Github is having a major service outage | Hacker News Reader

Github is having a major service outage

status.github.com

22 pointskaws20 comments

This happens every other week. Does it really need to be posted on Hacker News every time? If you happen to be using Github at the time of the outage, you're going to notice. If you don't happen to be using Github at that time then it doesn't affect you.

This doesn't qualify for the news part of Hacker News.

I wonder how many people who use Github as part of their deployment work flow are impacted by outages like this. I know git is distributed, but I can imagine people with scripts that default to pulling from a github.com origin having to scramble to reconfigure.

This is exactly why we have an internal system which mirrors repos. We've never had our build/deploy process interrupted by GitHub outages because we always use the internal mirror.

Can I ask here? Why do a lot of companies insist on keeping their code on GitHub?

It seems expensive and they have many service outages from DDoS attacks.

It seems like someone could set up their 10 different git servers for a fraction of the price and have greater up-time due to redundancy.

And securing your own isn't rocket science either...

What am I not seeing that is the big draw to github?

There are a lot of companies out there who do not have a system administrator capable of setting up or maintaining (the latter is more difficult and time consuming) its own server. GitHub is a solution to that and is quite cheap.

Is it cheap? If I was hypothetically an app company with many customers I could easily have a thousand private repos.

When I checked github (I tried to check again now but their site is down) it would cost something like $1,500 bucks...It seems like I would be getting gouged.

A thousand repos is a bit much, don't you think? I've worked for some pretty big agencies before and the number of active projects has never been more than 50-60. That's only going to cost you around $50/month.

The reason I say active is because even if you do have a thousand repos, you're surely not maintaining all of them - that would be insane. You would probably have 950 repos which would be better off archived, backed-up, and removed from GitHub.

On surface, 1500 bucks seems very expensive. But if I had 1500 private repos (supposedly that means 1500 or little bit less clients) I'm making so much money that 1500 bucks/month looks very cheap. And still much cheaper than paying for full time sys admin (which doesn't mean that you don't employ one or several).

Having said that, personally, I prefer BitBucket pricing scheme where I can have unlimited private repos and paying per number of users.

Probably for all the "sugar" around git: code reviews and all the other collaborative tools they provide.

1) Developer Familiarity 2) They have one of the first (and best) pull request workflows and people again are familiar with it. 3) They are a big name that you can be sure wont be going anywhere anytime soon 4) For a business spending a little extra to not have the headache of managing it yourself is worth it

That all being said I use CodeBaseHQ for my company's repos as they have a better model of projects with repos in them than just repos.

It's not about git, it's about the addons. The inline code review is amazing. Issue tracker is decent, and with things like huboard easily sufficient for project management. Email notifications are useful, the ability to work from anywhere as long as you have your ssh key invaluable.

The downtimes are... regrettble. But our company moved to github a while ago, and everyone is mostly happy.

We already have redundancy - since git is distributed, Github going down does not impact our development or deployment.

Github provides a great user experience for discussion and managing branches/pull requests. Issue tracking is usable enough that some companies find it sufficient.

The cost is literally unnoticeable for pretty much any company.

"Many" service outages is an exaggeration, I think. It's just selection bias - if you don't use github, and the only time you hear about it is when they get attacked, you'll have an impression that they are under constant attack.

For the companies I have worked at, in short, there was no downside, and decent upside to using it.

Probably a stupid question, but, what are the potential motivators behind DDoS-ing Github?

Two possibilities:

1. Boredom 2. Infamy (although nobody seems to claim responsibility for attacks like this so not sure how that can be a motivating factor - but who knows).

3. Extortion.

4. Competition 5. General maliciousness (wohoo I managed to annoy so many people)

GitHub has competitors.

Which competitors in particular are you suggesting might be DDoS'ing them?

An interesting idea and I have honest question: would anyone in the industry risk DDOS-ing a competitor?

I mean, sooner or later they would get caught, the news would spread like a wildfire, that would really be great PR for the attacked.

Any ideas on that? Does anyone have a case where that actually happened?

>I mean, sooner or later they would get caught, the news would spread like a wildfire, that would really be great PR for the attacked.

That's nowhere near certain.

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