Sorry to suggest this but if they charged everyone say $1/mo. it would absolutely help the massive surge from AI coding they seem to have had.
I don't like paying for free stuff but gh certainly worth it.
The August 17 outage
41–50 of 804 posts
Re: The August 17 outage
#42We need to have a package of FLOSsoftware that you could run on the cloud of your choice that offers most of what GitHub does (niceties on top of Git) without the centralization. GitLab was close last I remember but there was some sort of enterprise tier when I tried hosting stuff on a local server years ago. I want true FLOSS, not another SaaS equivalent of the coke dealer giving clients the good uncut stuff when th…
https://forgejo.org/ promises to be this, have only lightly used it on https://codeberg.org/ but it seems nice?
"Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge"
That says absolutely nothing. The "What is Forgejo?" question is unanswered and instead you get a lot of words about their values, their inclusivity, etc. And the next thing in the docs is how to install it. It's ridiculous.
I still don't know what it is or what it does.
Re: The August 17 outage
#43"We are committed to fixing these problems, as long as it doesn't involve buying things other than AI computers, hiring humans, or using non-Microsoft products." Calling Azure the solution to this problem when it is in fact the source of most of these problems is just fantastic doublespeak. Github is ripe for disruption and I hope it is disrupted soon.
Ok, but there's no universe where a major Microsoft-owned property is not being forced to run on Azure. Just like AWS pushing to get off Oracle back in the day. It would be career-destroying to suggest otherwise regardless of technical merit (and tbf, no infrastructure is bulletproof, unless you want to port GitHub to z/OS on mainframe)
Re: The August 17 outage
#44Re: The August 17 outage
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"While accelerating our migration to Azure," meaning, they will only solve problems if it helps them also use Azure more. It is unbelivable that aload of 2.8b commits was totally fine, and a load of 2.9b was a sitewide outage, unless they have no reporting or their tooling is completely incompetent. If things can fall apart so easily, throwing more capacity at the problem won't fix it.
This absolutely can happen in large systems. If some part of the system is at capacity, then slightly increasing the load can cause it to fall behind and start accumulating a backlog. These backlogs can cause clients to make more retries, exacerbating the problem. Potentially further cascading through the system.
I believe their point is that "system is at capacity" is something they ought to start fixing before the capacity is exceeded
Re: The August 17 outage
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're a big company, you can afford having one engineer spend one or two days per year to maintain your self-hosted GitLab or Forgejo. On top of better reliability than GitHub, you'll get the additional bonus that your source code won't accidentally leak through being in Copilot's training set. If you're a hobbyist, Codeberg is great, has a nice community and automatically shields you from slop contributions.
The issue with these systems is that they lack Github's sophistication for issue tracking, knowledge transfer, and automation. I think Gitlab is a mature product in its own space and unlikey to change, for instance, at this point. Codeberg also has the issue of having a political stance which means they will not accept just anyone's use of the platform. That is absolutely their right and I have no issue with it, but…
"sophistication" seems like a strange way to describe GitHub to me - I've found in every individual aspect (code browsing, issue tracking, code review, package management, etc), it's the worst out of all the systems I use regularly... But it's good _enough_ for most people, and it has all those features in one place, which is more convenient than wrangling 10-15 high quality but disconnected systems
Re: The August 17 outage
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We installed as much hardware as available power allowed in our existing data centers while accelerating our migration to Azure. And from the RCA [1]: > The immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic. [1]: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zkxwbgr0cnmx
"While accelerating our migration to Azure," meaning, they will only solve problems if it helps them also use Azure more. It is unbelivable that aload of 2.8b commits was totally fine, and a load of 2.9b was a sitewide outage, unless they have no reporting or their tooling is completely incompetent. If things can fall apart so easily, throwing more capacity at the problem won't fix it.
There's always a cliff, this part is fine.
You sometimes know the cliff but often do not.
Re: The August 17 outage
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're a big company, you can afford having one engineer spend one or two days per year to maintain your self-hosted GitLab or Forgejo. On top of better reliability than GitHub, you'll get the additional bonus that your source code won't accidentally leak through being in Copilot's training set. If you're a hobbyist, Codeberg is great, has a nice community and automatically shields you from slop contributions.
The issue with these systems is that they lack Github's sophistication for issue tracking, knowledge transfer, and automation. I think Gitlab is a mature product in its own space and unlikey to change, for instance, at this point. Codeberg also has the issue of having a political stance which means they will not accept just anyone's use of the platform. That is absolutely their right and I have no issue with it, but…
Gitlab has the benefit of having very little traffic, both free and paid. Their limits are still way above the current usage so less likely to be an issue
Re: The August 17 outage
#49Has to be one of the most vague outage summaries of the year
Re: The August 17 outage
#50"We are committed to fixing these problems, as long as it doesn't involve buying things other than AI computers, hiring humans, or using non-Microsoft products." Calling Azure the solution to this problem when it is in fact the source of most of these problems is just fantastic doublespeak. Github is ripe for disruption and I hope it is disrupted soon.
If you're a big company, you can afford having one engineer spend one or two days per year to maintain your self-hosted GitLab or Forgejo. On top of better reliability than GitHub, you'll get the additional bonus that your source code won't accidentally leak through being in Copilot's training set. If you're a hobbyist, Codeberg is great, has a nice community and automatically shields you from slop contributions.
Speaking from experience, it cost mW about a week or two per year to maintain GitLab for the startup I worked at.
My personal GitLab on the other hand really does take only a day or two per year.
That said, a week or two per year is just what it costs to maintain any one thing period. I spent about that much time maintaining PCs in the office, or my personal proxmox setup. It's not onerous at all.
GitLab is super bloated and a little sucky to admin, but it's not too bad all things considered. I'm admin in my new job's GitHub org and it sucks a whole lot more to maintain.