The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
github.blog44 points by 0xedb an hour ago
44 points by 0xedb an hour ago
"We are committed to fixing these problems, as long as it doesn't involve buying things other than AI computers, hiring humans, or using non-Microsoft products."
Calling Azure the solution to this problem when it is in fact the source of most of these problems is just fantastic doublespeak.
Github is ripe for disruption and I hope it is disrupted soon.
> We installed as much hardware as available power allowed in our existing data centers while accelerating our migration to Azure.
And from the RCA [1]:
> The immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic.
"While accelerating our migration to Azure," meaning, they will only solve problems if it helps them also use Azure more.
It is unbelivable that aload of 2.8b commits was totally fine, and a load of 2.9b was a sitewide outage, unless they have no reporting or their tooling is completely incompetent. If things can fall apart so easily, throwing more capacity at the problem won't fix it.
You’re torturing your own logic to make Azure the villain here. And it also sounds like you lack experience with capacity exhaustion. Things fail slowly, then suddenly.
No, I am calling Github disingenuous liars with poor motives, offering an unbelivable explanation. Not sure where the torture is, except in their statement.
If it was failing slowly, why didn't they fix it then? Why didn't they notice?
Could it be because they fired all the people who know how to monitor and identify such problems? That's what SREs are for.
Baseless accusation made from a position of zero information.
Opinion based on stated facts.
Please share the information you have which contradicts the conclusions I have drawn from Github's statement.
(And we know they're liars. They report very few of the actual incidents they have; see for example https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/)
I don’t owe you anything, much less a separately sourced counterargument. You openly admit that your opinion is not based not on GitHub’s proffered statements but on your self-admitted assumption that GitHub is actively lying in an attempt to cover up an Azure-related root cause.
This absolutely can happen in large systems. If some part of the system is at capacity, then slightly increasing the load can cause it to fall behind and start accumulating a backlog.
These backlogs can cause clients to make more retries, exacerbating the problem. Potentially further cascading through the system.
I believe their point is that "system is at capacity" is something they ought to start fixing before the capacity is exceeded
But then people like OP will claim that the capacity concerns are a lie manufactured to support an unjustified move to Azure.
Sure. But you might not even be realizing that something is just at the cusp if the load is spiky enough.
The art of large system design is to identify and avoid these kinds of chokepoints. And when something happens, propagate the "backpressure" up the stack to avoid queuing.
AWS got a fair share of similar outages, so the newer SDKs now try to not exacerbate these kinds of issues: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdkref/latest/guide/feature-retr...
The original AWS EBS outage is probably the canonical example: https://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
There's always a cliff, this part is fine. You sometimes know the cliff but often do not.
I'm betting on Tangled and Codeberg. Tangled has a better press and in general is a dark horse, Codeberg has the "brand" and some network effects from projects that moved to there. (famously, Zig.) I heard that Sourcehut is having a moment as well, and I love the idea of email-based workflow and not having to have an account to contribute to someone's project hosted there, but I'm not maintaining anything worthwhile paying the $4/mo sub.
Ok, but there's no universe where a major Microsoft-owned property is not being forced to run on Azure. Just like AWS pushing to get off Oracle back in the day. It would be career-destroying to suggest otherwise regardless of technical merit (and tbf, no infrastructure is bulletproof, unless you want to port GitHub to z/OS on mainframe)
If you're a big company, you can afford having one engineer spend one or two days per year to maintain your self-hosted GitLab or Forgejo. On top of better reliability than GitHub, you'll get the additional bonus that your source code won't accidentally leak through being in Copilot's training set.
If you're a hobbyist, Codeberg is great, has a nice community and automatically shields you from slop contributions.
The issue with these systems is that they lack Github's sophistication for issue tracking, knowledge transfer, and automation. I think Gitlab is a mature product in its own space and unlikey to change, for instance, at this point.
Codeberg also has the issue of having a political stance which means they will not accept just anyone's use of the platform. That is absolutely their right and I have no issue with it, but it's unattractive to me - as someone who agrees with most of their current politics - because the day they decide they don't like me, I'm screwed.
I never found GitHub's systems for issue tracking to be all that great. Cross-repository issues and development plans are hard to track within a git host. I've always used an external panning and issue tracking tool, mostly Linear, and it works really well. GitLab's Linear integration is excellent, FWIW.
I've actually worked with a couple of companies who do use GitHub for their code, and they all use Linear in addition to GitHub.
