GitHub is moving to Rackspace

http://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace

by mojombo • 17 years ago

152 29 17 years ago

fizx• 17 years ago

"If you want something done right, do it yourself." still applies to deployment, apparently. I wonder if/when the "cloud" will grow up. Any bets on how many years until rolling your own deployment infrastructure seems silly?

ajkirwin• 17 years ago

It will ALWAYS be better to do it yourself.

fnid2• 17 years ago

That is far from true. There are lots of things to do to get a site up and running that don't require managing infrastructure.

If you spend time "doing it yourself," then you don't spend a lot of time and money on other parts of the business or the site. There is a scalability path that includes cloud computing.

If you have a large complex site like GitHub with an architecture that isn't conveniently accommodated by your cloud host and you can do it yourself, then it may be better.

Never say never and never say always.

jbellis• 17 years ago

Hiring Rackspace to handle ops isn't exactly "doing it yourself," either. It's just paying for a custom solution instead of using the generic one-size-fits-all "cloud."

Maciek416• 17 years ago

> We’re growing at a rate of over 400 new users and 1000 new repositories every day and these rates are only increasing with time

Crazy. Interesting how the repo growth is faster than the new user growth. That's a lot of projects :)

The point-by-point listing of requirements in this post almost reads like an outline of what EY cannot do. I know that the split is supposedly amicable (on the surface), but this doesn't look so great for EY.

Also interesting is how the requirements of a given application gradually shatter through various ceilings of performance requirements, one notable one here being the following:

> The benefits of running bare metal are obvious and have been empirically proven. We need to have the option to run bare metal when it is appropriate to the task at hand

pyre2• 17 years ago

> Crazy. Interesting how the repo growth is faster than the new user growth. That's a lot of projects :)

Not that surprising. I see a lot of people fork repos only to do nothing with them. It's like forking on github is a 'packrat-ish' form of the 'watching' feature.

I'd be more interested in a number that excluded either all forked repos, or forked repos with no new commits since the fork.

icefox• 17 years ago

I read the 1000 new repos as actual new repos, not forks. But yah if it is just forks that it isn't as impressive.

sachinag2• 17 years ago

The split probably was amicable, frankly. No one disputes that Rackspace can do things that EY can't at this point. People outgrow things all the time. You start just accepting PayPal, and then you add credit cards when enough users want that. You start with an AIR app, but go to dedicated Windows/Mac/Linux apps when you have enough users on each that are worth it.

There's been nothing that I've read - anywhere - that would suggest that someone else shouldn't use EY for their Rails app.

dcurtis• 17 years ago

Except for the incredible price of EY, of course.

It's probably coincidence, but I noticed that all of those other beginning technologies you mention are cheaper than the next step up. Not so with Engine Yard.

It's like buying a Porsche, realizing you need more seats, and then switching to a nice, reliable, high-end Civic.

Tichy• 17 years ago

Any comments from Engine Yard?

trevorturk• 17 years ago

They have a blog post and have some comments in this HN thread as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817864

noodle• 17 years ago

yes, this is more of a follow-up submission to one earlier.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817864

yan• 17 years ago

Github is hosted by 10 virtual machines. I expected this to be much more.

gcv• 17 years ago

...we’ll finally be leaving our shared file system behind. We’ve far exceeded the normal IO tolerances of GFS...

Which GFS? Red Hat Global File System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_File_System)? GlusterFS (http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Glu...)? Something else?

mojombo3• 17 years ago

RedHat GFS. It works great for low and medium IO situations, but can cause sporadic issues on high IO installations like ours, and we aren't able to attach any more servers to it without further impacting performance.

stephenjudkins• 17 years ago

I understand it refers to Global File System.

Given our experience with GlusterFS, I imagine Github would have crashed and burned a long time ago if they were using it. Our use-case (checking if a file exist and grabbing images to occasionally resizing them) ran into all sorts of bizarre issues. We had about 1 million small files.

strlen• 17 years ago

I'm very curious about the move to shared nothing storage. Could any future blog psots be made on that topic?

mojombo3• 17 years ago

Don't worry, I'll be making some technical blog posts down the road explaining in excruciating detail exactly how I've done the federated architecture.

GitHub is moving to Rackspace

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