It's like when your boss let's you "resign" so you don't have to tell a future employer you were fired. EY was fired.
This is another failure of Freemium. GH is only able to provide such large repos because they get free infrastructure.
I can't really blame EY for bailing. The partnership is no longer equitable. GH is getting something for nothing. I shouldn't say nothing, it's something, but it's not enough.
It's just a conclusion that makes the most sense for both sides of the arrangement.
This really shows poorly on the guys at Github. It sounds like EY went out of their way to accommodate the growth rate (I have yet to hear the Github guys dispute that) and just because EY was asking to be paid for all the hard work, Github was unwilling to, for once, be paid...Github ditched them.
One of the things I appreciate about EngineYard, and the Ruby development world in general, is that they appreciate the benefit of helping to incubate open-source and small startup operations. It's about re-investing back into the community. They did this when they helped incubate a startup company with some great programming minds behind it, which they knew would assist in the rapid development of open-source Ruby libraries.
But it seems GitHub hasn't absorbed any of that mindset by their move to ditch their supporter as soon as they're in a position to show appreciation for the help by actually paying for the service they receive for once.
FWIW, I first heard about Engine Yard through GitHub, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
After reading more into the thread and the issue being mainly with GFS, then perhaps it won't be that difficult to improve performance at Rackspace because they'll control the hardware and be able to use any file system they want.
Knowing why they can't run at EY clears up a lot of the questions. The scalability at EY is simply too limiting for GH, paid or not. It probably doesn't make sense for EY to install a new file system simply because GH wants it and GH probably can't afford, or doesn't want to afford the amount that it'd take for EY to move all their customers to a more scalable file system.
If you look beyond all the drama here, this really is a rational decision on both sides. It's a testament to the community here that two groups parting ways in such a dramatic way can both participate in this very comment thread together and with civility. It speaks volumes and I think everyone involved has handled themselves very well.
I can't imagine this is a pleasurable experience for either group, but when one party wants something the other is unwilling to provide and in this case, it's true of both EY (different file system) and GH (compensation for the change) it's rare for both to understand the other side's perspective and avoid irrational name calling and bickering. I'm glad this breakup hasn't gone down that route.
For all we know it could have been equally lopsided in the other direction: if EngineYard was sending them tons of traffic through free accounts, it could have proved costly in terms of support and negative effect on paying customers.
We of course don't know.