The availability expectations gap is interesting from an education standpoint. Students are tought that 99.9% sounds impressive without contextualizing what that means in practice — roughly 8 hours of downtime per year. For a platform that millions of developers depend on as critical infrastructure during work hours, that math hits very differently than it does for a consumer app.

Anyone who used the phrase "measly" in relation to three nines is inadvertently admitting their lack of knowledge in massive systems. 99.9 and 99.95 is the target for some of the most common systems you use all day and is by no means easy to achieve. Even just relying on a couple regional AWS services will put your CEILING at three nines. It's even more embarrassing when people post that one GH uptime tracker that combines many services into 1 single number as if that means anything useful.

For solo and small team projects, I've started treating GitHub as distribution rather than infrastructure. Git itself is distributed — the repo on my machine is the source of truth. Deploy scripts that can run without GitHub Actions. Local backups of anything critical. It's a bit more work upfront, but the peace of mind when you see yet another incident on the status page is worth it.

The irony no one is talking about: AI makes quality code worse. Was bad enough already so imagine it now. I am expecting many more services to drop from 3 nines to 1 nine.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Except the last one isn't quite going to plan...

I wonder how much of this is down to the massive amount of new repos and commits (of good or bad quality!) from the coding agents. I believe that the App Store is struggling to keep up with (mostly manual tbf) app reviews now, with sharp increases in review times.

I find it hard to believe that an Azure migration would be that detrimental to performance, especially with no doubt "unlimited credit" to play with?

You can provision Linux machines easily on Azure and... that's all you need? Or is the thinking that without bare metal NVMe mySQL it can't cope (which is a bit of a different problem tbf).

I worked on the react team while at GitHub and you could easily tell which pages rendered with react vs which were still using turbo. I wish we took perf more seriously as a culture there

Until paying customers start leaving en masse, they will continue to shovel out subpar service.

It is annoying. But I bet they’re effectively being DDoS’d every day by AI agents now. I think the past year of that growth has destroyed any of their spare resources. It’s not really a scale problem I’d like to work on, tbh. Seems very hard.

Plus, the azure migration.

Hey, it's better than nine threes.