Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

status.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 147 posts

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#131

Post by jbverschoor »

saurik wrote: post #114
jtchang wrote: post #5

This is why I love git (and distributed version control systems in general). For the most part a short downtime isn't the end of the world. When it comes back up I'll push my changes and that'll be that.

While I actually agree with you, as I look at GitHub as "somewhat reasonable git hosting", that is not how many (if not even most) projects actually use the website, so it is an unfair analysis: people seriously often use (and even encourage others to use) GitHub as the only web presence for their project, using a Readme.md to build a landing page; meanwhile, for many people, GitHub is how they handle incoming bug re…

emm.. it IS exactly the point.

Webservers can become unavailable. Github has a great trackrecord, and because git is distributed, people can still commit their code locally.

If you would have an SVN workflow, you would either have to wait committing (which is costly), or commit multiple changes in one go.

Also the email example is exactly the same. It IS a good thing you can access stuff locally.

You basically tell that dropbox is useless.

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#132

Post by kitsune_ »

ghshephard wrote: post #67
tinco wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your company runs its source revisions through Github without a backup solution? Do you really put all your eggs in a basket you have no control over? I know that in theory a cloud solution should have a higher uptime than an amateuristic set up private server, but cloud solutions have a certain complexity and coherence that make them very vulnerable to these kinds of 'full failures' where nothing is in your control.…

Add up your downtime over a three year period by relying on Git (or gmail, or AWS) versus the cost of trying to engineer some local-backup system, and the downtime associated with that going awry. Outages happens - as long as we're talking hours a year, pretty much everyone but life-safety systems, critical infrastructure, and payment/high-traffic commerce sites are probably better off just letting third-party cloud…

It's not about downtimes and outages. It's incomprehensible to me how lax businesses are with their backups, especially business where their clients data is everything. Yes, the brave new world of the cloud seems tantalizing, but even there, data can and will be lost. Don't just use only one way / provider / service / mechanism for backing up your data.

A tape / lto backup system doesn't cost the world. Yes, it introduces overhead and maintenance, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

At my place of work we currently use a lot of virtual servers, hosted by external providers. We use their backup and snapshot mechanisms. But we also pull all data to our local back up server. From there we backup to tape on a daily basis.

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#133

Post by Xylakant »

kitsune_ wrote: post #132
ghshephard wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add up your downtime over a three year period by relying on Git (or gmail, or AWS) versus the cost of trying to engineer some local-backup system, and the downtime associated with that going awry. Outages happens - as long as we're talking hours a year, pretty much everyone but life-safety systems, critical infrastructure, and payment/high-traffic commerce sites are probably better off just letting third-party cloud…

It's not about downtimes and outages. It's incomprehensible to me how lax businesses are with their backups, especially business where their clients data is everything. Yes, the brave new world of the cloud seems tantalizing, but even there, data can and will be lost. Don't just use only one way / provider / service / mechanism for backing up your data. A tape / lto backup system doesn't cost the world. Yes, it intro…

I do have backups of all my (relevant) GH repos since that's just a "git pull" away and can be automated nicely. But I'd probably be out of luck running my regular CI-process with github down or do a deployment. Both rely on having a public-facing git server - having a backup does not imply that I have a full git server running. I could set one up and administer it, but it's just too much effort given GH uptime.

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#134

Post by saurik »

jbverschoor wrote: post #131
saurik wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I actually agree with you, as I look at GitHub as "somewhat reasonable git hosting", that is not how many (if not even most) projects actually use the website, so it is an unfair analysis: people seriously often use (and even encourage others to use) GitHub as the only web presence for their project, using a Readme.md to build a landing page; meanwhile, for many people, GitHub is how they handle incoming bug re…

emm.. it IS exactly the point. Webservers can become unavailable. Github has a great trackrecord, and because git is distributed, people can still commit their code locally. If you would have an SVN workflow, you would either have to wait committing (which is costly), or commit multiple changes in one go. Also the email example is exactly the same. It IS a good thing you can access stuff locally. You basically tell t…

You seem to have ignored what I said... this insistence that "people can still commit their code locally" is focussing on just one of the use cases for this website. To read jtchang's comment, it is as if that's the only service that GitHub provides.

In fact, "git hosting" is one of the least interesting services GitHub provides for the specific reason that, yes, git is so ludicrously decentralized: it seriously takes less time to push to your own git repository than it takes to log in to your GitHub account.

(Really, the only thing it makes simpler, with regards to actual git hosting, is managing user credentials for a centralized Subversion-like repository; however, if you actually think of git as a decentralized system you don't do that in the first place.)

I will thereby attempt to make this point even more clear by taking my example about Gmail (where you totally ignored the Calendar comment) and ratchet it even further: if all of Google went offline tomorrow, my ability to still send mail using Outlook is great, but it doesn't help me watch YouTube videos or, you know, search the web.

