten multiple refunds for this issue, but it’s still a complete mess. Unfortunately we’ve built much of our process around GH Actions... if not I’m sure we would be on CircleCI or TravisCI already. We’ve also considered switching to self…

We're using https://next.yarnpkg.com/features/zero-installs, and it gets rid of one off issues like this (unless you have native deps which require an install).

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#26

Post by blacktriangle »

Sebb767 wrote: post #21
Aeolun wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it’s down is not the problem, but it’s painful that there’s nothing I can do to fix it. That’s the part I like about self hosting. It may ultimately be down more often, but I never have to tell someone “Nothing to be done, we wait.”.

Which is better for you, but for your company, "wait, I'm on it" and "wait, they're on it" does not make a world of difference. What's better, on the other hand, is that you can schedule expected and possible downtimes to a time that causes the least impact to your company; with a SaaS, an update might cause you problems any time.

You're second point exactly nails it. Hosted solutions break because they're busying pushing new features I may or may not care about. When self hosting I can decide when upgrading is worthwhile to my needs and then plan when to make risky actions according to my own organizations time line. Any single org can probably get away with 90% uptime just so long as the downtime is at the correct time.

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#27

Post by chrisweekly »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #17
cjohansson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like MS, that is the only way they can get organic customers. All their popular products are originally built by someone else except Windows of course

Azure, .net, office, office 365, teams, ml.net, ... Not a single one i could manage building ( eg. Teams has bots, quick to create apps and pretty advanced cam features)

Teams UX is a hot mess; it's just astonishingly bad.

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#28

Post by hulahoof »

chrisweekly wrote: post #27
NicoJuicy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure, .net, office, office 365, teams, ml.net, ... Not a single one i could manage building ( eg. Teams has bots, quick to create apps and pretty advanced cam features)

Teams UX is a hot mess; it's just astonishingly bad.

The thing that made it the worst for me was the inconsistency across devices, such as only being able to directly reply to messages on the web and phone app but not the desktop app (at least on OSX).

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#29

Post by saurik »

cjohansson wrote: post #14
Hamuko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was amused by reports when Microsoft was in talks with Discord that one of the reasons why Microsoft wanted to buy Discord was because they wanted Discord on Azure. Like, was the grand customer acquisition strategy for Azure just acquiring the companies and then migrating over?

Sounds like MS, that is the only way they can get organic customers. All their popular products are originally built by someone else except Windows of course

Buying products though is very different than buying customers; if we try to map this hilarious customer "acquisition"--which is now a double entendre ;P--strategy to a more typical product, it would be akin to saying "no one is using Excel, so let's start buying large accounting firms currently using VisiCalc to migrate over".

Re: GitHub Actions Down

#30

Post by dap »

ddlsmurf wrote: post #13
limoce wrote: post #12

My workflows have been queued for at least four hours. It's a hotfix commit. GitHub Actions helped me a lot in synchronizing updates with other repositories automatically, but this time I have to manually apply it. Because I'm the first time expecting GitHub Actions incident, I was wondering that I ran out of my free quota for this month... By the way, should GitHub send an email to the owner if any workflow has been…

Personally I'd rather they focus on the issue rather than negotiating with PR and legal to formulate an e-mail. If you rely on an external service and don't monitor it that's on you.

Have you tried monitoring GitHub Actions? It’s not uncommon for me to find that actions just don’t run for some reason. The docs are so incomplete that it’s hard for me to know why.
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