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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

Boomer opinion but trusting third parties to be critical infrastructure, especially with no SLA in sight, will always end in tears. "The cloud" is very convenient, but its providers will never care about your infrastructure or your customers as much as you will.

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Older millennial here and I agree. If you rely on Github you should at least be have your processes such that you can work around it.

That's the reason why my build agent is self-hosted

3P-maintained infrastructure is what makes civilizations work efficiently. We're not all digging our own wells, generating our own electricity, and burning or burying our own garbage.

You are still supposed to be prepared for outages.

Agreed. So is the issue really then that people were inadequately prepared with backup plans and now they're suffering the consequences?

It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.

Eeh, you always rely on someone else's infrastructure. Even if you are off cloud entirely and own your own datacenter, you still need peering/transit. You still need power (or at least fuel). You can't avoid depending on a DNS infrastructure.

Github does have an SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla. But like virtually all SLAs, it's really just a token gesture. I have never seen an SLA that pays the losses you suffer due to the outage.

People are already saying things like "We need a plan B in case we urgently need to deploy a fix to production, and GitHub Actions is unavailable again".

But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.

And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla

The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.

Boomer here as well, but I'd add that trusting your own org for critical infra usually also ends in tears. Most everything in IT involves failure, including in well designed systems designed by great engineers.

I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.

At this point github is barely managing one nine.

True. I'd be very annoyed if I had anything mission critical on github. While we have everything in the cloud, we do actually self-host that part.

+1 (as a millenial) ... especially given that setting up a git server for non-OSS company code isn't too much of a challenge really. also, no need to self-denigrate this reasonable opinion in preemptive obedience.

GitHub is way more than just a git repo host. It manages code reviews, merge (pull) requests, and has an entire CI/CD workflow engine in it. Replicating all that is a challenge that most orgs are not up to.

Agree. But also, it's affecting everyone equally, whether they have a free personal account or are part of an enterprise account with SLA. Understanding the practical value of an SLA is an interesting problem.

You're right.

However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...

How did this become a boomer opinion? It is proved truth thousand times a day. Not that you shouldn't use third parties - but in this industry you can shrink this exposure to the minimum, and have plan B for anything else.

Boomer who has never had a business? Depending on third party suppliers is business as usual.

Well it's not business at all today!

Arguably, git is decentralized, so contingency plans, like working with local and server repos, should still work.

Truly a boomer opinion. Respect!

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