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by Kelteseth 1134 days ago
Why don't we all collectively mirror our repos to gitlab and switch development to there during the monthly outage?
6 comments

GitHub outages aren't nearly long or often enough to consider this. Git is distributed, just keep working locally until GitHub is back up. GitHub outages are nowhere near the threshold of pain I'd require to introduce a second Git hosting provider to the mix.

Really, GitHub outages barely hurt at all. It's not like an AWS or Cloudflare outage which is more likely to be a production disaster. Every outage a bunch of people on HN start screaming about owning their own on-prem destiny or wondering why we're still on GitHub. Nothing changes because it's not nearly as bad as those people are making it out to be. Life is all about tradeoffs.

Depends how your company is set up. Some people can't run tests locally and just push commits to have some magic run the tests online.
Enterprise says I have to use this unreliable garbage.
It's definitely no less reliable than GitLab, where a good 300GB of database data got deleted in production by accident...
And how often that has happened? Seems a little harsh
Just like calling GitHub "unreliable garbage"...
Github has been down hundreds of times this year alone. They have reported outages 72 times this year and there are multiple times when services are unavailable and they don't report it on the status page.

I don't see how the two situations are comparable

> there are multiple times when services are unavailable and they don't report it on the status page.

There's no evidence that the exact same doesn't happen with GitLab. I've had it (consistently) 500 on me in the past when there's nothing on their status page to indicate any issues.

gitlab.com or self-hosted?
gitlab.com is implied since it happening on a self-hosted instance would have nothing to do with gitlab as a service (they can't be responsible for your on-site backups).

> Trying to restore the replication process, an engineer proceeds to wipe the PostgreSQL database directory, errantly thinking they were doing so on the secondary. Unfortunately this process was executed on the primary instead. The engineer terminated the process a second or two after noticing their mistake, but at this point around 300 GB of data had already been removed.

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-datab...

Ah I see the link. I'd caution that many people choose between github.com, gitlab.com, and gitlab self-hosted. The reliability of self-hosted gitlab is meaningful, especially when operated competently. People need to know if there are safeguards or foot guns. Backups alone can't prevent data loss.
Substitute capital expenditure for operating expenses? With interest rates going up? It was already a tough sell with negative real rates...
Yep. We could self host. But it's forbidden.
We migrated recently. On prem was never down, but since moving to GitHub were more down than up.
https://status.gitlab.com/ lists 27 incidents this year, so far.
https://www.githubstatus.com/history lists 72 incidents since January
The point isn't that GitLab has more, the point is that running these things at global scale is pretty complicated, and everyone has problems. "Just switch to GitLab" is pithy but isn't in itself an actual solution.
You can self-host GitLab and have few, if any, incidents that get resolved very quickly. Worked for a company that had no incidents that I observed in ~3 years, now work at a company that had ~2 incidents in 1.5 years.
We have a self-hosted Premium instance and have 30min of downtime _every day_ while the database is frozen and backed up. We've been told that it's a known issue being discussed with GitLab but that could just be CYA. But in any case, it's the "at scale, while changing" that tends to cause problems.

Perhaps this is a continuing argument for self-hosting, especially if you don't have to expose the instance publicly. But then, if that's an option, you can also self-host GitHub (though I have heard less anecdotes about the stability of that).

> We have a self-hosted Premium instance and have 30min of downtime _every day_ while the database is frozen and backed up.

I'm confused. You can do zero-downtime backups and replication of databases. I don't know what your company / Gitlab are doing but it seems wrong.

You can self-host GitHub Enterprise too.
GitLab is quite a bit more expensive. If you have GitHub Enterprise with the security features, it's $70/month/user whereas you'll need to get GitLab Ultimate for the security features, which is $99/month/user.
Feature mismatch of anything outside Git. And no one wrote the tooling needed to synchronize issues, pull/merge requests, ... back and forth.
Even so, for a lot of devs its still easier as a temporary collaboration point than sending patches via mail.
why particularly GitLab?