Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

githubstatus.com

161–170 of 446 posts

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#161

Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.

What would you guys recommend as an alternative? Both hosted and/or self hosted

Forgejo seems decent but I've only scratched the surface.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#162

Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.

What would you guys recommend as an alternative? Both hosted and/or self hosted

We self-host gitlab and it’s great. It’s not cheap, but it’s also never gone down.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this correlates more to them being bought by Microsoft, a company known for being seemingly incapable of creating quality software to the point that it's not even funny anymore, and also known for sloppifying all the products they touch.

I don't think so. GitHub was bought by Microsoft 8 years ago and people have only started complaining about its uptime in the last year or so - exactly correlating with the surge in LLM use.

I don't think so. I've seen those complaints for more than a year.

I have an Ops background and I strongly suspect they were given a stupid timeline for the Azure migration.

I've got to believe Microsoft have decent Ops people but the management wanted to move faster than was reasonable and screwed it up. Move one thing at a time and double check it all works and you can do a migration like this.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#165

Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.

What would you guys recommend as an alternative? Both hosted and/or self hosted

We have set up a new enterprise and are migrating to GHE. For us this was a no-brainer; we get our own isolated environment, Enterprise Managed Users with Entra OIDC provisioning and Github Copilot in EU data residency. https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/dashboard looks pretty good to me. We will still keep our github.com enterprise around for public repositories. I’m genuinely curious to know why a company would prefer github.com over GHE?

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#166
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GHA still beats Circle CI or trying to run your own Jenkins - even with all the downtime. I'd move in a heartbeat if there were good alternatives.

gitlab self hosted though? no outage. i remember equivalent functionality at my last job taking this path

That's significantly more difficult to set up and it cost money. Github's big issues that it's free, Microsoft doesn't want to allocate enough budget to keep the thing running properly.

But for people who either don't pay anything at all or phenomenal amount one 9 of up time is all you need.

If you're actually trying to run a business I guess you can call and gitlab and get an Enterprise contract

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#167
post #164

Is anyone seeing improvement - their last message implying a capacity problem would suggest some are actions are running?

I have sporadically had a few workflows complete for me, but most are having trouble finding a runner to start.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#168

I don't think this portents anything great for software in general. We're a good year+ into the use LLMs for all major bits of software that we all rely upon and GitHub here is down to one 9 of uptime. I've been using GitHub for a _long_ time, my first commits there go back to August 2009!, and I honestly don't recall GitHub going down as much as it has in the last year. I'm sure there's other things happening in the…

Are these outages caused by introduced bugs, though, or by load issues?

As someone who has spent many years working in high load environments, this is not an uncommon pattern.

You design a system and it works great. It can handle failures, load spikes, it is horizontally scalable, things are great. You think you figured it out.

And then load keeps increasing and you suddenly hit a tipping point where everything keeps failing, and you cant keep up. The things that you thought were perfectly horizontally scalable turn out to have a bottleneck you didn’t even think about until you got to a truly massive scale. Your systems suddenly don’t have the excess capacity to handle load spikes or catchup work, so suddenly any failure cascades and recovery is more and more difficult. You can’t solve the problem with additional hardware, and your perfect scalable design actually can’t scale any more.

This doesn’t have to be about GitHub using LLMs in their code to still be related to LLMs. GitHub gets a lot more commits now because of LLMs and probably get a lot more reads because of LLMs as well.

It could be that the extra usage just pushed them past one of those capacity thresholds.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#169

It's been hours :( I have sympathy for the on-call team trying to resolve it, most of us have been there done that. But seems something is systematically going wrong at GH

Time to touch some grass. Better use of my time and energy than twisting the remaining things on my todo list today to make more progress on them than I have managed. I should have taken a long lunch but I rebased the hell out of a PR instead.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#170

Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.

Forgejo selfhosted for a few months now. Its all good and cost nothing.
Post reply on HN