Unpopular opinion: We should not shame and blame GitHub too much.
The product was meant to be used by humans. It's now used as part of automation pipelines left, right, and center instead.
Repos, commits, users, lines-of-code, secrets, action run counts — all through the roof. Definitely some four-sigma beyond projected growth.
Honestly, as an executive at GitHub, I'd say it's "a good problem to have" that there are constant outages.
There's no good alternative, after all. Whether we like it or not, GitHub actions became a de-facto standard, so that even agents use them.
While I can easily imagine an agentic-first GitHub replacement raising hundreds of millions of dollars today (wink wink), the reality is that it will not replace GitHub any time soon.
And, quite frankly, the interruptions are all intermittent. If your company's development process is stalled for some ~three hours some ~twice a month — way above the current pace at which GitHub is down — it's still not a good enough business reason to justify transition.
Personally — and I keep saying this for a while! — some S3-based cross-cloud storage plus a Web3-grade orchestration layer is the future. May well be open source future, to be honest.
Most large companies have storage and compute paid for already, GitHub already charges a large premium on top of these two, and the main GitHub lockdown factor — that humans are used to its UI/UX — is just irrelevant for agentic-first workflows.
So some #StatefulCompute for exactly-once rules enforcement of gates, and some time-bounded #MeteredCompute to run what used to be GitHub actions — and we're done with GitHub for good. That is, in a sane universe that does optimize for cost-effectiveness.
In the real world that we are living in, no medium and large company is interested in cost effectiveness, so I guess we're stuck with the good old GitHub. Personally, I like the product, and have no complaints whatsoever.
The product was meant to be used by humans. It's now used as part of automation pipelines left, right, and center instead.
Repos, commits, users, lines-of-code, secrets, action run counts — all through the roof. Definitely some four-sigma beyond projected growth.
Honestly, as an executive at GitHub, I'd say it's "a good problem to have" that there are constant outages.
There's no good alternative, after all. Whether we like it or not, GitHub actions became a de-facto standard, so that even agents use them.
While I can easily imagine an agentic-first GitHub replacement raising hundreds of millions of dollars today (wink wink), the reality is that it will not replace GitHub any time soon.
And, quite frankly, the interruptions are all intermittent. If your company's development process is stalled for some ~three hours some ~twice a month — way above the current pace at which GitHub is down — it's still not a good enough business reason to justify transition.
Personally — and I keep saying this for a while! — some S3-based cross-cloud storage plus a Web3-grade orchestration layer is the future. May well be open source future, to be honest.
Most large companies have storage and compute paid for already, GitHub already charges a large premium on top of these two, and the main GitHub lockdown factor — that humans are used to its UI/UX — is just irrelevant for agentic-first workflows.
So some #StatefulCompute for exactly-once rules enforcement of gates, and some time-bounded #MeteredCompute to run what used to be GitHub actions — and we're done with GitHub for good. That is, in a sane universe that does optimize for cost-effectiveness.
In the real world that we are living in, no medium and large company is interested in cost effectiveness, so I guess we're stuck with the good old GitHub. Personally, I like the product, and have no complaints whatsoever.
👍3