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An update on GitHub availability

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Re: An update on GitHub availability

#31

Post by embedding-shape »

Hah, love that now they say "Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features" when 6 months ago, it was seemingly exactly the same except Azure supposedly was gonna save them:

> GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development - GitHub is working on migrating all of its infrastructure to Azure, even though this means it'll have to delay some feature development.

> In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.

https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

So the currently delayed feature development is now gonna be further delayed, yet almost every week we see new features and changes, just the other day the single issues view was changed, as just one example. And it was "existential" 6 months ago yet they keep stumbling on the exact same issue today?

Even if they're focused exclusively on reliability and uptime, we get the experience that we have today, kind of incredible how a company with the resources of Microsoft seemingly are unable to stop continuously shot themselves in the foot. It's kind of impressive actually. As icing on the cake, they've decided to buy up all popular developer services then migrate them all to the same platform, great idea too.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#32

Post by mohsen1 »

jftuga wrote: post #23

Some interesting tid bits: * we had to resolve a variety of bottlenecks that appeared faster than expected from moving webhooks to a different backend (out of MySQL) * * redesigning user session cache to redoing authentication and authorization flows to substantially reduce database load. * we accelerated parts of migrating performance or scale sensitive code out of Ruby monolith into Go. I'd like to know what databa…

Another interesting bit: they are hitting performance issues due to the rise of monorepos. GitHub and frankly Git were not designed for monorepos

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#33

Post by tfrancisl »

beernet wrote: post #29
icy wrote: post #18

I'm biased (founder of tangled.org), but the future really should be federated forges. Host repositories on sovereign infra with global identity + federated "metadata" (issues, pulls, etc.). Global indices for this should be trivial to spin up so availability is never a concern (we're working towards this!).

What is "sovereign infra" exactly?

No less than self hosted, imo. If youre on some cloud it doesnt really matter that you pay them absurd amounts of money, you arent sovereign.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#34

Post by someone_eu »

fontain wrote: post #17

Personally, I’m sympathetic. We know that GitHub did a huge amount of work over the last decade to make Git scale, which has benefited us all. These new scaling challenges are real challenges, 30x growth would be a nightmare for any system that was already pushing the limits of what was possible, I think we are being far too hard on GitHub, they deserve a little grace.

GitHub's scaling issues are caused by their own vendor-lock approach and monopoly. Yes, of course _their_ goal is to be even bigger and even more all-consuming, so _they_ have to deal with the scale. Why a user would be sympathetic to that?

The user (and not a big tech monopoly) answer to scaling issues is almost always to stop scaling and start federating and interoperating.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#35

Post by ferguess_k »

maccard wrote: post #13

It's kind of hard to read this with a straight face. The unlabelled graph with big numbers on top, the priorities that don't match with what we're experiencing, and a list of things that they're doing without a real acknowledgement of the _dire_ uptime over the last 12 months....

You can do the same with so many clients.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#36

Post by georgyo »

maccard wrote: post #13

It's kind of hard to read this with a straight face. The unlabelled graph with big numbers on top, the priorities that don't match with what we're experiencing, and a list of things that they're doing without a real acknowledgement of the _dire_ uptime over the last 12 months....

These are not the worst graphs in the world... Sure the bottom left axis is not labeled, but it still conveys the point correctly. The growth between 2023->2024->2025->2026 is growing quickly. And that in the end/beginning of 2026 they say more growth than the three years before, combined!

You don't need to know the bottom left axis number. We do have to assume the graph is linear, and not some kind of negative exponent log graph. But given the rest of the content, I think that is safe to assume.

Any company that experiences significantly more growth than they were planning for will have capacity issues.

The priorities are most inline with that. The are way beyond the point that they can just add more hardware. They need to make the backend more efficient, and all the stated goals are about helping there.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#37

Post by nibbleyou »

ArcHound wrote: post #28
icy wrote: post #18

I'm biased (founder of tangled.org), but the future really should be federated forges. Host repositories on sovereign infra with global identity + federated "metadata" (issues, pulls, etc.). Global indices for this should be trivial to spin up so availability is never a concern (we're working towards this!).

But, there are? I can host a repo on GitHub, Codeberg and self host it too. Then I need to watch over main to keep it consistent between those. After that's established, I can do updates from wherever. Link'em in the README.

There's also a tool to automatically push it to multiple repos: https://github.com/prashantsengar/GitEcho

Disclaimer: the author is a colleague of mine

Though to be fair, what the parent meant by federated forges is different than this approach.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#39

Post by cedws »

I wonder if they’ll end the free lunch we’ve been having since the MS takeover. There’s been a deluge of spam and crapware projects due to the LLM wave which is visible in that graph. Can’t see them sustaining being a public dustbin for low value projects forever.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#40

Post by OtherShrezzing »

ncruces wrote: post #26
maccard wrote: post #13

It's kind of hard to read this with a straight face. The unlabelled graph with big numbers on top, the priorities that don't match with what we're experiencing, and a list of things that they're doing without a real acknowledgement of the _dire_ uptime over the last 12 months....

More numbers: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 What's the question here, you don't believe growth is currently exponential, or do you think it shouldn't be hard to scale, when 10x YoY is not enough?

As a business user, our costs have gone up while service has gone down dramatically. Meanwhile our marginal cost to GitHub has hardly changed. Where our costs to them have increased, they mostly charge us per cpu minute, so obviously aren’t making any kind of loss on our account.

I’m sure they’re experiencing scaling issues across the platform, but it’s unacceptable for that to have a negative impact on us when we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.

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