iirc (it's been a while) they where on rackspace when Microsoft bought them out - there was an article a few months ago saying they where moving to Azure and freezing new features while they do the move[1].
Honestly I don't know half the features they have added because the surface is huge at this point everyone seems to be using a (different) subset of them anyway.
So a feature freeze isn't likely to have much impact on me.
A team of us moved it off Rackspace in 2013, it’s been mostly in a set of GitHub operated colo since then. Used to be there was some workloads on AWS and a bit of DirectConnect. Now it’s some workloads on Azure.
To the best of my knowledge there’s been no Rackspace in the picture since about 2013, the details behind that are fuzzy as it’s been 10+ years since I worked on infrastructure at GitHub.
yeah, we did not have anything in Rackspace for many years before the Microsoft acquisition. I remember having to migrate some tiny internal things off of Heroku, though!
In the Pragmatic Engineer podcast episode with the former CEO of Github, the latter mentioned that they had their own infra for everything. If I remember correctly, this was due to the fact that Github is quite old and at the time when Github Actions became a thing, cloud providers were not really offering the kind of infra that was necessary to support the feature.
GitHub is old, but GitHub Actions are not. Indeed, GitHub Actions launched two months after the Microsoft acquisition was announced [0], and it is a half-assed clone of Azure Pipelines.
I'll be damned, I feel like I've been using GA since forever!
You're right though, just re-listened to the segment[0] and the ex-CEO mentions they were initially using AWS, then moved to their own servers because of the limitations of AWS at the time and their particular needs. Github Actions did however always run on Azure!
I can't read the entirety of this article[1] because it's paywalled, but it looks like they ran their own servers:
> GitHub is currently hosted on the company’s own hardware, centrally located in Virginia
I imagine this predates their acquisition from Microsoft. Honestly, given how often Github seems to be down compared to the level of dependency people have on it, this might be one of the few cases where I might have understood if Microsoft embraced and extended a bit harder.
Fair enough, my Azure experience is minimal enough that maybe I shouldn't make assumptions about whether this would improve things. That being said, I do think there's merit in the idea that if Microsoft is going to be able to solve this problem, they probably should try to solve it just once, and in a general way, rather than just for Github?
Doubt it. I'm Ops person on Azure, while they just had terrible outage recently, they tend to be as stable as any other cloud provider and I haven't had many issues with Azure itself compared to whatever slop the devs are chucking into production.
