Microsoft turns to AWS as GitHub faces AI capacity crunch

https://runtimewire.com/article/microsoft-github-aws-ai-capacity-crunch

by ilreb • 1 month ago

154 68 1 month ago

runtimewire.com

csbrooks• 1 month ago

commits were on pace to hit 14 billion in 2026, up from 1 billion in 2025

So AI means 14x the checkins? That's not 14x features completed, but still... wow.

nomel2• 1 month ago

Seems very reasonable, from my use. I commit much more often, as checkpoints, with branch rules that prevent force pushes/deletions, so the agents can't delete anything. And, suspect MS is only counting commits, and not the eventual squashes to one commit.

larusso• 1 month ago

And every checking runs a whole CI run?

We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state. We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons. We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.

N_Lens2• 1 month ago

AI has 100x'd our productive capacity such that we're moving at unforeseen speeds at digging holes and refilling them!

shimman• 1 month ago

This is too generous, they aren't even filling in the holes.

BobbyTables22• 1 month ago

Is that even a lot?

Spread over a year, roughly estimating a generous 4 kbytes of data per commit, comes out to a throughput of a little under 2 MB/s.

Of course, it isn’t spread out uniformly and there is also a lot of hashing and other things going on.

Maybe pulls and clones drive more I/O ?

3eb7988a16632• 1 month ago

I suspect there is a cacophony of work that happens when a commit hits the server. That request needs to get replicated, git repositories need to be repacked, pull requests need to calculate diffs, CI jobs need to execute, on and on.

That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.

3eb7988a16632• 1 month ago

I am surprised it is that low. The Bun Zig-to-Rust AI port was 6755 commits in like two weeks. If you make 10 commits per working day, that is 2500/year.

While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.

Aperocky2• 1 month ago

That commit count alone should not become any problem for infrastructure, even for Azure. They probably developed some ungodly mess with actions that did not/could not translate very well on Azure infrastructure.

kcartlidge• 1 month ago

With agentic stuff there's also a large amount of commits which are not code.

For instance with OpenClaw and similar, they often simulate institutional and short term memory with markdown files in folders. Other tooling that runs companies using agents as staff, for example, do the same - but also with files for inputs, outcomes, handovers etc.

All of this means a lot of extra churn as these kinds of files can be changing with every interaction not just every traditional commit point.

ashishb• 1 month ago

I wonder what percentage of pull requests are cascading updates caused by dependabot and multiple code review bots reviewing those PRs.

My belief is it is likely 1% or more. And likely coming in as an avalanche.

jf• 1 month ago

I helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner.

One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.

jiggawatts• 1 month ago

Wait, are you trying to tell me that 1/100th the speed at 50x the price isn’t a great offer for Microsoft’s customers!?

Heathen lies!

Oh, wait… we have to use it? Oh, that’s terrible…

winrid• 1 month ago

I had a feeling this was all related to someone trying to run a database on networked disks.

every fucking time

not_kurt_godel• 1 month ago

Saving this for the next time someone trots out the "All cloud providers are the same" line

dr_kretyn• 1 month ago

If they pull out "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." on AWS then I'm going to be impressed beyond mad.

solumunus• 1 month ago

How is this relevant or possible here.

Aperocky2• 1 month ago

That only work on smaller business/organization.

citizenpaul• 1 month ago

My favorite part of this is that MS is just bending over to take it lest the gods scorn their "free" training data temple.

locusofself• 1 month ago

I have to imagine this is very temporary.

pjmlp• 1 month ago

So this is an Hotmail moment?

UnlockedSecrets• 1 month ago

Is this in reference to something that should be linked for those not alive or in the know at the time?

kqgnkqgn2• 1 month ago

I'm not sure if it was entirely true, but there are stories that after Microsoft bought Hotmail in the mid-90's, they quickly attempted to move them from FreeBSD (?) to Windows NT. But it failed miserably, and they went back to the original stack for another ~decade.

pmontra• 1 month ago

Maybe this from 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/01/microsoft...

fortran77• 1 month ago

Still, it’s mostly text. You’d think it wouldn’t be that much of an issue.

andyst• 1 month ago

and programming is just typing!

stonogo• 1 month ago

and now it's not even that!

rickette2• 1 month ago

Easy to criticize this, but I rather see GitHub survive than fail under its own success. So thanks for acting on this MS!

theojulienne• 1 month ago

They were originally on their own datacenters + huge amounts of burst and ancillary stuff in AWS, the internal push to move away from "the competitor's cloud" after the acquisition was huge and entirely stupid. I'm ex-GitHub and was one of the annoying people constantly saying GitHub should only move where it was provably the best option for GitHub - the third best major cloud provider is likely never it on merits alone.

If this story is true, it's good that they finally realised that GitHub's performance and availability mattered more than using Microsoft's products. It would mean someone finally came to their senses rather than forcing a wholesale push to Azure - but I bet they still want to have it both ways even if they concede some AWS now.

jeffrallen2• 1 month ago

In the early 2000's they did the same dumb thing to WebTV: forced a move from Solaris to Windows, that completely wrecked the engineering team's velocity and motivation.

rickette2• 1 month ago

Thanks for the insight, changes my perspective.

inopinatus• 1 month ago

If there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand.