I understand the concern you're talking about wrt. Codeberg, but I wouldn't view it as a significantly bigger risk than anything else. Any platform can suddenly decide that your project is against ToS (GitHub will absolutely not accept just anyone's use of their platform either) and Codeberg introducing some rules recently doesn't, in my mind, drastically increase the risk of a dramatic ToS change in the future. But we all have to make our own risk evaluations and I won't judge yours. Luckily, moving between Git hosts isn't that difficult; setting up CI again and losing merge request history does suck but it's not the end of the world, unlike something like, say, losing your AWS/GCP/whatever account.
"sophistication" seems like a strange way to describe GitHub to me - I've found in every individual aspect (code browsing, issue tracking, code review, package management, etc), it's the worst out of all the systems I use regularly... But it's good _enough_ for most people, and it has all those features in one place, which is more convenient than wrangling 10-15 high quality but disconnected systems
Gitlab has the benefit of having very little traffic, both free and paid. Their limits are still way above the current usage so less likely to be an issue
Speaking from experience, it cost mW about a week or two per year to maintain GitLab for the startup I worked at.
My personal GitLab on the other hand really does take only a day or two per year.
That said, a week or two per year is just what it costs to maintain any one thing period. I spent about that much time maintaining PCs in the office, or my personal proxmox setup. It's not onerous at all.
GitLab is super bloated and a little sucky to admin, but it's not too bad all things considered. I'm admin in my new job's GitHub org and it sucks a whole lot more to maintain.
> Github is ripe for disruption and I hope it is disrupted soon.
It's an expensive, low revenue generating site.
There are, and have always been, competitors, including "host it all yourself" solutions, but nothing has really stuck.
How is it "ripe" for disruption?
They had $1b revenue in 2023 and now probably more than $2b in revenue... do you have cost figures showing what their expenses are?
> We have since added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage, and significant network capacity. We installed as much hardware as available power allowed in our existing data centers while accelerating our migration to Azure.
That can't be cheap.
A server box now has around 256 CPU cores. So that's about 12000 servers. If each one is $10k that's $120 million. Not a lot compared to Github's income.
Microsoft don't release the costs as you know, but
Compute and Storage for Free Tiers: Hosting code for over 150 million developers and processing over 2 billion GitHub Actions (CI/CD) workflows a month requires astronomical server power and data storage. The "Free" tier is a massive cost sink that Microsoft treats as a loss-leader marketing expense
Let me know when you understand how that's not free.
"Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. "
It really is. I know I've gone from tens a month to thousands a month. They have to be projecting >100B/month in the next year or two.
wow. they should really institute a maximum amount of individual pushes per-month per-user.
> Errors in those services triggered a client-side retry loop that increased traffic during recovery.
The worst outages I've been part of always have some version of this :(
Reading this port-mortem / plan shocks me, this doesn't look like a service that has been serving high-throughput services for more than a decade. In fact it is almost like they've barely started. It seems the solution has been capacity, capacity rather than architectural or data changes.
> Our next milestone is an architecture that scales read capacity linearly with the number of readers, enabling unlimited read operations
How do you not have read-replicas / read caches at this scale yet? Which is what I am reading from this statement. You can of course get really far with sharding and whatnot. But at some point it might become worth it to engineer your data into a model that scales better.
Sorry to suggest this but if they charged everyone say $1/mo. it would absolutely help the massive surge from AI coding they seem to have had.
I don't like paying for free stuff but gh certainly worth it.
Unfortunately time and time again, the overwhelming majority of people show that they would rather deal with an unreliable scummy company for "free" than pay $1/mo for a reliable service which treats them with respect :(
Pay per issue and commit. Buy 1,000 commit credits at a time.
Might force people to review their slop before pushing it.
The comments just shows how entitled people have become. Most people use GitHub and features for free and have the audacity to complain.
The outage is due to massive load increase. In 4 months the number of commits doubled to 2.9 Billions. Anyone worked with high load systems knows that’s it’s not a normal growth and how difficult even to keep on horizontally scaling in a short time period such a complex system.
GitHub should charge at least maybe 5$ monthly fee and most of the entitled freeloaders would leave the platform and it would free up resources
AWS CloudWatch has an option to show the trend and what it will be like after x-period.
