The problem is bad design and/or integration of components. VMS clusters over leased lines went years without outages. Record was 17 years at a rail yard. They also did rolling upgrades across both different OS versions and CPU architectures. The methods are public if any competitors want to match or exceed them:

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na...

These modern cloud services using Linux ecosystem are doing rolling outages instead. I'm amazed people keep making them dependencies. Maybe their local systems using similar technology went down more often. Maybe this is an improvement. I'd still put mine on an OpenBSD or OpenVMS cluster if it was business-critical with lots of money on the line. I want it staying up, up, up. :)

Modern apps are designed to deal with part of them being down - it is the core upgrade strategy.

VMS clusters were (and modern equivalents are) awesome, but they have a different speed of innovation / development.

It is a trade off - perfect uptime, but that new feature could take a year, or 99.9% uptime, but it can be written and deployed tomorrow.

Their development velocity might have been due to their management or internal culture. You can get most of those results faster and on a budget. The best evidence was the startup behind FoundationDB continually improving their product in highly-competitive space while doing QA like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc

Generally, on top of code reviews, one can get high return with minimal labor and hardware with a combo of Design-by-Contract, contract/spec/property-based testing, low-F.P. static analysis, and fuzzing with contracts in as runtime checks. That's my default recommendation.

In Github's case, they also might have access to both closed and open tools that Microsoft Research makes. MSR is awesome if you've never checked them out. Two examples applicable to system reliability and security:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/ironclad/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/p-safe-...

Plus some of their other tools in various states of usability:

https://rise4fun.com/

Our Erlang nodes are never down. We do live code updates and have gone several years now with no downtime.

There are quite a decent list of competitors, all of which have similar or sometimes better offerings. There are also plenty of fully free and open source solutions, should you want to do things yourself.

The Github monopoly is driven by its users.

I tried gitlab but I hated the web interface. It was lacking in so many departments. Any other alternatives to github to try?

What was lacking? The GUI on Gitlab is phenomenal imo.

On gitlab,repository and code searching function should be improved loll

Same could be said for github. I regularly literally copy and paste a variable name from a file on Github itself - paste it into the search, and it finds 0 results.

HOW COULD YOU FIND NOTHING?! Not even the file I copied it from? A simple grep search would've had no issue and would've been faster!

Yeah, I always end up having to clone the repo to grep.

- sr.ht (OSS, managed, self-hosting)

- Gitlab (sorta OSS, managed, self-hosting)

- Gitea (OSS, self-hosting)

- Gogs (OSS, self-hosting)

- Bitbucket (managed)

- Azure Repos (managed)

- Google Cloud Repositories (managed)

To be honest, Gitlab has come a long way. And things like search that people point out doesn't work well on Github either, where code search is super broken and often skips results or find nothing where a git grep would drown you in results.

This. The UI is quite primitive compared to GitHub IMHO. That and Gitlab is littered with half-implemented or poorly implemented workflows. The MR workflow to support code reviews was never really thought through.

Hi, GitLab employee, is there anything else (besides the MR workflow) specifically that you think we should improve? UI-wise or whatever else you've noticed

> The MR workflow to support code reviews was never really thought through.

Uh, I've been using this for quite some time in GitLab and never found it lacking. Curious what do you find missing there?

Bitbucket is pretty good

Bitbucket suffers from all the usual problems of an Atlassian-product: A badly designed user-interface, and frequent stability/downtime problems.

Problem 1 with Atlassian is they're using Java.

Problem 2 with Atlassian is that their portfolio is entirely made up out of stuff they bought up over years, with wildly different coding and UI/UX standards/history.

I think you're right about a general move towards a Git monoculture (as opposed to a GitHub one), but there are dozens of great Git repo hosting/collaboration companies - GitLab, Bitbucket & SourceForge to name a few of the bigger ones