Thread

GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

163 points · 95 comments · Footkerchief

arandomhuman · 1786035573 · focus · HN ↗
I love how even self hosted workers don't work during these outages - running jobs on their infrastructure being flakey is marginally acceptable, but the API to simply schedule workflows having this availability is mind boggling. Github just doesn't seem like a serious company anymore.
1. x3n0ph3n3 · 1786036795 · focus · HN ↗
  Microsoft is not a serious company anymore.
  1. hinkley · 1786038908 · focus · HN ↗
    They never were. They were just really good at maintaining the bluster and backing it up with expensive lawyers. Now that they don't come in claws-first like they did when they were a NASDAQ rocket to the stars, it's easy to see.
    Their MO was to court an executive and sell second-rate tools to them before the people who had to use them had a chance to say anything. It doesn't matter how much evidence you can provide to the contrary, once the million dollar deal is signed, you are going to be tasked with finding reasons to say that your executive was shrewd for buying this pile of junk and unfulfilled promises, and not an insane idiot sucking away your job satisfaction as fast as they can.
    They did a lot of deals based on how their products would have features their competitors already have 'soon' when they haven't even started them, and a long track record of taking 3 major releases to get from something to good, and then breaking everything again by doing a 4th major release that re-imagined everything and made it horrible again.
    I'm not going to claim that Apple was or is a panacea. Apple doesn't use vaporware which is big, and their Cycle of Awful is 2 releases instead of 3. You could afford to skip 1 waiting for the next even-numbered version, instead of being 2 versions behind and getting pressed to upgrade.
    markus_zhang · 1786046424 · focus · HN ↗
    They definitely managed to create a lot of reliable products.
    Windows NT was one of them. Up to Windows XP the products were pretty solid and each had visible improvement against the previous one.
    Their language products were/are still solid IMO. Maybe Visual Studio is sluggish, but we can still use an older version if we want. Plus they put a lot of effort optimizing VSCode, too.
    Even back in the MS-DOS/16-bit Windows days, when things broke down quite easily, I think they still provide the best bang for individual users and developers. There was no competitors who could provide so much value back then.
  2. sharts · 1786041692 · focus · HN ↗
    One might question your perspective if you ever thought they were serious.
2. vaneri2007 · 1786036800 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe switching to <a href="https://github.com/gitlabhq" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gitlabhq :)
3. duped · 1786038068 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm not sure that it's that mind boggling. The entire complexity and value of GHA is not in the runners but the scheduler that the GH frontend hooks into and runners subscribe to jobs from. It's the most likely thing to fall over. '
  If the scheduling was self hosted it would be inexcusable but you can always just connect whatever you want to webhooks.
  1. hinkley · 1786038416 · focus · HN ↗
    The entire complexity and value of GHA is rent-seeking to keep the lights on for other things.
    They have a strong motivation (self preservation) to continue to misunderstand the problem. If they did what is best for us, then we could avoid a substantial fraction of all GH subscriptions by using a FOSS tool to hit the Pareto frontier by replicating just enough GH services to watch commits and PRs.
  2. packetlost · 1786038629 · focus · HN ↗
    That "scheduling" is just a git hook and a message queue, maybe with some database updates in between with very clear boundaries that make sharding easy to reason about, assuming they have a sane architecture (they evidently don't)
    jacobgold · 1786039160 · focus · HN ↗
    It's just silly to guess at how a system works, or should work, without digging into the details. Because you simply don't know what you don't know.
    packetlost · 1786039395 · focus · HN ↗
    The only statement I'm making about their system is that it appears to be poorly designed, as evident by their poor uptime. The rest is just visible details about what data is involved in performing the task at hand, agnostic to the implementation underlying it.
    duped · 1786040947 · focus · HN ↗
    The one thing that falls over is that the webhooks are actually self modifying code since you have an 'on commit' webhook that bootstraps the actions logic from the workflow.yaml file(s) (which are not really config files, they have logic that needs to be evaluated).
    I don't disagree that it's obvious they've got problems but I'm just saying it's obvious to me the part that falls over (the scheduling of jobs) and why that would impact self hosted runners, which do no scheduling but depend on it to function.
    As for 'just a message queue with some database updates and sharding that's easy to reason about'... Here's a job scheduling problem as an example: imagine you schedule a job, and there's no runner available. How do you disambiguate between no runners available because you've reached capacity, runners not being available because they're on a real network with faulty connections, and runners not being available because of a faulty rollout of internal updates?
    A simple message queue for job scheduling is fine if you own everything and can deal with the operational overhead of identifying those cases by hand, but Github can't do that.
    packetlost · 1786042590 · focus · HN ↗
    > The one thing that falls over is that the webhooks are actually self modifying code since you have an 'on commit' webhook that bootstraps the actions logic from the workflow.yaml file(s) (which are not really config files, they have logic that needs to be evaluated).
    Sure, but the part that actually schedules where a 'job' gets run is based on a relatively simplistic tag system. Reading the yaml and plopping some job metadata into a queue-like system isn't where I would expect their issues to be, but at their scale I'm sure everything becomes fragile and inscrutable.
    > imagine you schedule a job, and there's no runner available. How do you disambiguate between no runners available because you've reached capacity, runners not being available because they're on a real network with faulty connections, and runners not being available because of a faulty rollout of internal updates?
    You don't need to. GitHub Actions runners, and most CI runners that I've interacted with appear to have a pull-based model where they ask for work that matches their declared tags/shape (usually platform/runtime/OS/etc.). This probably amounts to a database query, but who knows.
    > A simple message queue for job scheduling is fine if you own everything and can deal with the operational overhead of identifying those cases by hand, but Github can't do that.
    I highly doubt it's a simple message queue. My issue is git repos and their CI infrastructure have very low coupling to other repos or entities in most circumstances, at least conceptually, so parts of the system (ie. regions, shards, etc.) should be able to function even when others are down (ie. it shouldn't break for everyone). There's clearly centralization and coupling that isn't obvious from an outside perspective, which sorta tells me it's incidental.
4. inigyou · 1786038849 · focus · HN ↗
  GitHub implements self hosted runners by running a normal runner that passes the environment to your runner and then polls it. That's why they cost as much as the smallest GitHub-hosted runner.
  This is no surprise given standard Microsoft operating procedure - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
  1. exochrono · 1786039159 · focus · HN ↗
    they walked that back for now at least - self-hosted gh runners are still free: <a href="https://docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/product-billing/github-actions" rel="nofollow">https://docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/product-billing/...
    inigyou · 1786039575 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, they're still implemented that way.
  2. arandomhuman · 1786042074 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh that is pretty gross, thanks for sharing. I was not aware of that process, that explains the cost they attempted to roll out for runners too a few months back.
5. cyanydeez · 1786038922 · focus · HN ↗
  gitlab-ce can run all the integration tests in docker et al.
  Sitting on Github these days is the same as sticking to twitter a decade ago, expect next mecha hitler, I suppose.

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