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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

IMO, they're reaching the point of no return. I don't think they can horizontally-scale their way out of the hole they dug themselves unless they separate their free and paid infra maybe... which doesn't seem likely considering how their other infra changes are going.

In the same way you need to be 10x better for someone to consider switching to your product, if you get 10x worse your competitors get a free 10x by just standing still.

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I think there's a very good chance you're right. Their reputation is obviously severely harmed, and high profile projects like Ghostty leaving may be a canary in the coalmine.

Something creative like separating their free and paid tiers may help them. I suspect the fact that all of this is happening to them along with their migration to Azure is probably complicating their ability to adapt their infrastructure.

What if I told you most enterprise customers don't even use the cloud offering and aren't impacted by any of this? Companies like Apple use GHES, and honestly thats where most of their revenue comes from, not the free offering.

IIRC back in the day they used to have an on-prem Enterprise product? I've never heard of anyone who actually used it though. IMO that would make a lot of sense for a medium-large organization--you still get the familiar Github product but you can take responsibility for your own uptime--like with Jira, Jenkins (nee Hudson), PyPI/Maven/etc.

I wonder if AWS resurrecting CodeCommit might be related. "For all of our warts, we still have a higher rep score than github" would not be an extraordinary thought at this point. There has been some brief chat about looking to github, and I'm so glad we never did. A previous company did migrate to github with no real answers on what the benefit was other than investors ask if your code is in github by name vs some other repo.

How can they not? Surely at GitHub scale there isn't a single component where they were relying on vertical scaling?

For all of it's history (up to and including now possibly?) Github was a big Ruby on Rails monolith. [0] Obviously some things run in their own service, but I'm seeing the core github features fall apart which should be the features packed into the big monolith. If load is this much a problem, not being able to only vertically scale the processes that need the extra headroom is a big problem. Scaling horizontally by just throwing more machines at it, or at least cordoning-off some machines as "the ones that people actually pay for" is all I can think of for an application I can only describe as "accidentally working". Urgency is most-definitely high and that pushes decision making towards permanently-temporary patches instead of actual infra/architecture improvements.

[0] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...

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