How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?
I honestly can't explain the discrepancy between the graph in the article and the month over month stats on the same page, but the latter tracks both to my own subjective experience of GitHub and their own internal metrics.
I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?
Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.
But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.
There's something called "rate limits" that engineers not working for GitHub have probably heard of; it's this crazy idea that you should limit the load on your infra in order to avoid downtime. GitHub is not the first free service to ever have to deal with bots.
Companies had been hosting their own CVS or later svn servers.
GitHub's problems can technically be solved, but that doesn't mean they can be solved in a way where the economics still work out.
If AI use is 10x-ing the amount of infrastructure costs for GitHub but it is (as I suspect) almost all on the free side of GitHub and coming nowhere near 10x-ing the amount of money Microsoft can make off GitHub through Team/Enterprise subscriptions then there is certainly no guarantee they will bother to solve these issues adequately.
Twitter had a clearer financial goal... support more people stably, show more ads.
Also (and this part is admittedly far more speculative) if AI labs are to be believed this is still early days for AI usage and we'll still see massive usage growth over the next few years. If GitHub is already having existential trouble at the beginning of the curve, what hope do they have to scale up with their current business model if AI usage actually does ramp up exponentially?
GitHub action, co pilot. Oh and that ugly AI search I'm unable to disable. Migration to azure.
Yes Microsoft managed to ruin the network effect. Outages? The straw that broke the camel's back.
The next year they removed the limitation on collaborators on private repos for free users.
In the last 4 years they’ve significantly improved their project management tools. I think a lot of teams can make do with GitHub Projects, they’re pretty decent.
Who knows if any of these are directly because of Microsoft or not. But there has naturally been material improvements to GitHub in the years after being bought by Microsoft.
It's more like any positive actions they have had are being outright dismissed or forgotten. They removed several restrictions that Github had over private accounts, as well as github actions. Aside from the downtimes, the Github of today is fantastic compared to pre-acquisition Github.
It provides huge value for anyone running an opensource AI generated project.
C'mon.
I'm the only person on this network that would even look at Github, and my connection has a dedicated IP, no CGN.
The page will load correctly
So there is no rate-limit, it's a default deny for unauthenticated requests... which could be fine but at least update the error message to reflect that.
lol!
I also have to say that I'm surprised about the backlash against bitbucket. I find the UI incredibly simple and clear, as do all of the new joiners. With Script Runner you can do some pretty amazing things. It handles the huge repo's well too.
Side note: I read the URL as "dBus hell". We've all been there m8
On the one hand the acquisition of GitHub may have caused the availability to be worse.
On the other hand, the 100.00% availability before the acquisition looks suspicious, wondering if it's not just the status page being better updated.
(I'm aware of the recent availability problems with GitHub, but on the graph the problems start in 2020 and don't seem to worsen significantly)
The only concerns are if it were exposed to the public internet and scale. For personal stuff? It's spectacular.
For things that require GitHub I’ve been able to mirror repos there and get things working. Keeping code in sync is annoying though.
Ghostty is leaving GitHub
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
Before GitHub
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940921
Days without GitHub incidents
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012022
GitHub Actions is the weakest link
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933257
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
I still don't see this tool when it's about a forge. It is a fantastic tool. Seriously guys, you should really consider it !
Now, are you going to finally self host or should we continue to expect another outage on GitHub?
This time, there is no CEO of GitHub to help us. It is Copilot, and Tay.ai that are still struggling to maintain GitHub.