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Comment by shrinks99 | Hacker News Reader

I got Claude to make me the exact same graph a few weeks ago! I had hypothesized that we'd see a sharp drop off, instead what I found (as this project also shows) is a rather messy average trend of outages that has been going on for some time.

The graph being all nice before the Microsoft acquisition is a fun narrative, until you realize that some products (like actions, announced on October 16th, 2018) didn't exist and therefore had no outages. Easy to correct for by setting up start dates, but not done here. For the rest that did exist (API requests, Git ops, pages, etc) I figured they could just as easily be explained with GitHub improving their observability.

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It feels like they launched actions and it quickly turned out to be an operations and availability nightmare. Since then, they've been firefighting and now the problems have spread to previously stable things like issues and PRs

They rushed to launch Actions because GitLab launched them before.

BTW, GitLab called it "CI/CD" just as a navigation section on their dashboard, and that name spread outside as well, despite being weird. Weird names are easier to remember and associate with specific meaning, instead of generic characterless "Actions".

We added Actions for CI in 2020. A year later realized our entire deploy pipeline just assumed it would be up.

Webhook doesn't fire, nothing errors out, and you find out when someone asks why staging hasn't moved in two days.

Github actions needs to go away. Git, in the linux mantra, is a tool written to do one job very well. Productizing it, bolting shit onto the sides of it, and making it more than it should be was/is a giant mistake.

The whole "just because we could doesn't mean we should" quote applies here.

But GitHub actions is not Git?

Sorry yes, that was my point. GitHub turned git into some dysmorphic DVCS version of c++ on the web. Git is fine. Maybe 10% of people use plain git, it’d all wrapped in shitty web apps. Let git be git, and let ci/cd be ci/cd, the way Linux intended.

However, I don’t work on web apps. Maybe it’s better for the JavaScript folks. I hope to never write a line of js in my lifetime.

The same philosophy would suggest that running some other command immediately following a particular (successful) git command is fine; it is composing relatively simple programs into a greater system. Other than the common security pitfalls of the former, said philosophy has no issue with using (for example) Jenkins instead of Actions.

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