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The GitHub Load Balancer

githubengineering.com

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Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#111

Post by contingencies »

sitkack wrote: post #97
positr0n wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the requirements they list are pretty unique to github since they serve .git to git clients as well as http to http clients (which is what most SaaS companies do). Like a very long running git clone from someone with slow internet not having its connection dropped.

As person who has used github on totally lousy connections in remote parts of the world, it faired far better than most Isomorphic web apps. People in Nepal can use github to actually get work done. Most current generation web apps won't even load.

I second this from China. Apple Appstore based OSX updates are literally impossible here. Annoyingly, they are required to upgrade Xcode.

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#112

Post by lifeisstillgood »

josegonzalez wrote: post #88
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Are you saying instead of having Github, we should all be hosting our own Git repos? Well, yes. That's the point. It was designed as an entirely distributed setup. It's crazy that in order to post a message to my neighbours I have to send data to Facebook in SV and just as crazy that two devs on the same team need to write their code commits in a load balanced mega server in ... Err ... Washington? Wherever. And…

No one is forcing you to use github or facebook. I host my own gitlab installation for certain private repositories and I still send emails to some people when coordinating outings.

I Am not feeling forced to use it. I use it because it is easier for me as an individual developer. I use readthedocs because they have better uptime than my own servers.n All the reasons i use GitHub are good choices for me.

I get the economics of centralised vs decentralised service provision - it's just ironic that GitHub is facing load balancing problems precisely because they have taken a distributed technology and made it, de facto, a centralised technology.

We can imagine a perfect storm of GitHub going down just as someone pulls a vital package from npm and Google losing jquery CDN; all Of a sudden the web will stop working.

It's amazing how fragile we can make a system designed to be resilient - I presume there is a real cost with keeping things distributed that a good economist could explain to me

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#113

Post by lifeisstillgood »

auxbuss wrote: post #78
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #14

I love using GitHub and appreciate the impact it is and has had. But this post is what is wrong with the web today. They have taken a distributed-at-it's-plumbing technology, and centralised it so much that now we need to innovate new load balancing mechanisms. Years ago I worked at Demon Internet and we tried to give every dial up user a piece of webspace - just a disk always connected. Almost no one ever used them.…

You're not alone in thinking this (and I was one of those Demon customers back in the day :-) ). I've had pub chats with many tech folk over the years about how we might enable this. It needs to be cheap, of course, like 5 USD pa cheap. But, perhaps, with today's container tech that's viable. It needs other things too. A fully distributed "web" of personally managed data is where we'll get to one day. It might need a…

Those are good pub chats aren't they :-)

I was at PyCon UK, and watched 60 kids connecting up microbits to RPis and inventing ways to send signals over BTLE without a stack. I would like to solve the whole worlds problems, but if the past twenty years have taught us anything, it's that a few kids can invent the fire and we will all follow. So inthinknwe are going to be in good hands.

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#114

Post by [deleted] »

saurik wrote: post #49
alexandros wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here's an alternative interpretation: Due to their unique requirements, they were forced to investigate alternative approaches to the problem, and the approach they went with, they believe, is useful to a lot more people than just themselves. This is both plausible and matches the announcement, so why take a bad faith approach to someone releasing some code to the open source? Would you prefer if they kept it closed?…

Huh? Atom/Electron is another great example of GitHub duplicating a ton of existing projects (whether dependencies such as CEF and node-webkit or high-level solutions such as ACE) without seemingly having any interest at all in joining those existing projects. Just because someone is successful at doing this does not make what they are doing any more reasonable: if anything it should just put them in a similar place…

[deleted]

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#115

Post by contingencies »

I am intrigued by their opening statement of multiple POPs, but the lack of multi-POP discussion further in the system description.

My understanding is that the likes of, for example, Cloudflare or EC2 have a pretty solid system in place for issuing geoDNS responses (historical latency/bandwidth, ASN or geolocation based DNS responses) to direct random internet clients to a nearby POP. Building such a system is not that difficult, I am fairly confident many of us could do so given some time and hardware funding.

