Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.
To offer a data point (not a tribalist argument): GitHub Actions being down this often is still less expensive than the cost of switching everything somewhere else. Would rather have my team walk away from the PRs and do other tasks than have engineering effort, meetings, design pages, scheduling, etc. for switching over.
This is annoying and I'm here because it's down. But it would have to be far worse to come close to actually being worth changing.
1. go sign-up elsewhere
2. Log into GitHub and point Actions to that new host
3. All my actions files immediately worked without question
I'd probably give it a spin and make a wiki page explaining how to swap back and forth. No meetings. No design issues. No scheduling. Just a flip switch on who to pay for computers.
For what it's worth, we switched some of our actions to a self-hosted Woodpecker instance, and although there were a few kinks to iron out, it works better overall (for example, because of better caching on that single instance, our docker images build faster).
In my experience moving from GH to Forgejo was trivial, largely because the actions are mostly compatible and importing the repos can be automated. The amount of time it took was definitely less than the 5-8 hours of downtime that GHA had yesterday.
I’m intensely grateful that despite rumblings, the company I contract to hasn’t switched from self-hosted Jenkins to GHA. Hopefully the steady drumbeat of failure will keep it that way.
We've started writing some new workflows against argo-workflows for the last like 9months or so. Especially for use cases where the actions are like self-service type automation.
I think people were so excited to move away from jenkins to something 'managed' just because of how much a dinosaur jenkins is and how much a pain in the ass it is to upgrade it... but now we are seeing how managed can bite you in the ass if the manager is incompetent.
I think I agree if you don't have someone dedicated to running and maintaining Jenkins. If you have someone at your org that knows what they are doing though, I'd still take Jenkins over GHA any day.
That's significantly more difficult to set up and it cost money. Github's big issues that it's free, Microsoft doesn't want to allocate enough budget to keep the thing running properly.
But for people who either don't pay anything at all or phenomenal amount one 9 of up time is all you need.
If you're actually trying to run a business I guess you can call and gitlab and get an Enterprise contract
We've been working on this at Depot[0]. We built the internals of Depot CI as a general-purpose workflow engine that understands GitHub Actions as an input (with plans to extend) - we've been working to make Actions runners more performant and more reliable for a while, but eventually you hit a ceiling if you don't also control the control plane.
Our deployments are triggered by GitHub Actions, and it is a pain to deploy without it (specifically collecting the credentials and putting them into variables the shell will read).
This is multiple times this month that this has been a problem.
Has GitHub completed it's internal migration to Azure yet? Or is it still ongoing? None of our devs want to switch away from GH, but we will have to at this point.
My Github actions are now basically: "checkout / set env vars from secrets / docker-compose builder run make".
I used large machine runners to run full the Docker (Podman actually) on Github first to avoid dealing with docker-in-docker complications. This step also provided some very nice robustness advantages, as I can now trigger deployments from my laptop if needed.
Step two:
Migrate to self-hosted runners. I used my former homelab server to set up a build machine. It has 16Tb of fast NVMe SSDs and thanks to Podman container layer caching, my entire lint workflow now takes 30 seconds. Faster than just one "npm install" on Github before.
And Github's self-hosted runners are actually surprisingly easy to set up and use. They are also somewhat more robust.
WoodpeckerCI for DIY, Drone.io for paid support. Self-hosted, OAuth login, repo-permission-based authorization, container-native design, easy web UI, optional RDBMS, supports many platforms. All the core features needed for scalable CI, deploy as few/many as you want for multiple teams, small enough to easily run on one box for one repo. Nothing else is as simple, easy, powerful, compatible.
We have set up a new enterprise and are migrating to GHE. For us this was a no-brainer; we get our own isolated environment, Enterprise Managed Users with Entra OIDC provisioning and Github Copilot in EU data residency. https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/dashboard looks pretty good to me. We will still keep our github.com enterprise around for public repositories. I’m genuinely curious to know why a company would prefer github.com over GHE?
I wasn't directly involved, but working in a couple of shops that used GH, I think they really steered people away from GHE, my impression was it's a product they don't really want to support - I vaguely recall hearing that upgrades were very painful on GHE, and the scaling / failover story was not great. Can anyone else confirm?
To clarify, we are on Github Enterprise Cloud, not Server. The option for enterprise managed users with your own ghe.com subdomain and data residency options is still prominently shown in the enterprise signup flow. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/enterpris...
Until someone makes a better PR experience you guys are stuck with GitHub.
Nobody cares about ATProto or whether your commits are a damn NFT or some bs just literally improve upon the experience.
That’s it.
It’s as if no company is focusing on the product experience or anybody’s experience anymore. It’s all ooo look what I got I got this I can do that too me me me but nobody will ever buy that.
Say what you want about huge companies like Microsoft or Walmart but they spend a lot of energy understanding the human experience to sell products and less on their own perceived self-aggrandizement.
GitHub is the best version control online and it’s not even close.
https://github.com/agentspan-ai/agentspan which is essentially an agentic SDK layer for Conductor can convert any of your langgraph, openAI, vercel, or ADK agent and makes it durable and adds orchestration with no code changes.
The thesis: agents should not just be an LLM loop running inside one Python process. Once agents touch real systems, you need crash recovery, retries, human approval, distributed tool execution, cancellation, observability, and execution history.
Agentspan is basically applying the Conductor OSS execution model to agents. Conductor made long-running distributed workflows durable. Agentspan tries to do the same thing for agent executions: give every run an ID, persist the state, let it survive process death, pause for approval, resume later, and inspect what happened.
The post is three arguments that together form a new framing for agent runtimes:
The LLM shouldn't execute anything (planning and execution belong on strictly separated planes), signals are the primitive that makes out-of-band cancellation and replanning possible, and the workflow's graph should be synthesized by the LLM at runtime rather than declared by a programmer at commit time. That last one is the load-bearing idea - a Late-Bound Saga.
Agentspan is the runtime that implements it on top of Conductor. Happy to answer about any of these and why I think the `while` loop is the wrong primitive.
