Hacker News Reader

Comment by number6 | Hacker News Reader

It's already not done by Github. Invest the time and you will be on a better path.

I used to do OPs for a living, so I’m a bit aware of the tradeoff involved - and for me, the math doesn’t work out. We’d need three or four people with knowledge of the setup - I can’t be the only one since I want to go on vacation from time to time. Others have the same right. Sometimes people fall ill or are unavailable. We could scrape together enough folks and train them, but it’s honestly not something I want to track and invest time in. GitHub had its outages, but none that would affect us massively.

If you already have internal infrastructure and a moderately competent operations team for that infrastructure, the calculus for you may be different. Blindly assuming that I’m wrong is not a sign that you’re aware of the tradeoffs.

Your logic is unfortunately being cast into the reason-devoid abyss of HN commenters consistently overestimating the value of the lone wolf, "competent" Linux admin.

Say you don't understand opportunity cost in software development without saying it.

I won't delve too deeply on the obvious: most "competent Linux sysadmins" have a very over-inflated sense of their own skill set, and tend make for toxic team members.

Most software development shops are in the business of developing their particular software, not deploying and self-managing DVCS, much less hosting, monitoring etc...

Sure, could one person set up a Git/GitLab system? Absolutely. Can they operationalize it effectively? Not really... the bus problem is a thing and anyone that thinks tying the entirety of a system's uptime to one individual is an operational improvement over GitHub's outage SLA is deluding themselves.

Just joined a company that self hosts Gitlab (and everything else, there's zero cloud) but is 100% remote. So far everything has been seamless and there's a large enough infra team to solve these issues if they arise :)

As I wrote, it's a matter of what you focus on - I've run CI systems and internal git hosts for large organizations as part of my work. There are very valid reasons to do so, but cost alone is rarely a compelling one - an on-site enterprise gitlab license is roughly as expensive as hosted github seat, and the community edition is somewhat limited.

And it's definitely possible to run gitlab or any other git hosting solution on-site with little downtime. There's no magic or arcane knowledge involved. It just takes serious effort to do so - more than a single lone wolf sysadmin can provide. All their skills are worth nothing if they're sick and in hospital or on a beach holiday.

At some point you will need a pack of fierce sysadmins, not the lone wolf, as dangerous he might be. If you forget to scale your ops team, you gonna have problems. Guess it's a strategy thing: do I want to rely on a third party or do I want to manage my own people and processes for this. In any case I habe to assess the risks and plan ahead.

> At some point you will need a pack of fierce sysadmins, not the lone wolf, as dangerous he might be.

Maybe, but also maybe not. And then that still doesn't mean I want them to focus on running git/gitlab. I mean we're doing stuff that revolves around the rust compiler and we have operations people easily capable of running gitlab around, but their primary task is something else - they're building systems on top of that. Do I want to re-task - or even just side-track them - into running gitlab?

Once you reach a certain size, you can have an internal ops team that's responsible for providing internal infrastructure, but to what extend is that really different from giving github/gitlab money? They'll be about as far removed from the individual teams they're serving as github is. Is that really something I want to put organizational effort into, distracting the org from achieving the goal? It's all tradeoffs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com