If I to hire a contractor to redo my roof, and that roof leaks, whether they worked hard or not is immaterial. They did not do the task in they were paid to do. I'm not going to buy their services again just because their shingles guy was particularly charming.
MS has talented engineers, but that's a complete misdirection. Github is a service in decline: there is nothing wrong with criticizing them.
A corporation is not a person. If your organization cannot handle the load, then you need to adjust your practices. The organization needs to prioritize their paying users. The organization needs to shift people from new features to keeping the lights on. And maybe the organization needs to find another strategy to manage its azure transition.
Are you suggesting that whatever decisions their upper-level management makes that you consider unethical irreversibly and irrevocably taints all the difficult and honorable work that their engineers and operations people are performing?
“Corporations are made up of people” is a strange way to excuse the reality that the ‘bad’ things that corporations do are often decided by top management.
A corporation is just a business formation, and businesses are made of individual people working for it. Those people’s motivations and efforts can, and often should, be evaluated separately from the decisions of management.
Invoking individual workers well-being to defend a billion dollar company is also very strange.
Hot take, if it's traffic is causing issues, throttle your free-tier, pause signups, or stop giving out free things (like runner time).
Would you feel the same way about a colleague who kept causing downtime in your product again and again, seemingly without making any progress in addressing whatever issue was causing their repeated mistakes?
There are web applications out there that are far more complex than GitHub but have much less downtime. It's not like they're facing an unsolvable problem.
You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now.
So, argument to credentialism out of the way... What should we do as consumers if a provider that is a defacto monopoly due to network effects stops functioning?
Scale is everything and a faster computer doesn’t always help. Vertical scaling has limits, and complex distributed systems are complex.
Since you seem to possess a diagnosis and remedy with a reasonable amount of certainty, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you and have you fix all their problems for them. Especially if you can do it while not making the problem worse in any dimension.
I skimmed your profile. Working on the infrastructure for a couple mid-tier video games is a cool accomplishment, but equating this to having solved GitHub level scale rings hollow.
GitHub has a couple orders of magnitude more daily active visitors than the games you worked on had at their peak.
You can make valid criticisms of GitHub without trying to reduce their scale or inflate your credentials to create a false equivalence.
I didn't make one. The sentence after "I have" was literally "you could argue the scales are different."
GitHub spent a decade asking the world to host its code with them. They got what they asked for. You don't get to beg everyone to run services for you for ten years and then have "scaling is hard" be the answer. They should be improving, not regressing over time, and they have some of the worlds best engineers and a trillion dollar corporation behind them, they don't need my sympathy.
The original question is still open and nobody's engaging with it.
Don't you at least see how it's misleading to respond "I have" in response to a question about scaling GitHub-scale services?
Trying to caveat it with "the scales are different" misses the point. The parent commenter was talking about scale.
Discarding legitimate criticism based on some self-determined criteria of intellectual superiority isn't a good look. It smacks of elitism and isn't something conducive to a productive and positive community discussion.
It is unhelpful, rude, condescending, and completely fails to address the underlying problem.
Put more simply: if you get into the ring, you’d better be prepared to take a punch.
I didn't bring their credentials into the conversation. They did.
It’s all about the Golden Rule.
The earn bucket loads of money, they should be planning for exactly that. And testing for it via load testing every day.
Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders.
Genuinely could use a refresher here.
I know I am speaking from a position of some privilege, but I have previously left workplaces that did not allow me to practice good engineering, and I do expect others to do so.
There are literally thousands of people who are ready to ride up the totem pole, it would not be a difficult decision for a bad manager to swing his axe and replace the new head
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/oct21-post-in...
They tried to scale MySql and turn it into Cassandra and then they lost customer data (that they claimed to later recover).
GitHub is promising service they know they cannot meet, not telling you that, and still charging you full price. What's more, one can argue quite convincingly that they're lying about their level of delivered service by not reflecting the actual level of uptime on their status page.
To give benefit of the doubt requires that the other party is not blatantly and overtly acting in bad faith. When they are, you're just apologizing for fraudulent behavior.
It’s not like they don’t know that people like us are counting on them: they recognize that their service is the “dial tone” for much of the world’s software development capability. They are keenly aware of the impact.
What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like?