As long as you didn't go all in on GitHub Actions. Like my company has.
The downtime we do have each year is typically also on our terms, not in the middle of a work day or at a critical moment.
The reason for buying centralized cloud solutions is not uptime, it's to safe the headache of developing and maintaining the thing.
Multi-AZ RDS is 100% higher availability than me managing something.
Anecdotal, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most software doesn’t need to be distributed. But it’s the growth paradigm where we build everything on principles that can scale to world-wide low-latency accessibility.
A UNIX pipe gets replaced with a $1200/mo. maximum IOPS RDS channel, bandwidth not included in price. Vendor lock-in guaranteed.
Meaning the cloud may go down more frequently than small scale self deployments , however downtimes are always on average much shorter on cloud. A lot of money is at stake for clouds providers, so GitHub et al have the resources to put to fix a problem compared to you or me when self hosting.
On the other hand when things go down self hosted, it is far more difficult or expensive to have on call engineers who can actual restore services quickly .
The skill to understand and fix a problem is limited so it takes longer for semi skilled talent to do so, while the failure modes are simpler but not simple.
The skill difference between setting up something locally that works and something works reliably is vastly different. The talent with the latter are scarce to find or retain .
I’ve seen that work first hand to keep critical stuff deployable through several CI outages, and also has the upside of making it trivial to debug “CI issues”, since it’s trivial to run the same target locally
You should aim for this but there are some things that CI can do that you can't do on your own machine, for example running jobs on multiple operating systems/architectures. You also need to use CI to block PRs from merging until it passes, and for merge queues/trains to prevent races.
Ended up expanding this little quip into a blogpost to refer to in the future, feedback welcome! https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/ci-offgrid/
We moved to GHA b/c nobody ever got fired ^W^W^W^W leadership thought eng running CI was not a good use of eng time. (Without much question into how much time was actually spent on it… which was pretty close to none. Self-hosted stuff has high initial cost for the setup … and then just kinda runs.)
Ironically, one of our self-hosted CI outages was caused by Azure — we have to get VMs from somewhere, and Azure … simply ran out. We had to swap to a different AZ to merely get compute.
The big upside to a self-hosted solution is that when stuff breaks, you can hold someone over the fire. (Above, that would be me, unfortunately.) With Github? Nobody really cares unless it is so big, and so severe, that they're more or less forced to, and even then, the response is usually lackluster.
It just workz [;