I recall reading years ago that cloud services were expected to run with a reliability of 3 or 4 '9's and that if they didn't competing services would quickly overtake them in adoption. The industry was supposed to be that cut throat.

Has big tech reached a similar status like banks in that they are "too big to fail" i.e. when they do fail we all just look the other way and say: "well everyone else is out too". Didn't someone recently calculate that GitHub is running at 95%? For comparison the Irish Rail service which is not reliable has 80% of it's trains run on time.

This seems absurd and really challenges a lot of ideas I had about big tech and cloud infrastructure. GitHub seems to have remained the dominant player relative to GitLab etc.

That canot happen if the market becomes monopolistic, with every bigtech out there buying every startup worth a penny. The erosion of anti trust in the US created this monstrosity.

People overestimate how much they care about stuff. Moving off GitHub would be more costly for us than having 5% downtime. Obviously there’s a tipping point, but it shows people are tolerant given the price tags.

https://vimeo.com/355556831

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

A lot of it is inertia I think. I hear people saying that they "just use so-and-so for version control" but really we all have tons of CI/CD build and test pipelines, config, business processes etc in Github (rightly or wrongly).

I think AI is going to change this. Once you've built around github you feel locked in, since moving all your CI and other actions out of there, and your workflows out of there, is labor intensive. Now you could migrate from github to another service in a week, maybe less depending on how many workflows you need to move.

Competing services can't afford the data storage to compete with Big tech