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AlexandrBtoday at 2:04 PM10 repliesview on HN

Boomer opinion but trusting third parties to be critical infrastructure, especially with no SLA in sight, will always end in tears. "The cloud" is very convenient, but its providers will never care about your infrastructure or your customers as much as you will.


Replies

Maxiontoday at 2:08 PM

Older millennial here and I agree. If you rely on Github you should at least be have your processes such that you can work around it.

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otterleytoday at 2:22 PM

3P-maintained infrastructure is what makes civilizations work efficiently. We're not all digging our own wells, generating our own electricity, and burning or burying our own garbage.

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aenistoday at 2:16 PM

Boomer here as well, but I'd add that trusting your own org for critical infra usually also ends in tears. Most everything in IT involves failure, including in well designed systems designed by great engineers.

I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.

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swillstoday at 3:11 PM

Agree. But also, it's affecting everyone equally, whether they have a free personal account or are part of an enterprise account with SLA. Understanding the practical value of an SLA is an interesting problem.

raffael_detoday at 2:08 PM

+1 (as a millenial) ... especially given that setting up a git server for non-OSS company code isn't too much of a challenge really. also, no need to self-denigrate this reasonable opinion in preemptive obedience.

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ethagnawltoday at 2:35 PM

You're right.

However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...

poisonborztoday at 2:13 PM

How did this become a boomer opinion? It is proved truth thousand times a day. Not that you shouldn't use third parties - but in this industry you can shrink this exposure to the minimum, and have plan B for anything else.

SideburnsOfDoomtoday at 2:11 PM

People are already saying things like "We need a plan B in case we urgently need to deploy a fix to production, and GitHub Actions is unavailable again".

But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.

And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla

The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.

TZubiritoday at 2:13 PM

Boomer who has never had a business? Depending on third party suppliers is business as usual.

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BryanBeshoretoday at 2:06 PM

Truly a boomer opinion. Respect!