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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio Online has been offline all day. They say it is due to the same Azure outage. This has had a productivity impact.

If Microsoft didn't own GitHub, this may have prompted a move, but since they do it seems a little redundant given that Github will likely be on Azure too before long.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/?p=17405

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VSTS being down all day has had a non-negligible impact for us. We have most of our deployment pipelines there, and they've been inaccessible all day.

In my experience git is excellent at being offline. I’m not sure if we would have had problem if our team foundation setup had ever went off line, but we moved to git long ago because it’s what every single IT-based student learns in my country. With every potential hire knowing git and almost none of them knowing tfd/vsts, it seemed silly not to migrate since the platforms both work well for what we need and git was cheaper over all.

You can use git outside of GitHub and Microsoft though, I mean, you could always use bitbucket.

In my experience, most companies that use "github" (and not "git") cannot get much done if github is down.

So much this. All the pipeline and delivery stuff is glued into github’s API. Most companies aren’t using git any more but github and git is just a dependency. I’ve even seen developers who are unaware that git can exist without github.

I incidentally think this is a completely terrible outcome.

Or badly configured CI, that redownloads dependencies all the time instead of caching them locally.

It doesn't really mater what service provider you use. You can't do anything that requires a sync if the server is down. You can do a bit of local development, but things like automated tests and deployment to staging servers will tend to break if they can't access the source.

I think it's unlikely. Github were on cloud, and then moved to their own infrastructure a while back. In fact they have their own provisioning framework and all that fun stuff.

I doubt they will move back to Azure or any cloud for that matter. It's the same story with Dropbox and similar companies. Once past a point in scale, and depending on the case, for example need to control the data security to have certain certifications, it's essential to have your own infrastructure.

Microsoft owns Azure, Microsoft owns GitHub. Azure is Microsoft’s own infrastructure. Remember kids there is no cloud it’s just somebody else’s computer.

You're missing the point. Github wants to have control over its hardware. It's as easy as that.

Having VSTS down all day meant I got exactly 0 done today. Completely crazy to me.

Not intended to be snarky: why is this crazy to you? All cloud providers have had downtime incidents, major hosted VCS providers, SaaS products. Downtime is a fact of life in tech.

Hrm. I've worked at a large tech firm for more than a decade and there has never been a full day where VCS or the build farm were down all day. It's notable when it's down for more than twenty minutes.

As counterpoint, I’ve seen banks down for extended periods of time, hours occasionally stretching to a day or two (TSB, LLoyds, Bank Of America, BankSimple [BBVA]). Downtime is a fact of life. Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft have had major cloud outages. GitLab nuked their production DB. Slack and Reddit are frequently down.

Unless it’s life critical (911, air traffic control), if it’s down its only going to hamper productivity, but it’ll be back eventually. Time to stretch and get a coffee, and if it’s all day, going home and we’ll start fresh tomorrow.

We’re not saving lives, we’re just building websites. Downtime isn’t shameful, it happens to all of us.

If a single bank is down or Reddit (lol) then the impact is fairly limited, but if one of the 3 major cloud providers, which powers large parts of the internet is down for an entire day, then the impact is a little bit more critical I would say ;).

There's a reason why Azure has a SLA and Reddit doesn't ;)

Also if you start comparing the big companies with GitLab then we don't have to continue talking anymore. It's not ok to nuke your production db and that's why everyone in the tech scene laughs about GitLab and comparing them to Azure is like comparing a lego house to brick and mortar.

At GitLab we are always trying to iterate and we learned a lot from our incident with the database.

The one thing we are proud of is our transparency. The community really appreciates our openness and we are happy about it.

Here's the one example https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...

For me, it's even crazier to rely on a third party provider to be able to do my work. I wouldn't be comfortable at all knowing that my development infrastructure is beyond my control.

I received a notification just now in my Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition that I "have a license for Visual Studio Enterprise 2017. Get it now". When I click on in, the web page asks me to sign in which returns a 502 error code.

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