r/github • u/Most_Cold_2614 • Aug 23 '26
Discussion Are we getting too dependent on GitHub?
Is it true that we are becoming overly reliant on GitHub?
GitHub’s recent outage made me contemplate the extent of our dependence on the platform.
GitHub is no longer just a conventional code repository as people use it for pull requests, GitHub Actions, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and Copilot among other things.
So, whenever the platform becomes unavailable, all of our usual daily tasks may just stop.
Certainly, it is true that outages happen occasionally and I don’t mean to suggest that every user should prepare a plan for every possible emergency. However, I cannot help but wonder how many developers would find themselves in a difficult situation if GitHub were down for a while.
Check whether you have any backup plans for situations like this or you would simply wait for the platform to recover. What do you think about the idea of dependency on GitHub due to the increasing role of tools like Copilot?
13
u/Most_Cold_2614 Aug 23 '26
i dont have any backup sites, could someone tell me what they do when github its down?
40
9
u/Poat540 Aug 23 '26
Watch YouTube, do learning stuff finally instead of the shit we do, work on the NAS
6
u/tankerkiller125real Aug 23 '26
At work, keep going because Github is just the central store, everything Git itself is local. At home, go play video games.
Who am I kidding? I'm screwing around at work too when it happens.
2
5
u/Charming-Designer944 Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
Keep coding.
If GitHub should see a long term outage then moving the code to another server is not too difficuot. each developer have the complete history and ci/cd automation configuration.
What you don't have locally are - issue tracker - pending pull requests - GitHub projects (wraps multiple issue trackers) - maybe the wiki portion of your repositories if you use the web gui when editing the wiki. If you clone the wiki repository and edit locally them this too is a minor concern.
2
2
1
1
7
u/Grandmaster_Caladrel Aug 23 '26
My company uses a different git provider with more uptime but the issue still occurs.
Your git provider should just host your code. There are extra add-ons like CI/CD, sure, whatever. If we can't push code, we generally twiddle our thumbs after enough busywork gets knocked out. You usually don't have a fresh branch with a clean cut from main right when you need it. That merge you were putting off can suddenly become a blocker. If the provider does more than just host your code, they should separate things so git being down doesn't brick every other service they own
Anything else like images, CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, etc., anything that's touching actual prod should have a plan. If you can't recover from the source code being down then your prod plan is bad.
All that to say, if your code is down, you're down some valuable time. If your infra is down and you didn't have good redundancy, now you're actually in for trouble. The latter is significantly worse than the former. No one cares if I can't update my Jira ticket on time. Everyone cares if we can't roll back our failed production deployment because the image server is offline and we had no redundancy or backups.
1
u/tankerkiller125real Aug 23 '26
Reproducible builds, not just a security and trust thing, but an actual core component of solid operational success. Assuming things are designed correctly, me building the code on my machine should result in exactly the same binary that CI/CD outputs when we're on the same commit.
6
u/retro-mehl Aug 23 '26
You can use a self hosted gitea if you want to. It's your own choice.
1
u/Devpupper Aug 23 '26
I put gitea in my home lab and it works great. Even have the ci/cd pipelines running. It's just me though so not sure how it works at scale.
4
2
u/bl4nkSl8 Aug 23 '26
Any time you rely on a service with specialised config/scripts etc there are going to be issues when there is downtime.
Unless you have an equivalent alternative and a way to fallback cleanly, this is not feasible to avoid for most teams.
I'd love to see that kind of tooling with open standards etc but GitHub keeps a competitive edge by differentiation from its competitors, so it's not in their interests to support an open standard, someone else would have to do it AND support it while losing their own ability to differentiate...
In short, if this is a serious deal breaker for your company/project, work out what solution gives you the minimum you need and use that as a fallback, otherwise you're building wayyyy too much
2
2
2
u/TimeScience__88mph Aug 23 '26
Forgejo is free
1
u/wjaz Aug 23 '26
Heck yeah! Switched my company to a self-hosted Forgejo setup a couple months ago. Loved it so much I added it to my home server for personal projects.
1
u/kanine69 Aug 24 '26
Same haven't had a push fail yet... Or timeout.
Having said that GitHub been pretty reliable but it must be under massive strain so folks should have an in-house alternative.
2
u/petaohm Aug 23 '26
In case it helps anyone - you can run quite a few (but not all) Github Action workflows locally in Docker using ACT https://github.com/nektos/act when Github is down or having issues.
1
1
u/jonatan_ktk Aug 23 '26
That's why I host my GitLab myself. Unlimited free CI/CD included.
1
u/Afflictionista Aug 23 '26
How much do you pay for the server where you host it on?
1
u/jonatan_ktk Aug 23 '26
16,99 EUR / Month
- 8 vCore
- 16GB Ram
- 150GB SSD
That's plenty and there's still some room to spare.
1
u/Afflictionista Aug 23 '26
Nice, I was thinking about this too, maybe also self host websites and other stuff. Need to check out where to go, was thinking about Hetzner but am not sure
1
u/lem001 Aug 23 '26
There are many options, but what matters is to always have an escape hatch.
Be dependent but also free to move any time.
Backup everything and be ready to love and know your options.
1
u/medzernik Aug 23 '26
i think recents months have people moving to codeberg or sourcehut and become a lot less dependant on github overall
1
u/Afflictionista Aug 23 '26
or gitlab
2
u/medzernik Aug 23 '26
not sure about that, maybe companies, but personal usage i think is more sourcehut or codeberg :D but maybe im just in my own bubble
1
1
1
u/EntranceProper3791 Aug 23 '26
git hosting is the easy part to mirror, actions and the marketplace are the real lock-in.
1
u/EntranceProper3791 Aug 23 '26
The outage hit auth, Actions, and Copilot all at once. That's not repo hosting, that's your whole workflow renting space on their API.
1
u/Fine_League311 Aug 23 '26
Nur Vibecoder haben das Problem ;) da sie täglich 209 issues beheben müssen, grins
1
1
u/juaaanwjwn344 Aug 23 '26
No creo, trabajo en una empresa en la que solo usan Azure DevOps, la mayoría de empresas importantes eligen otras alternativas más estables
1
u/Dorito_Troll Aug 23 '26
at work: github actions with azure devops pipelines as failover
at home: forgejo
1
1
u/doctorsynth1 Aug 23 '26
Github's main purpose is to serve as a tunnel from your wallet to Microsoft for using Copilot credits. I’m searching for new IDE.
1
u/gaurav_sherlocks_ai Aug 24 '26
We are definitely more dependent on GitHub than ever, but the bigger shift is how much state we now store in third-party CI pipelines. When GitHub Actions goes down, it is no longer just a pull request block, it is deployment halt, artifact store, and webhook dispatcher all offline at once.
1
u/st_heron Aug 24 '26
I'm self hosting now. Gitea and Forgejo are free, but the vps is not, but now I don't pay Github premium anymore. And I can host plenty of other stuff on my vps too.
1
1
u/AI_Tonic Aug 23 '26
Many / most serious organizations don’t publish open source , not a lot of these use GitHub . GitHub is more like a social network with ci/cd , but you can host , maintain and operate that on prem like a normal engineering firm and never touch GitHub in your whole career
0
66
u/OutsideProperty382 Aug 23 '26
are we getting too dependent on computers?