Observation #1: No geoDNS strategy.

Observation #2: Limited global POPs.

Given that the inherently distributed nature of git probably makes providing a multi-pop experience easier than for other companies, I wonder why Github's architecture does not appear to have this licked. Is this a case of missing the forest for the trees?

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#116

Post by im4w1l »

jimjag wrote: post #29

I am increasingly bothered by the "not invented here" syndrome where instead of taking existing projects and enhancing them, in true open source fashion, people instead re-create from scratch. It is then justified that their creation is needed because "no one else has these kinds of problems" but then they open source them as if lots of other people could benefit from it. Why open source something if it has an expect…

Why would you start a new company when you can join and enhance an existing one?

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#117

Post by JungleGymSam »

ckdarby wrote: post #68
jimjag wrote: post #29

I am increasingly bothered by the "not invented here" syndrome where instead of taking existing projects and enhancing them, in true open source fashion, people instead re-create from scratch. It is then justified that their creation is needed because "no one else has these kinds of problems" but then they open source them as if lots of other people could benefit from it. Why open source something if it has an expect…

Have you ever contributed to HaProxy? Have you ever tried committing massive alterations to major open source projects? It isn't as simple as here's my massive rewrite, click the accept button and everything works out for the open source community. Let me be the first to say that the level of politics, circle jerking and knowing people is ridiculous.

Sounds like you're suggesting you can't use your own modified fork until your PR is accepted.

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#118

Post by jstimpfle »

audleman wrote: post #66
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #14

I love using GitHub and appreciate the impact it is and has had. But this post is what is wrong with the web today. They have taken a distributed-at-it's-plumbing technology, and centralised it so much that now we need to innovate new load balancing mechanisms. Years ago I worked at Demon Internet and we tried to give every dial up user a piece of webspace - just a disk always connected. Almost no one ever used them.…

Are you saying instead of having Github, we should all be hosting our own Git repos? > But it is beginning to creak. GitHub faces scaling challenges, I don't agree that Github facing scaling issues means the web is creaking. More like old wooden boats are being replaced by big, sturdy battleships. I think the web is getting stronger thanks to engineers facing the challenges coming their way. > I am frustrated that so…

Multiple platforms != distributed

Yes, multiple platforms is overhead. That's why I mostly use mail, basically never IM, even for the most short-lived or informal conversations.

It's no problem at all for me having email conversations with people whose mailboxes are hosted at a diverse set of providers.

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#119

Post by pcarranza »

dogismycopilot wrote: post #90
sytse wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) We're not doing this better. We're struggling with our load balancers right now. We're using Azure load balancers and then HAproxy. But the Azure ones sometimes don't work. Luckily the new network type on Azure supports floating IPs so we can set something up ourselves https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/466

I would love to see the solution. We're also desiring to run HAProxy in Azure with keepalived (even in unicast mode). The black-box "windows based" load balancer that Azure offers is quite limited.

Infrastructure issues are here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure

The one about the load balancer is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/467 but we don't have a lot of data published just yet as we are currently figuring it out.

Re: The GitHub Load Balancer

#120

Post by sitkack »

contingencies wrote: post #111
sitkack wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As person who has used github on totally lousy connections in remote parts of the world, it faired far better than most Isomorphic web apps. People in Nepal can use github to actually get work done. Most current generation web apps won't even load.

I second this from China. Apple Appstore based OSX updates are literally impossible here. Annoyingly, they are required to upgrade Xcode.

One technique I used is to download updates directly via

    wget -c --limit-rate=200K http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1833/en_US/osxupd10.10.5.dmg
-c resumes download where left off, the rate limiting can be used to match the speed of your connection or intermediaries reducing stalls, drops and angry network users. I would often keep a list of URLs in `download-queue.txt` and use the above flags with -i to load the list of urls, letting it run overnight at some much lower speed.
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