

GitHub: Yesterday's Outage - timmorgan
http://github.com/blog/682-yesterday-s-outage

======
timmorgan
With all GitHub's server tech and architecture (described in fair detail in
past blog posts), I'm usually surprised (and relieved a bit, I must admit) to
see them fail at something.

------
Xurinos
Does anybody else announce outages with twitter and other public
communications servers offsite? At darkmists.org, we learned a while back that
we could not trust even our ISP to keep us accessible to the world. The iPhone
allowed me to at least use twitter to update our players and attempt to set
expectations. (Some of our administrators also try to keep tabs with players
via IM programs, but that is not scalable.)

~~~
jackowayed
I think it's pretty common practice to host your status site separately from
your site so that connectivity issues at your datacenter don't bring your
status site down as well.

Engine Yard has a Wordpress.com blog (and they don't even have it as a
subdomain of engineyard.com. I guess in case their DNS goes down). Not only
does GitHub use twitter, but they also have status.github.com hosted on EC2.
Heroku has a status site on Slicehost.

It just makes sense. Connectivity is a pretty common reason for downtime. Why
would you want a point of failure that can bring down your site and your
status site?

~~~
jacobian
> Not only does GitHub use twitter, but they also have status.github.com
> hosted on EC2. Heroku has a status site on Slicehost.

Heh, that's a bit funny:

Github's hosted on Rackspace Cloud. They have a status page which is hosted on
EC2 via Heroku. Heroku hosts a status page on Slicehost. Slicehost is... wait
for it... run by Rackspace out of the same data center as Rackspace Cloud.

~~~
pjhyett
The main GitHub app is served from Rackspace's IAD data center on bare metal.

