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GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

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Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#441

Post by markus_zhang »

sunaookami wrote: post #342
markus_zhang wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely managed to create a lot of reliable products. Windows NT was one of them. Up to Windows XP the products were pretty solid and each had visible improvement against the previous one. Their language products were/are still solid IMO. Maybe Visual Studio is sluggish, but we can still use an older version if we want. Plus they put a lot of effort optimizing VSCode, too. Even back in the MS-DOS/16-bit Windo…

reliable? Windows is the only operating system you have to constantly reinstall because it gets slower after a few months. To the point people think it's totally normal to do that!

At least they are reliable in/after the Windows 2000/XP/7 era? Even as I don't like Windows 10, I haven't reinstalled it for years.

Back then the other options for home computers are just too technical for normies. I tried to install Linux back in early 2000 and I couldn't even get through the install process. Skill issue for sure, but if I couldn't do it back then I'm sure none of my class mates could.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#442

Post by judge2020 »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #329
judge2020 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet they still have a completely separate IDP for employees https://github.okta.com .

most companies do. do you mean they’re not using AD only?

Most companies onboard and consolidate IDPs fairly quickly because it's quite easy to change the SSO configuration for services over just a few years.

My only guess is there's some circular dependency they want to avoid by keeping Okta.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#443

Post by Proofread0592 »

pianopatrick wrote: post #409

What is amazing is people do not switch away from GitHub. Maybe people are actually pretty tolerant of downtime if other things about the product or service are done right

The only thing that would make me switch is data loss.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#444

Post by pdimitar »

tofuahdude wrote: post #259
Melatonic wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that if companies wanted they could probably use AI to instead increase uptime. Keep existing QA teams (instead of replacing them) and then use AI for better and more timely monitoring (and messaging even) and as an additional Always-Testing™ layer of QA

"Just use AI" is definitely not the solve for the problems Github faces.

Shhh! Do you hear that? It's the collective scream of middle managers screaming in terror.

Jokes aside, yes, quite correct. Even frontier models like Fable have very obvious limits.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#445

Post by pdimitar »

habinero wrote: post #305
sharts wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s no excuse. Particularly if it affects people self hosting their workers. These are folks that routinely make it a point to press on system design and scalability during interviews. Now they suddenly can’t scale or design systems but we should accept that?

Are you kidding? That's an insane amount of load increase to manage. "Scalability" isn't one thing, especially not at that level, so it's ridiculous to knock them for it. That amount of load ripples across your entire infrastructure.

Not hiring 20-25 year olds with social science Ph.D.-s would be a good start (don't remember where I saw that a while ago).

Next: proficient engineering managers, not just people who immediately bend a knee to the middle manager.

Oh wait, I went into sci-fi territory again. My bad.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#446

Post by acuteaura »

crabbone wrote: post #433
acuteaura wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub Actions was always a mess. Because it is a Microsoft product. If you want to have a horrible time, try reading some of the runner code. It's early 2010s-style Windows-First, MSFT C# crud that has trouble not racing several threads to inconclusive status codes.

Yes. That was my impression too. Github Actions aren't a good product in many ways. It's also very complex and requires quite a bit more infrastructure than the rest of Github. Unfortunately, I don't think that the commercial side of the product would allow it to improve in the direction of better quality / uptime. It's cursed to be forever like MS Outlook: whenever it changes it's for the worse, even though it was n…

More literally a Microsoft product. As in, rebadged Azure Pipelines.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#447

Post by thecatapps »

Kinrany wrote: post #398
thecatapps wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood this argument. Even if self-hosted things were offline more often (which I've never found to be the case, I've had Forgejo + runners running for a year now with no downtime), the real benefit is that you yourself can work to bring it back online when it does, rather than waiting on a large, slow-moving organization to figure out what slopped PR caused their global service serving ungodly amounts…

I don't follow, how is that better? It's down more often AND you have to do more work.

Except it's not down more often and it's not a heavy lift. It's not a mail server, it's a Postgres database, a Golang app, and backups (and some providers will just handle that for you!).

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#448

Post by thecatapps »

mschuetz wrote: post #420
thecatapps wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood this argument. Even if self-hosted things were offline more often (which I've never found to be the case, I've had Forgejo + runners running for a year now with no downtime), the real benefit is that you yourself can work to bring it back online when it does, rather than waiting on a large, slow-moving organization to figure out what slopped PR caused their global service serving ungodly amounts…

But I don't want to have to do this kind of work, you're only listing disadvantages from my viewpoint.

Why? Like I wrote in a separate comment, it's not a mail server, it's a Postgres database, a Golang app, and backups (and some providers will just handle that for you!)

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#449

Post by mschuetz »

thecatapps wrote: post #448
mschuetz wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't want to have to do this kind of work, you're only listing disadvantages from my viewpoint.

Why? Like I wrote in a separate comment, it's not a mail server, it's a Postgres database, a Golang app, and backups (and some providers will just handle that for you!)

What do you mean "why"? Setting up and tinkering with systems is work I loathe to do, obviously. I want to code, not host coding repositories. I did it in the past because I had to, and now I don't have to do it because github does it for me. It's great.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#450

Post by croemer »

winwang wrote: post #394
winwang wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back of the envelope math, if anyone wants to correct my mental model: 2.1B (min core)/week ~ 300M (min core)/day. Assuming ~300k cores (~3k physical server CPUs, seems fine), that's 1k min/day. Seems about right, though obviously not uniformly distributed. In any case, the number I'm focusing on here is the 300k cores part (x2 if you're counting in vcores). It does not seem like too much to ask for (significantly) m…

I decided to ask chatgpt for a fermi estimate of cores/datacenter, which you can check for yourself: 1~10 million physical cores. The surprising part of this for me was the "low" power usage (it used 20MW/"datacenter" as another point for estimation). 1MW ~ 6700 NYC citizens' residential usage, apparently, lol. I don't know exactly why, but that citizen number seemed a surprisingly large (well, probably because I've…

Your lasers were probably at MW for only a microsecond.
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