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Comment by shurcooL | Hacker News Reader

> GitHub being a giant single point of failure

What is our definition of a "point"?

If you have an external hard-drive backup of your laptop, that's 2 points of failure, right? If someone else has 10 external hard-drives that they keep in different places, that's 10 points, yes? But what stops you from calling all those hard-drives "a giant single point of failure"? If all of them are destroyed, the data is lost.

I just don't get these arguments... The chances of all GitHub data being lost is probably less likely than BitBucket and SourceForge combined.

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By "failure," it never occurred to me to mean a technical or operations failure.

I'm thinking: shut down due to the business model not working, or some other business-model variant, such as gradually getting intolerably crappy like SourceForge. Cash flow isn't great; let's introduce "sponsored" code. Etc.

You're right about the 10 hard drives : if you've bought them identically at the same time, it's likely they all gonna fail in a short time span. I've recently heard about the "3,2,1" rule concerning backup :

  - 3 images of your data (1 original + 2 copies).
  - 2 types of media (e.g. extHD and DVD)
  - 1 offshore location (e.g. bank vault, your parents' house,etc.)

Of course it's not a golden rule, but it can prevent catastrophic failures.

In this case my definition of a point is a single remote to github.com/<project> in all the OSS projects .git/config

A single issue tracker with hundreds of issues for all these projects. A single database of commiter permissions. Etc.

It's organizationally a single point of failure. The company could easily decide to shutdown access to all of it's servers and everyone relying on github for issue tracking, etc would be screwed.

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