Doesn't Azure have such options so that engineers can predict to scale better? Seems like engineers are not ready for this per postmortem
The trend line does not tell you what will actually happen at scale, even if you think you're perfectly prepared for the next 10% or 20% growth. As Mike Tyson put it, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face".
dang and friends, can you lock (some) threads? This is getting out of hand, it seems to me?
GitHub outages seem to be very normal and even more emotional these days. Yet, that’s no reason to treat each other destructively. It’s sad.
So let’s turn this energy into creating something better.
Great read - I'm glad they realize there's work ahead but what I'm missing is: * Paid customers: we know you pay us often a ton of money, and we burn your month on actions during these outages - we'll refund you for the days we spent your money and gave you no value. * Paid customer: We know you put your trust in us, so we'll ensure we have a separate pool of capacity to ensure we can keep that trust. * Paid customer: we'll proactively refund you when we miss our SLA.
What I read from this is: * Scaling is hard, we don't have enough capacity * We give away a shitton of compute for free * I have to talk about Azure not being a steaming pile of poop, otherwise my bonus will get tweaked downward in the next comp cycle.
Notice there's nothing about paid customers, I'll add in what they are missing:
Paid customers: Go F*ck yourself, you don't pays us enough to be an interesting line item compared to windows server.
Has to be one of the most vague outage summaries of the year
The root cause analysis is separate, but linked to from the blog post: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zkxwbgr0cnmx
It is specific and technical.
I fear to ask, how archive.org keeps up to catch all those events for archiving...
Related recently:
GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611
and new entry:
Cursor Origin Code Hosting
Github down, no hard drives available, no memory available, thanks AI!
Seems like we are headed for Tech Gridlock.
What they can implement is to slowdown the commit rate, rate limt or just queue-up messages not to overburden their downstream service.
I don't think GH has any of those, but just keep scaling, but that scaling failed.
Just bad architectural decisions from the postmortem.
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It will only get worse due to AIs spawning massive commits, and they don't have unlimited cloud resource.
They can scale but not scalable in terms of effort, resources, and $
How would any of what you're saying help with this?
> The immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic. Originally this was caused by an Istio sidecar pod reaching its concurrency limits and failing to auto scale correctly because of a misconfigured policy that watched host service but not sidecar limits. One failure cascaded to more and eventually four HAProxy nodes exhausted their flow limits, degrading the gateway auth path and causing widespread authentication latency and failures. The problem was worsened by optimistic retry logic which overloaded internal load balancers. Pausing HAProxy on those nodes simultaneously produced immediate broad recovery.
This stuff is good! This is what a booming economy looks like. There are people out there competing with you for resources because they have cool ideas they want to implement.
Or at least they asked the AI to come up with cool ideas, which is even more interesting. It's exciting watching the world transition away from humanity being in the driver's seat!
We need to have a package of FLOSsoftware that you could run on the cloud of your choice that offers most of what GitHub does (niceties on top of Git) without the centralization.
GitLab was close last I remember but there was some sort of enterprise tier when I tried hosting stuff on a local server years ago. I want true FLOSS, not another SaaS equivalent of the coke dealer giving clients the good uncut stuff when they're just starting out only to sell crap when they're addicted.
https://forgejo.org/ promises to be this, have only lightly used it on https://codeberg.org/ but it seems nice?
Forgejo is pretty neat. Their CI story is sad because it's based on act and it lacks features like GH Apps so service accounts are not possible (using a user account as service is barf).
I self-host it and its pretty easy to have uptime higher than github when you have 3 users total.
Absolutely do not recommend using GitLab.
"Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge"
That says absolutely nothing. The "What is Forgejo?" question is unanswered and instead you get a lot of words about their values, their inclusivity, etc. And the next thing in the docs is how to install it. It's ridiculous.
I still don't know what it is or what it does.
Exponential growth. No company could handle that without some issues. Good luck to them. And for those who cannot tolerate this, there are many self hosted options.
And another outage. [0] Looking forward to the subsequent post-mortem on that one.
You might want to not go all in on GitHub anymore since it is very unstable to use. A self-hosted instance would have a far better uptime than GitHub over the years.
6 years ahead [1] on not going all in an centralizing everything on GitHub.
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Almost 8 hours of downtime across all core workflows, and the word "sorry" or "apologize" appears nowhere in this post.
"If you were trying to ship software that day, we let you down" is classic corporate non-apology speak.
I’m done.
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They should rewrite their Ruby code to a performant language.