And when they do go down, how long will they be unavailable? When this happens (and it will happen) please post here so we can say "why are you running infrastructure yourself?"
Have we as an industry forgot how to make systems? that's pretty telling if so.
Why are people so utterly afraid of running their own systems.
If a SaaS platform goes down it's followed by "#hugops; running large systems is hard!", when someone says "Well, if it's hard, why not break it into smaller pieces and run it myself" it's met directly with "Do you think you can do better!?!".
Honestly, probably, maybe not. Why does it matter?
Those two things cannot be true simultaneously. You cannot say "running big systems is hard" and "they can run a big system better than you can run a small system".
I'm not going to fall into the trap of arguing points like the fact that if you own the data you can have your own D/R & backup strategies and the fact you can run maintenance's on your own time (hell: you can run maintenance's to migrate things around, which is more than github can do, which is not an indictment of them, just the nature of being a hosted service).
Honestly, I miss sysadmins. People who were not afraid of servers, even if they said "no" sometimes. Because, you know, being afraid of servers and hosting things is just pathetic.
When you run your own servers, not only do you need to maintain them, you are also responsible for their certification and getting them audited.
As a manager in a medium sized company, I think it is essential to identify what "needs building" and what could be bought to ensure the needs of stakeholders are met in a timely manner.
Back when I was working in eCommerce (PCI-DSS Tier 1, Cardholder data on premises) it was basically impossible to use hosted services.
As then, it is now: "Compliance" is just enough nebulous of a word to prevent critical thinking.
Sure you can build your own infrastructure but don’t pretend that’s superior. Each has its pros and cons.
The last line probably is making fun of their reaction — any person as dogmatic as the parent commenter would comment someone with their own infrastructure going down with that comment.
They can absolutely be true simultaneously. In fact, I can't name a logic system where those two statements comprise a contradiction. They are logically completely unrelated to each other.
Now I’ll tell you the real problem with it: it worked great for people who were located in the U.S., but it was terrible for certain remote employees due to increased latency, and the fix for that would be to set up a complicated replication setup that puts data closer to people not near the main instance.
There’s obviously other issues, but that is one that is probably commonly overlooked that most SaaS solutions can do better on.
I currently manage an internal gitlab instance with some remote coworkers, but I haven't heard any complaints about latency. Although tbf, I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of what gitlab supports
When I moved to a new company, the GitLab instance was still up, and last I was aware, many years down the road, it is still in use. Feature-wise, we were very much satisfied, and the GitLab CI model with Docker executors worked very well for us.
If something like Git went down — which it never — it was a few clicks away from coming back
Working with competent people is a blast
Worst case is losing commits between going down and backups, but even then it'll be minimal if you set your backup to simply push to a another origin.
I pay for someone else to worry about most services, but git doesn't have to be one of them.
Very simple to set up, and as long as your data volume is not lost (which can happen, but is very rare), such a system would recover from a host failure by itself faster than most people could react to it going down. In the unlikely case that you lose the EBS volume, you'd just recover from snapshots manually.
DNS goes down for a particular dot com? BGP hijinks? Backhoe through the major fibre serving your workplace?
All of these are going to happen and will lead to downtime out of your control or the control of the SaaS provider.
Thankfully git is designed to be decentralised and developers can continue to work even if they have to use paper books as reference material and not Stack Overflow.