Likewise, when GitHub has an "outage across all services" that affects all kinds of things developers do that have nothing at all to do with "hosted git repository". To repeat one example: a lot of developers are crippled if they don't have access to an issue tracker to tell them what they need to work on next.

So, just because your workflow doesn't rely on anything GitHub provides, doesn't mean that isn't why most of the people who use GitHub aren't using it: GitHub is a popular set of services for project management that are all bundled together in a way that is easy for people to get started with, not just a git hosting company.

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#135

Post by ConstantineXVI »

rolleiflex wrote: post #119
rtkwe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah missed that, or an edit, either way. Yeah there's not the community because it's used for more private projects. GitHub has the community because it's focused towards open source and all the sharing and cooperation that OSS entails.

Yeah, I agree. One interesting thing is that their JIRA is really popular as an issue tracker to the point that more than a few organisations I've seen are using JIRA as a tracker and github:enterprise as repo. Github really needs to up their game on this part.

Odds are the orgs in question were using Jira long before they were using GitHub. Pretty sure it's Atlassian feeling the pressure here and not GitHub; given the existence of Stash.

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#136

Post by dchest »

zem wrote: post #124
rwg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the neat things about repos in Fossil (the DVCS by drh of SQLite fame) is that they have a built-in wiki and issue tracker whose contents are version controlled along with everything else in a project's repo. The Fossil executable also has a built-in web server that presents a web interface for working with the repo, including the issue tracker and wiki. In short, if you have a project's Fossil repo, you can w…

how does fossil do versioning of the issue tracker? i tried using a setup like that for a while, with ditz as the issue tracker. it turned out to be really inconvenient to have my issues versioned along with my code as part of the same repo - i want to navigate around in my code's history and branch layout with the issue tracker conceptually being an entirely separate repo that always points to HEAD unless i explicit…

Fossil doesn't track issues along with source code, unlike some scripts for bug tracking on top of git. While Fossil stores tickets in the same repository with source code, with the same basic format, tickets are separate entities and are not connected to the source code itself.

You can read more about it here: http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/bugtheory...

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#137

Post by dchest »

chacha102 wrote: post #86
rwg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the neat things about repos in Fossil (the DVCS by drh of SQLite fame) is that they have a built-in wiki and issue tracker whose contents are version controlled along with everything else in a project's repo. The Fossil executable also has a built-in web server that presents a web interface for working with the repo, including the issue tracker and wiki. In short, if you have a project's Fossil repo, you can w…

Just to note, Github Wiki is git repo, so it you want to backup the data, branch, etc, you can push pull and everything else with any Github Wiki. Github issues aren't however.

But you can't view GitHub Wiki in browser without some preprocessing. In Fossil, I just do

    $ fossil ui
And view (and edit) a copy of the whole project website, including wiki, tickets, history, interface for diffs, etc. in my browser.

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#138

Post by pjungwir »

It's easy enough to set up a backup repo so a team can keep collaborating when Github is down, but does anyone have a way to deploy Rails apps with Capistrano+bundler? It's terrible not being able to deploy; sometimes that can be really urgent.

With Cap I can just repoint config/deploy.rb to the backup git repo, but what about bundler?

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#139

Post by pjungwir »

pjungwir wrote: post #138

It's easy enough to set up a backup repo so a team can keep collaborating when Github is down, but does anyone have a way to deploy Rails apps with Capistrano+bundler? It's terrible not being able to deploy; sometimes that can be really urgent. With Cap I can just repoint config/deploy.rb to the backup git repo, but what about bundler?

To answer my own question:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8693319/where-can-i-install-gems-from-when-rubygems-org-is-down
Of course if you have private patches of gems with bundler's `:git` option, you'd need to repoint all of those, too (as well as keep them in two places).

It'd be awesome if there was some simpler way, maybe a separate declaration in your Gemfile so that any gems added to your project also get installed on a corporate git server, and then bundler uses that as a fallback if `source` doesn't work.

Re: Github experiencing major service outages across all services.

#140

Post by rb2k_ »

tinco wrote: post #52
rubynerd wrote: post #25

I'm amazed at how much this has knocked me on my arse. I first attempted to redo the README for a service I've just open-sourced, before realising Github is down. Then, I attempted to fix the company CI server (OOM errors because of Carrierwave needing more than 500MB of memory to run 1 spec in, for some unknown reason), which failed because it couldn't check out the code. After giving up on that, I attempted to inst…

Your company runs its source revisions through Github without a backup solution? Do you really put all your eggs in a basket you have no control over? I know that in theory a cloud solution should have a higher uptime than an amateuristic set up private server, but cloud solutions have a certain complexity and coherence that make them very vulnerable to these kinds of 'full failures' where nothing is in your control.…

> Your company runs its source revisions through Github without a backup solution?

Thanks to git, every developer usually has a complete backup of the repository + all of its history

Post reply on HN