Comment by bob1029
6 years ago
Today marks the 3rd time I've broached the topic w/ management of getting the self-host enterprise option... Compared to (public) GitHub's problems this year so far, our AWS EC2 instances are orders of magnitude more reliable. Sure, the internet can still go down, but my VPN into us-east-1 from Texas has been unbroken for weeks now.
At this point I'd almost prefer to pull it all in-house and manage it myself so the entire team doesn't have to lose a whole day of productivity over all this. I am so glad we moved away from using GH Actions for builds because we would be absolutely hosed right now on supporting our customers.
I'm not sure the irony is lost on you that; people generally prefer services like github (and; similarly EC2) precisely _because_ it's not on-prem and that if it's down there are hundreds of talented engineers working to resolve those issues.
Unfortunately anecdotal experience here is spotty. Services I run for my team are several 9's higher in terms of actual availability (note: I did not say "uptime"); and contrarily other internal services at my company have many times less reliability than services like github.
Given that people prefer external hosting for the reasons I mentioned, for many I think pulling it in-house is unappealing.
Does the GH Enterprise option not provide some degree of support with initial setup and configuration? Is the enterprise support more or less responsive than the public channels? I would expect those same engineers are also responsible for maintaining the enterprise offering.
Also, does isolation of a private GH instance from the public instances not provide some degree of added reliability considering the potential for DDOS or simply extreme load?
I absolutely grant you the IT infrastructure concerns. BUT Amazon is our vendor on that. GitHub provides the software. It's not like I'd be standing up a new series of physical hosts to run an on-prem GitHub built from source and managing all of the hell around that. This would be simply putting a GH-provided image on a EC2 instance and making sure we have frequent snapshots.
My typical response from GitHub Enterprise support has been fantastic over the years. I'll also note that after GitHub Actions/Packages came out on Github.com the lead time for support response did increase substantially for non critical tickets due the increased support burden for those new services. My most recent tickets have been answered promptly so they must have figured out the staffing issues.
You should be well aware that actual architecture of GitHub Enterprise isn't truly highly available (1 active and 1 or more standby instances) unless you are a huge customer to support clustering mode. Which means you likely need to take downtime to implement upgrades since they typically require rebooting the VM.
I work for a fortune 100 company and GHE has been a nightmare. Not only do you need a team to maintain it, but then that team needs to be equipped enough to help support any other internal services (CI/CD pipelines) that integrate with it. Github.com is just an infinitely more enjoyable experience.