Left GitLab for GitHub after today's crash | Hacker News Reader

Left GitLab for GitHub after today's crash

medium.com

13 pointsrxminus20 comments

Pretty fantastical post, seeing as Github had a severe outage on 1.27.2017. I'd also guesstimate Github has at least 2 to 3 major outages per year (a mix of DDoS and human errors)

Setting up a DigitalOcean droplet or AWS instance would have only added a few dollars and extra minutes to your transfer today. The benefit would be to reduce dependencies on external service that are vital to your core product.

Always remember, when you don't host your code you don't have full control of your code. To me having 100% ownership of your source should be the foundation to any software-driven organization

This really applies to more than just code. Any time you rely on an outside provider you're opening up yourself to risks. Ultimately it comes down to whether or not you trust the ability of the provider to provide you with service more than you trust your own ability.

Really though, this situation is just re-hashing the fact that everyone has to be careful about single points of failure. If you're screwed because a single service provider you rely on is down you need to think about increasing redundancy. This goes for absolutely everything whether the service is for DNS, VPSes, or version control repositories.

Any time you rely on an outside provider you shift your risks around. Thinking that you eliminate risks by hosting yourself is simply not true. Whether using an outside provider increases your risks requires a case by case analysis.

Yeah read about that one. I would like to avoid hosting our own code, but if Github proves to be too unreliable as well then indeed that will be our only option. But gitlab just had too frequent outages/slowdowns for me to feel comfortable staying. I don't expect 100% uptime, (as nothing does) but it's the frequency and consistency of outages that started to worry me.

I host my own GitLab instance - if it goes down all I have is myself to blame - and honestly with their pre-packaged software it's super simple. And took me another 15 minutes to get the GitLab CI workers running. I also mirror to GitHub for public projects.

GitLab ran into an issue many startups do - they grew very rapidly and didn't hire enough people. They make a fantastic piece of open source software, and the self-hosted version will continue to serve as my main Git server, but seeing as they've had so many issues with their hosted platform, I will be weary for some time to come.

I'm not disputing that...but like I mentioned in the post; I'm ruthless not spending time on things that aren't our core service. I don't host our own mail either, I pay for GSuite :-P.

As a business, I completely agree - streamlining to focus on what matters. As a individual person, I am also the kind who hosts my own mail server - and, well, everything else <- Not a fan of the NSA.

Then fair enough my friend :-) This is Hacker news after all!

Genuine question. Why did the GitLab outage prevent this person from working? Couldn't you just keep on working as usual and then rebase with origin once the service is back up? Decentralization is the best feature of Git.

Because the idiot (i.e. ME!) had pushed on his home computer and wanted to pull his work on his office computer. Don't ask me why they're different ATM...work in progress.

This doesn't make you an idiot. Being able to trust that this basic functionality (access controlled push/pull) will be available is why I pay for GitHub and decided to wait until GitLab stopped having avoidable, serious outages before considering them as an alternative.

How do we know github doesn't have the same potential issue? This is a problem with all hosted solutions, you still have to backup your own data.

Well that is the question of-course. But stability/speed/reliability issues have been frequent indeed. And from what I can gather GitHub has it's own set of issues, but availability & speed aren't one of them...hope that it proves true. The other aspect of course is that we're really excited to open source some of our stuff and GitHub just has the best community out there.

Ehh. Git is decentralized, if you're that worried about uptime, self host a git-http/GitLab/Gitolite/Gogs/Gitea/(getmydrift) etc instance and call it a day. Or do GitHub if you want, but even Github has outages and can't 100% guarantee your data.

If you're afraid the non-git metadata could be lost, use something like git-appraise or get off the cloud or onto a separate cloud and get some bug tracking software or something.

I don't think the actions they took really showed vigilance or good form, but the transparency and honesty says a lot about the company IMHO. I also don't think stomping on them excessively does anyone any good.

Edit: Also, GitLab's business model is different than most in the space. Since even private repos are free, GL only makes money on their enterprise clients. Free private repos are essentially leeches, bloodletting for mindshare. Shouldn't ask for too much.

Yes git is decentralised...but if your entire build & docker image hosting hangs too it it does play an integral role in day-to-day coding. Especially if you need to pull some changes you made late at night on a different computer to continue work. I'm not trying to bash GitLab...if anything I was trying to write a homage. I'm genuinely sad to leave.

You should not have an important SPOF, that is not-self hosted and especially not on best-effort, free service. Switching to GitHub changes nothing.

They try less harder to clean up 1000+ issues, and their hosted service is simply slow as hell.

GitHub has wonderful speed of customer support.

Docker isn't always the best solution to CI, what you need is just a prebuilt image for the language you're using. Travis starts really fast, since there's no image pulling time.

That sort of was the point I was trying to make...they have a lot of big picture "features" but their foundations are crumbling...sadly. Don't quite agree with you on Docker = prebuilt image. We do loads of cool stuff with Docker containers. We're microservice heaven here :-P

"I'm leaving, but first I have to tell everyone."

Don't let the door hit you.

"I'm leaving...but I don't really want to! Please fix your foundations and I'm super eager to come back"

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