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Comment by nrmitchi | Hacker News Reader

> Github seems to have degraded measurably after they got acquired. As is tradition.

I'm not disagreeing with you that it has degraded, however it was acquired almost 8 years ago at this point, and the software world has been turned on it's head in the last... 3?

Software generally degrades post-acquisition, I'm not denying that. Github has definitely degraded. I'm not sure I would agree that the core reason in this case is "the acquisition" and not "AI making software and free-CI-load demand 3-5 orders-of-magnitude higher than it was 3 years ago"

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The latest problems correlate pretty closely when they tried to migrate the entire platform onto azure in an insane timeline, something like ~1 year (for a project of that size, that's borderline insane).

Yes, but also in combination with the not-borderline-and-actually insane growth in commits and load on the platform due to AI.

this is often the argument that is trotted out, but i don't see any evidece of that.

It has been reported new user volume has nearly doubled, and commit volume 10x+ - that could certainly have an impact, but "Azure" and "scale" in my career are words that have never really gone together. Azure Cloud is the only 'hard no, will not interview' of any cloud provider that's listed on a job posting, and I've worked with just about all of them by now I think. Nothing even comes close to such a miserable experience.

The thought of migrating something at the scale of github to azure gives me the cold sweats.

... The reason they did that is because the AI induced load. Their data centers and entire REGION couldn't support the increase in demand so they had to plan an accelerated migration to Azure. They forecasted COMPLETE regional capacity exhaustion.

The problem isn't Azure. Azure is the solution. They have written about this a lot. It's easy to research. You could even just ask ChatGPT to explain it.

These are incredibly complex and massive systems, they do not fail instantly. The failures happen incrementally until they become insurmountable and the system collapse. Incompetence doesn't show its head immediately, it can take quite a while.

Either way, it's clear the acquisition has not helped github in any meaningful way. GitHub is owned by a multi trillion dollar transnational corporation. They have enough money, resources, and human labor to achieve whatever they want, but this is what they want and this is what they've achieved.

Agreed. It's not at all clear that GitHub as an independent company would be doing much better at dealing with this new world than GitHub within Microsoft is doing.

Would they have migrated to azure on such a timeframe?

They would not have moved to Azure... so, no.

Even taking into consideration the fact that Google never wants to talk to you for any reason, it has been my professional experience that Azure is -by far- the worst of the Big Three "cloud" providers.

> Would they have migrated to azure

> I'm not sure I would agree that the core reason in this case is "the acquisition"

Would data change your mind?

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

That is quite stark.

Whats the deal with the colors? Red and yellow don’t strictly seem to mean higher/lower. Some yellow dots are lower than red.

As best I can tell, the red dots are "major outages", the yellow are "partial outages".

Playing devil's advocate: from the graph alone, it could just be that the status page became more accurate, so same amount of down time, but reported more now.

On the other hand, I don't remember things being this bad before the acquisition.

Wasn’t that page debunked already?

It doesn't matter when GitHub has been acquired. The only thing that matters is whether it's part of a broader pattern, which it is. Remember Skype?

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