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Comment by arpinum | Hacker News Reader

These incidents have to hurt Azure's brand value. It's a monster task to run something as big as GitHub, if they ever get it stable it will lend a lot of credibility to Microsoft's cloud skills.

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There's not really all that much pointing to an infrastructure level failure - it's possible, but it's just as likely it's an application-level failure somewhere in Github's code. The API is returning 500s and not 503s and the failure is relatively quick, so it's not obviously a server outage.

It's yellow lights across the board, literally nothing is green. That's usually indicative of some sort of software infrastructure level failure or cascade failure, not an application-level failure, which usually manifests as one or two specific services going down (depending on how you define "infrastructure" and "application" - with IAC, arguably the software defined infrastructure _is_ an application). I doubt its a physical hardware issue. It's rarely hardware (except when your DS catches on fire).

No red lights, so it's probably not something catastrophic like that facebook DNS SNAFU, but it definitely smells infrastructure- or deployment-scoped. Like either small DNS issue, or some load balancers are sending traffic to servers which cannot handle it programmatically (schema change?) so they are barfing.

Only load balancer (as an infrastructure) can hit the lights across the board. Not much else.

Databases, Caches or the authentication service? For me read-only requests are working fine and I've not seen any issues. Submitting new contents (e.g. comments) is where it's failing for me. It might be that their database primary is falling over.

Serious questions:

1) Is GitHub runing under Azure's technology stack?

2) Is GitHub under Azure's mamagement (in contrast to Visual Studio's team)?

I'm not sure about two but I'm pretty sure that GitHub doesn't run under Azure at all, considering that GitHub has fully separate networking from MSN's/Azure's (and GitHub's machines do pingback unlike most of Microsoft's machines which don't).

The last time I checked, the only meaningful parts of GitHub that ran on Azure was/is Actions. Everything else is AWS.

> Everything else is AWS.

Huh? As of at least 2017 GitHub was running their own data centers [1]. Any evidence that’s changed? Microsoft bought them in 2018, I can’t imagine they went to AWS after that.

[1]: https://github.blog/2017-10-12-evolution-of-our-data-centers...

Believe they were multi-cloud, definitely had stuff on AWS

Ah sorry, yeah I wasn't being very accurate. I was checking "what's on Azure", I didn't really follow up to check in detail the breakdown of the rest. I just saw quite a bit on AWS and assumed it all was.

GitHub is pretty stable. What are you talking about? I doubt most GitHub users know it's on Azure.

Github Actions does not have good track record. https://www.githubstatus.com/history . You don't need a majority of GitHub users to understand it's owned by Microsoft for there to be an impact on brand value.

I don't consider this a reflection on Azure at all. It's really just a reflection on GitHub under Microsoft's leadership.

Eh, I'm no Microsoft fan but it used to have issues before the acquisition too. I can't really remember if it was better or worse.

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