Github service outage

https://status.github.com/#content

by manojlds • 14 years ago

44 34 14 years ago

status.github.com

gurgeous2• 14 years ago

I posted this as a separate thread but maybe I'll ask here. We're dead in the water due to this latest outage. They seem to hit weekly now. I'm considering switching to another provider today.

How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability? Features are sort of irrelevant compared to recurring downtime.

astrodust• 14 years ago

Since git is a distributed version control system, why not create replicas of your important repos so in the event of an outage you have alternatives? Anything with a working ssh can be used as a host, it doesn't have to be fancy. GitHub's hooks make it easy to write things that can react to push notifications.

BitBucket has made strides in improving their front-end app, but it's still far, far behind GitHub in terms of features and integration.

yebyen• 14 years ago

Yes, it's distributed

I use mr to keep my multiple repositories in sync (And they all laugh at me!) across hosts in places where git submodule seems inappropriate and there's no android 'repo' manifest.

If you're paying, "but it's distributed" does not ease the pain. You didn't buy a GitHub account because of the 'Git' -- you can get that for free! You bought it because of the 'Hub' and if you made it your hub, now you're dead in the water, scrambling to find another place to coordinate.

At least I guess that's the point of this article. Not sure. Doesn't look down to me, and I'm not a paying user.

*EDIT: I see it's only some users/repositories that are down, and it's not a general outage. I wonder if it's only paying users.

ncavig• 14 years ago

If you want more control I recommend the open source gitlabhq (http://gitlabhq.com/) - we run it for our repos, plus you can be in control of number of repos allowed per user. I consistently create repos for proof of concept or side projects that I wouldn't normally be able to do in github unless I wanted them all public. I don't particularly want people seeing unfinished or unpolished code

Gitlabhq has worked well for us, and it's open source.

Neural_Blaze• 14 years ago

The funny thing is, you can't install GitLab right now because their github repository is down :)

selectnull2• 14 years ago

I use and can recommend bitbucket. I can recall one outage in the last couple of months (and that was website only, ssh push and pull were working just fine).

Also, have in mind that bitbucket is much smaller than github so they might not have their scaling/stability issues yet. Their status page is http://status.bitbucket.org/

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

That's the one thing keeping me off bitbucket is the fact that nobody else is there. Admittedly their pricing is better (especially wrt. private repos, something i'm still not ready to shell out cash for), but the interface seems to be a Github ripoff.

Github is quickly becoming the social network for coding - there's no reason to use an also-ran copycat who lacks the "social" part. (And this isn't to disparage Atlassian, they're one of my favorite companies!)

famousactress• 14 years ago

Weekly? My experience must be different. This is definitely the worst one I've noticed in two years of use.. but I think I've maybe noticed issues once every 6-8 months or so. Not weekly.

arohner• 14 years ago

It's closer to weekly than biennial. At GitHub's size, there are minor hiccups that affect a small number of users more often than any one user will see.

My company (https://circleci.com) uses GitHub OAuth and checks out code as its core functionality. Believe me, I get emails every time GitHub has an issue for 30 seconds.

rabialam• 14 years ago

Agreed. This is the first major outage I've noticed as a user of github in several years. I have my grievances with GitHub, but the pull requests, issues and organization systems are really useful for me to have in a team setting, so I couldn't really see myself moving to another code management solution -- what would my alternatives be? JIRA? Lighthouse? And that doesn't even touch on the social aspect -- nothing is quite like github in terms of community vibrancy and activity. I've found so much useful information and documentation scattered through issues and forks that are all through github that I couldn't imagine finding otherwise -- or at least, it would be more difficult to find elsewhere. I really like being able to associate commits to issues via commit message. Still, this kind of outage definitely makes me thinking about having a some kind of a mirror long term -- haven't been able to use my issues all day, and that's kind of frustrating.

ergo14• 14 years ago

Bitbucket works quite reliably nowdays. I dont remember any outage in recent months - the service improved greatly.

snprbob86• 14 years ago

I realize that reliability is important; GitHub should improve here.

