
Left GitLab for GitHub after today's crash - rxminus
https://medium.com/@riknauta/farewell-gitlab-hey-github-sigh-8e743397cf61
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neeksHN
Pretty fantastical post, seeing as Github had a severe outage on 1.27.2017.
I'd also guesstimate Github has at least 2 to 3 major outages per year (a mix
of DDoS and human errors)

Setting up a DigitalOcean droplet or AWS instance would have only added a few
dollars and extra minutes to your transfer today. The benefit would be to
reduce dependencies on external service that are vital to your core product.

Always remember, when you don't host your code you don't have full control of
your code. To me having 100% ownership of your source should be the foundation
to any software-driven organization

~~~
oompahloompah
This really applies to more than just code. Any time you rely on an outside
provider you're opening up yourself to risks. Ultimately it comes down to
whether or not you trust the ability of the provider to provide you with
service more than you trust your own ability.

Really though, this situation is just re-hashing the fact that everyone has to
be careful about single points of failure. If you're screwed because a single
service provider you rely on is down you need to think about increasing
redundancy. This goes for absolutely everything whether the service is for
DNS, VPSes, or version control repositories.

~~~
WettowelReactor
Any time you rely on an outside provider you shift your risks around. Thinking
that you eliminate risks by hosting yourself is simply not true. Whether using
an outside provider increases your risks requires a case by case analysis.

------
tylerjd
I host my own GitLab instance - if it goes down all I have is myself to blame
- and honestly with their pre-packaged software it's super simple. And took me
another 15 minutes to get the GitLab CI workers running. I also mirror to
GitHub for public projects.

GitLab ran into an issue many startups do - they grew very rapidly and didn't
hire enough people. They make a fantastic piece of open source software, and
the self-hosted version will continue to serve as my main Git server, but
seeing as they've had so many issues with their hosted platform, I will be
weary for some time to come.

~~~
rxminus
I'm not disputing that...but like I mentioned in the post; I'm ruthless not
spending time on things that aren't our core service. I don't host our own
mail either, I pay for GSuite :-P.

~~~
tylerjd
As a business, I completely agree - streamlining to focus on what matters. As
a individual person, I am also the kind who hosts my own mail server - and,
well, everything else <\- Not a fan of the NSA.

~~~
rxminus
Then fair enough my friend :-) This is Hacker news after all!

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sumitgt
Genuine question. Why did the GitLab outage prevent this person from working?
Couldn't you just keep on working as usual and then rebase with origin once
the service is back up? Decentralization is the best feature of Git.

~~~
rxminus
Because the idiot (i.e. ME!) had pushed on his home computer and wanted to
pull his work on his office computer. Don't ask me why they're different
ATM...work in progress.

~~~
mjolk
This doesn't make you an idiot. Being able to trust that this basic
functionality (access controlled push/pull) will be available is why I pay for
GitHub and decided to wait until GitLab stopped having avoidable, serious
outages before considering them as an alternative.

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flukus
How do we know github doesn't have the same potential issue? This is a problem
with all hosted solutions, you still have to backup your own data.

~~~
rxminus
Well that is the question of-course. But stability/speed/reliability issues
have been frequent indeed. And from what I can gather GitHub has it's own set
of issues, but availability & speed aren't one of them...hope that it proves
true. The other aspect of course is that we're really excited to open source
some of our stuff and GitHub just has the best community out there.

------
yagni3
Ehh. Git is decentralized, if you're that worried about uptime, self host a
git-http/GitLab/Gitolite/Gogs/Gitea/(getmydrift) etc instance and call it a
day. Or do GitHub if you want, but even Github has outages and can't 100%
guarantee your data.

If you're afraid the non-git metadata could be lost, use something like git-
appraise or get off the cloud or onto a separate cloud and get some bug
tracking software or something.

I don't think the actions they took really showed vigilance or good form, but
the transparency and honesty says a lot about the company IMHO. I also don't
think stomping on them excessively does anyone any good.

Edit: Also, GitLab's business model is different than most in the space. Since
even private repos are free, GL only makes money on their enterprise clients.
Free private repos are essentially leeches, bloodletting for mindshare.
Shouldn't ask for too much.

~~~
rxminus
Yes git is decentralised...but if your entire build & docker image hosting
hangs too it it does play an integral role in day-to-day coding. Especially if
you need to pull some changes you made late at night on a different computer
to continue work. I'm not trying to bash GitLab...if anything I was trying to
write a homage. I'm genuinely sad to leave.

~~~
dpc_pw
You should not have an important SPOF, that is not-self hosted and especially
not on best-effort, free service. Switching to GitHub changes nothing.

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ishitatsuyuki
They try less harder to clean up 1000+ issues, and their hosted service is
simply slow as hell.

GitHub has wonderful speed of customer support.

Docker isn't always the best solution to CI, what you need is just a prebuilt
image for the language you're using. Travis starts really fast, since there's
no image pulling time.

~~~
rxminus
That sort of was the point I was trying to make...they have a lot of big
picture "features" but their foundations are crumbling...sadly. Don't quite
agree with you on Docker = prebuilt image. We do loads of cool stuff with
Docker containers. We're microservice heaven here :-P

------
yAnonymous
"I'm leaving, but first I have to tell everyone."

Don't let the door hit you.

~~~
rxminus
"I'm leaving...but I don't really want to! Please fix your foundations and I'm
super eager to come back"

