Days since last GitHub incident

I don't work at Github but I'd read here recently that they've been undergoing a herculean migration from whichever cloud provider they were on to Azure since their Microsoft acquisition, and that it coincides with an increase in outages. I'm guessing that the solution here was probably just to not do that and it's too late.

GitHub was already done years ago. The ideal solution was in hand as of ~2020. Nearly every release since then has brought some kind of regression.

$Work pays for GitHub, so the implicit solution offered is "take my money and make your service reliable"

because Microsoft are known for listening to their customers?

this trivial bug fix took more than a year to be merged:

https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157

that bug likely ended up costing customers millions

Why is Microsoft supposed to listen? I'm not happy with them either but I understand their shift in business strategy.

So many people here treat github like it's a utility; it's not. If you're not happy with it, move on to alternatives or make your own version.

Genuinely curios, what shift?

The decision makers about what software forge to use are often not the same folks using the software forge.

Woah, they actually fixed it? I mean, they are still using a poor man's sleep that uses up a core in the CPU instead of just using sleep, but progress!

Yes I would image the issues are due to doing a migration period. Not the fact that it's moving to Azure in and of itself.

Largely, because they want money from people. If you are in a business selling a product or service and you don't at least pay some attention to what customers are calling for, then you're likely to eventually fall flat no matter how big you are.

Of course IBM and Oracle still exist, so who knows.

> Why is Microsoft supposed to listen?

that's the point isn't it?

GitHub was a product that was loved by its userbase, because it was built by developers for developers

but Microsoft only care about one person, and one person alone: the individual that approves the purchase order

the people who have to suffer actually using the software are unimportant

which explains the rapid descent of GitHub into your standard quality Microsoft product (i.e.: terrible)

Hard disagree. GitHub Copilot is incredible. I can program pretty much entirely through my phone for large classes of problems now. Leveraged correctly it's amazing.

An optimal business only cares about whether the invoices get paid and the shareholders are hyped. Everything else is noise they block out. Not saying Microsoft is optimal, but this is just a business doing business.

Discussed entertainingly here by ThePrimeTimeagen: https://youtu.be/E3_95BZYIVs?si=IY-iT1eyXKnVvpTS

It's just a metric, not "whining". Besides, if complaining about companies (whether it's Github/Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, etc) without offering a solution is out-of-bounds, that probably knocks out 50% of the posts and comments on HN.

They weren't on any cloud provider previously. They famously had their own "metal cloud" of managed servers with everything being containerized and managed by Kubernetes. It seemed like it's worked pretty well, especially for their complex git operation tasks which had specific hardware requirements, but the official word is that apparently they're running into scaling limits with finding new datacenter capacity.

Yikes, that's worse, I thought the migration was at least a little politically motivated to reduce a dependency on a competitor like AWS or something. It's not exactly a great advertisement in any case to know that bare metal was more reliable for them than their own infrastructure when they now own it all the way through.

I won't blame Azure directly without a direct reason to, but as a developer often in the market for cloud providers it's definitely not the most reassuring that they're seemingly having so many migration pains.

A bit of an aside, I've only personally used Azure on one project at one company but their console UI had some bizarre footguns that caused us problems more than once. They have a habit of hiding any controls and options that your current logged-in user doesn't have permissions to use. In some cases that manifested as important warnings or tools that I wasn't even aware of (and were important to me!), but the owner of the company and other global admins could see. AWS, at least for a lot of the services last time I used it, was comfortable greying most things out with a tooltip telling you your user is missing X permission, which was way more actionable and the Azure version gave me whiplash by comparison.