However, my experience was that avoiding dependencies on an external server was the natural way of working with Git-based deploys. Our deploy scripts pushed the current branch from the local repository to the servers directly. This meant that the version tested locally, whether a hotfix on a developers box or the last synced/tested version on the CI server, was the exact version deployed. Granted, the scripts could have specified the exact revision to fetch from an external server, but since the deploy source and target were already communicating, why not just `git push` and a commit hook rather than various `ssh git ...` steps? It won't scale to hundreds of boxes, but by that point you surely have a local dist source for much more than just Git repositories.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability?

Used to be very unreliable. It's gotten better, but there are still issues once in a while. There was a big downtime mid-september (a good 3h of nothing): http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/09/19/post-mortem-on-our-avai... and there were a few issues e.g. yesterday due to a screwy deploy.

edit: checking the recent twitter stream, a few issues on the 28th, degraded performances on the 16th, broken newsfeeds on the 11th, brief network blip on the 5th, maintenance on September 29th, severe crash on September 19th, deploy issue on September 17th. Not sure you'll get much more reliability out of it compared to github. Though you could use one as a backup for the other one.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Ouch, this bit "Features are sort of irrelevant compared to recurring downtime." is key. If you're going to build a network based business, you have to invest in being operationally nimble. Just because DevOps isn't 'sexy' doesn't mean it isn't important :-) (and no I'm not saying that just because I am an operations guy, but I feel the pain when looking for DevOps engineers)

I also feel GitHub's pain. We're constantly dealing with things that come in over the transom at Blekko and getting a constant stream of sales guys and gals trying to tell us how their product will solve all our issues, and as I tell folks, if you don't know how to solve the problem how is it that you trust this solution being offered is sufficient? I've known people who will respond, "Well if it isn't we'll just beat on them until it is!" but that doesn't help the 'gurgeous's of the world who are trying to use your service while your vendor it getting beaten about the head and shoulders with a tuna.

I've advised a couple of startup founders who had under 'scaling' in their proposals "EC2/S3 totally scales" that while it was true, lacquer oil paints create masterpiece paintings, except if you don't know why a masterpiece is a masterpiece, just having the paint won't get you there.

gurgeous2• 14 years ago

I agree completely. I've had to deal with scaling challenges before, most memorably at Urbanspoon. I'm not judging anyone. This stuff is just hard.

As an entrepreneur/engineer my day is already jam packed. We have a tiny, full-stack engineering team here. I really just don't have time to babysit services that suffer from significant downtime. Certainly I could mitigate the issue by distributing our repos to multiple places, self-hosting, etc. but I'd prefer to just use something reliable.

ishbits2• 14 years ago

We use git because I am part of a distributed and often disconnected work force.

ishbits2• 14 years ago

Re: Bitbucket. I have repos at both. And have a script that runs hourly to create local mirrors of my git repos. I see connection failures often to github (perhaps very intermittent), but I never do for BitBucket.

It was my cron script erroring on a github backup today that made me notice the outage.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

> We're dead in the water due to this latest outage.

Why is that? Git is distributed, so while it might be a bit inconvenient, it shouldn't be difficult to create an alternative solution, especially if it only needs to be temporary.

purephase• 14 years ago

This is unfortunate. I realize that it is distributed, but when you're in a major push it really sucks to have to scramble around to setup another host to get working again.

I love their service, but they really need to get their reliability issues figured out.

f055• 14 years ago

I have bad luck, this happens every time I want to note an idea into a task...

prezjordan• 14 years ago

Working on a school project with a friend, and we've been unable to push for several hours.

Funny part is, we were configuring his MacBook with his GitHub credentials, and initially thought we had some sort of error uploading his SSH keys. Turns out it was a service outage.

Quekster• 14 years ago

GitHub seems to go down way too often nowadays.

Github service outage

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