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GitHub Outage

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: GitHub Outage

#61

Post by naikrovek »

mejutoco wrote: post #44
naikrovek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's the whole point of a manually updated status page. you don't want automation to update it because that automation can fail. automation likely caused the outage you want to know more about. you also don't want your automation guessing at what the problem is, or what the effects are. you want real info from a real person even if it isn't given to you the millisecond you look for it. this is why status pages aren…

IMO the reason status pages are not updated automatically is legal. SLA and other legal contracts might change if every time something is down the status page reflects that accurately, so people try to hide it. Approached in that way a status page is almost useless, since it is not reliable and only after I found out via other sources it is updated. I am perfectly happy with a status page that shows the, mm, status o…

> IMO the reason status pages are not updated automatically is legal. SLA and other legal contracts might change if every time something is down the status page reflects that accurately, so people try to hide it.

you are right about legal reasons; some companies count SLA by the time and date stamps on the status page.

people hiding a real outage when users know damned well there is an outage is thankfully not common at all.

if you can design and run a 100% reliable status page which never reports incorrect information, while also reporting useful information, you will be a hero to many.

Re: GitHub Outage

#62

Post by chrisseaton »

capableweb wrote: post #60
lysergia wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> equivalent of getting a surprise snow day Not if you self-host Git

Self-hosting Git is easy, throw up a ssh server and point git to it. Self-hosting everything else GitHub does is harder. Which is why they are building out all of those things, they don't want people to move to other places so easily. Hopefully these constant outages makes more developers pissed off that issues are not stored in git as well, and start working on tooling to solve this shitty problem once and for all.…

> Self-hosting everything else GitHub does is harder.

You can self-host the whole of GitHub can’t you?

Re: GitHub Outage

#63

Post by rozenmd »

omn1 wrote: post #2

Even though the status page ( https://www.githubstatus.com/ ) shows no issues, I'm still getting the occasional 500. It seems to be happening quite irregularly. They are possibly facing a lot of load.

I monitor GitHub externally here: https://github.onlineornot.com/

Seems like a huge spike in load.

Re: GitHub Outage

#64

Post by naikrovek »

smt88 wrote: post #41
naikrovek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's the whole point of a manually updated status page. you don't want automation to update it because that automation can fail. automation likely caused the outage you want to know more about. you also don't want your automation guessing at what the problem is, or what the effects are. you want real info from a real person even if it isn't given to you the millisecond you look for it. this is why status pages aren…

This is so wrong that it makes me wonder if it's satire. "The whole point" (as you put it) of status pages was to publish high-level monitoring data to users. The monitoring process should occur outside the system that is being monitored, perhaps even on a different cloud. Eventually, many companies realized this revealed expensive SLA violations and ended that level of transparency. Your status page can and should r…

not satire.

no company will put any amount of monitoring online for anyone to see, no matter how high level. for it to be useful info, it must contain details, and information about infrastructure is usually well guarded for very good reasons.

Re: GitHub Outage

#65

Post by lionkor »

capableweb wrote: post #60
lysergia wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> equivalent of getting a surprise snow day Not if you self-host Git

Self-hosting Git is easy, throw up a ssh server and point git to it. Self-hosting everything else GitHub does is harder. Which is why they are building out all of those things, they don't want people to move to other places so easily. Hopefully these constant outages makes more developers pissed off that issues are not stored in git as well, and start working on tooling to solve this shitty problem once and for all.…

gitlab

Re: GitHub Outage

#66

Post by busymom0 »

b112 wrote: post #58
busymom0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are probably Canadian (Canada had Monday off due to Labour Day, so people get confused).

Canadians are never confused, how dare you! I ... oh wait. Sorry, was confused.

> Sorry

Definitely Canadian.

Re: GitHub Outage

#67

Post by capableweb »

lionkor wrote: post #65
capableweb wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosting Git is easy, throw up a ssh server and point git to it. Self-hosting everything else GitHub does is harder. Which is why they are building out all of those things, they don't want people to move to other places so easily. Hopefully these constant outages makes more developers pissed off that issues are not stored in git as well, and start working on tooling to solve this shitty problem once and for all.…

gitlab

GitLab is not P2P/Local First software like Git itself. It suffers from exactly the same problem as GitHub, reliance on a central server (which is run either by the company making the product, or by your own team).

What I'm talking about is being able to access everything like issues, wikis, PRs and whatever, even when you're 100% offline.

Re: GitHub Outage

#68

Post by rozenmd »

MattIPv4 wrote: post #33
bowsamic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Status pages are absolutely useless. I've never seen them accurately reflect an outage

You are missing the point of a status page. They're not automatic things that tell you instantly when something is down -- that'd be pretty pointless, you already know it's down. They're updated by the folks responding to the incident, so you know they know there's an issue and that they're looking into it.

That's the premise of my whole business - there's definitely a market for an automated status page!

(https://onlineornot.com)

Re: GitHub Outage

#69

Post by [deleted] »

maxcan wrote: post #15

Github outages are the bored engineer's equivalent of getting a surprise snow day when you were in school, full of unbridled joy. For engaged, happy engineers its the equivalent of getting a surprise snow day when you are grown up and have to go dig your car out of the snow and its a normal day just with extra steps.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Outage

#70

Post by mejutoco »

naikrovek wrote: post #61
mejutoco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the reason status pages are not updated automatically is legal. SLA and other legal contracts might change if every time something is down the status page reflects that accurately, so people try to hide it. Approached in that way a status page is almost useless, since it is not reliable and only after I found out via other sources it is updated. I am perfectly happy with a status page that shows the, mm, status o…

> IMO the reason status pages are not updated automatically is legal. SLA and other legal contracts might change if every time something is down the status page reflects that accurately, so people try to hide it. you are right about legal reasons; some companies count SLA by the time and date stamps on the status page. people hiding a real outage when users know damned well there is an outage is thankfully not common…

> people hiding a real outage when users know damned well there is an outage is thankfully not common at all.

Thankfully people are not hiding it as in a conspiracy to pretend nothing is wrong. But, as you see in many comments in this thread, status pages rarely reflect that something is down immediately (because they are updated manually by humans).

This delay, codified in processes, is very convenient, and to me this is purposely hiding that a service is down. People are not hiding it, but the processes that control the status page are, indeed, hiding this information. This makes status pages less useful, IMO.

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