This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.

TurdF3rguson• 1 month ago

I wonder how that translates to Blue Origin and how they managed to be so completely outclassed by SpaceX.

anonymousiam• 1 month ago

SpaceX had been doing their thing for a while before Blue Origin got started. It seems to me that Bezos never wanted to try to catch up with Musk. His approach is not "move fast and break things", but instead more old-school (try to get things done right as best you can, and only test when necessary). Despite the gap, Bezos is slowly gaining ground. He's flying passengers and he's winning government contracts. The USG likes to have a second source for everything, and they're fed up with Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed, ULA (who have all absorbed some of the other space and launch startups). So Bezos is capitalizing on the US government's desire to have real competition, and a second source for launch (besides ULA).

There's also this funny outcome from the SpaceX IPO: https://x.com/ICannot_Enough/status/2065449141946253390

JumpCrisscross• 1 month ago

Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon.

(Probably just tea leaves. If you wanted to be extra spicy, you’d note that Jassy just threw Fable under the bus.)

CSMastermind• 1 month ago

Doesn't most of Anthropics revenue come from AWS still?

shrubble• 1 month ago

AWS gets a lot of money from both the unclassified government work they do plus the more secretive work. If they were required to disclose as part of that, they would disclose - why put all those contracts at risk?

VirusNewbie• 1 month ago

Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon.

Anthropic has been very strategic about playing all the big cloud providers off each other. They're also in desperate need of inference, and I don't think AWS has the capacity to scale up as fast as they want. AWS may also be trying to 'force' them to use Graviton, and I don't think Anthropic is as big of a fan.

kuschku3• 1 month ago

What kind of vibecoded website is this?

- the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer

- the title tag doesn't seem to work properly (just shows the URL in the tab title, on Chrome and Firefox)

- 2007-style keyword stuffing in meta keywords

- the entire page is client-side react with a completely empty body?

The agency that built it even proudly states on their website that they vibecode everything: https://gradientnoise.com/

EDIT: Turns out, the articles are mostly AI-generated as well? https://blog.ryanmerket.com/how-i-built-runtimewire-a-one-pe...

And this is the gate that lets me sleep: a story only auto-publishes if the editor says PASS, the risk score is comfortably low, a hero image exists, and it has at least one source

mujib772• 1 month ago

works fine on the phone

kuschku3• 1 month ago

I can't confirm that.

Mobile Chrome can't show a tab title either https://i.k8r.eu/3vVCTQ.png

And the infinite scroll causes the page to constantly jump back up, again preventing me from accessing the footer

And of course with JS disabled you get nothing at all (which affects RSS readers, kindle devices, etc)

plaguuuuuu• 1 month ago

I've read more than a handful of AI-generated articles on HN recently. The last one even had a fake author with a fake face. despite the site insisting it had human editors and reviews. The web property was created by a marketing/AI agency from (AFAIK) a European country with zero employees credentialed to edit hard science news articles, also zero employees with English names and faces like the supposed author.

The interslop is real. Simulacra and simulation.

ffsm8• 1 month ago

The dead Internet theory is long established at this point

patates• 1 month ago

the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer

Let's be fair, it's possible to reach the footer! You keep pressing the end key for like a minute or two and 665 requests (with embedded base64 encoded images and all) later, you have your footer.

So saying it's possible to reach the footer would be technically correct - the best kind of correct!

Walf• 1 month ago

But the hero image is an AI homage to cute paper-craft, to remind us that people cannot or will not put in that level of effort any more, so it's okay!

albert_e• 1 month ago

I "love" infinite scroll on websites where important links like finding a way to contact customer support for help is only in the footer that you can never reach.

ryanmerket2• 1 month ago

No agency. Just a one man shop. What kind of vibecoded website is this? It's a Replit built site along wtih my 20 years of experience building websites from scratch. It was launched this month, so it's a bit rough around the edges, but we're off to a great start.

jordemort• 1 month ago

yeah, pointless AI-generated header image --> close tab

amazingman• 1 month ago

Nature abhors a monoculture.

alibarber• 1 month ago

I was recently looking at a Python project to learn a bit about RTC and just generally hack around and try something out.

https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc

It was fun and I found the code nice and helpful.

I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.

N_Lens2• 1 month ago

After a decade and hundreds of billions in spend, Microsoft has finally upgraded from Azure to AWS.

sreekanth850• 1 month ago

Soon we can see limits on free github account. I guess that is clean way to end this AI slop fiasco.

aykutseker• 1 month ago

GitHub used to get code after someone had thought about it.

Agents are starting to use it while they think.

daft_pink• 1 month ago

They should have made it work with hono workers so they could scale to infinity with free edge deployment on cloudflare - Senior JS Developer (Kai Lentit)

fuckinpuppers• 1 month ago

Azure is hot garbage

Microsoft turns to AWS as GitHub faces AI capacity crunch

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