Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Good deal for us, actually. I used to get upset about this, but the alternative really does suck more.

You can either deal with the occasional non-productivity from a SAAS offering (which for GH has never lasted more than ~half a work day), or you can spin up all your own stack on-prem and generate 10 additional full-time problems in the quest to solve this one periodic issue.

The trick is to never put yourself in a position where your tools absolutely must work immediately or you lose a customer. Why make a promise on delivering a piece of software until its already in hand? Also, if github goes down and I really wanted to get an issue comment in, I can just open a text editor and keep a note around in my local repo until everything is back up. I can even do some crazy things, like share my local branches with other developers over side channels until things get back to normal in the centralized system.

Wasn't this kinda the entire point of talking developers into moving to the git model? Would be fun to rewind the clock and use these takes as an argument for sticking with TFS, et. al.

> I can even do some crazy things, like share my local branches with other developers over side channels

Haha, right, totally crazy, you could use git just like it was designed to be used! Who would do that!!

(Joking aside, despite Githubs frequent outages, I don't recall the git service itself ever being affected)

> I don't recall the git service itself ever being affected

The most important part of their service has never failed to work for me over the last 6 years.

I agree with you. To me it just sounds like people being entitled, expecting a service to never go down, ever. Shit happens and things go down. Design your processes around that fact and have procedures lined up for when it does happen.

However, saying "just get GitLab and deploy it to your own server" glosses over the huge time sink it is, especially for small companies that are already short-staffed, to maintain something like that. I sure as heck do not want to be responsible for keeping my GitLab server up.

As you say, if you're writing an issue, put it in an editor issues.md file or something. If you're working on code, even better, just commit locally.

Hosting Gitlab hasn’t been a huge time sink for me and I’m a one-person show who is conscious about my time. I set up automatic updates and haven’t SSH’d into that machine in about a year.

I agree that in many scenarios you will find that your approach is perfectly valid.

For us, we have ~8 people that need to use the system all at the same time. We utilize issues very heavily (we are entering 5 figures), with lots of data-heavy QA content throughout (screenshots/videos/binaries/etc). Additionally, our customer environments are actually configured to talk directly to our GitHub repository for purposes of rebuilding themselves from source at update time.

Because of the number of participants who are involved with our particular usage of GitHub, we find that a hosted solution with horizontal scalability and resilience to be an excellent fit. We have made the decision to make it Microsoft's problem to figure out how to eventually deal with 10k+ issues and 200+ employees/clients trying to hit the same host all at the same time.

If we had decided to host our own GitHub/Lab server in our cloud environment, we would be having to constantly review the capacity of the IT systems. As we add employees and customers, the load we put on our source control solution will increase linearly. Additionally, because of the deploy-time approach, having a solution that is backed by someone else's network means that we don't have to worry about our private network being slammed by outside requests. Our total checkout is nearing a gigabyte, so you can see how this might scale poorly if we operated out of our own infrastructure.

I almost feel like we are abusive of Microsoft's generosity considering the sheer amount of content we have throughout our organization's account. Every day I wonder when I am going to get some email demanding that we switch to a more expensive enterprise plan because of how we use the service. Maybe that day will never come. Even if it does, I will gladly shell out for the bigger contract.

I suppose it is different for you because you are all in private repositories but... have you seen github repos for very popular open source projects? Angular (the framework) alone has nearly 20k issues, the cli repo another 10k. React another 10k, golang 41k (35k closed, 6k open!)

I have to imagine that you're not exactly a small fish, but also not making them sweat too much either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com