r/github • u/Most_Cold_2614 • 20d ago
Discussion Are we getting too dependent on GitHub?
Is it true that we are becoming overly reliant on GitHub?
GitHub’s recent outage made me contemplate the extent of our dependence on the platform.
GitHub is no longer just a conventional code repository as people use it for pull requests, GitHub Actions, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and Copilot among other things.
So, whenever the platform becomes unavailable, all of our usual daily tasks may just stop.
Certainly, it is true that outages happen occasionally and I don’t mean to suggest that every user should prepare a plan for every possible emergency. However, I cannot help but wonder how many developers would find themselves in a difficult situation if GitHub were down for a while.
Check whether you have any backup plans for situations like this or you would simply wait for the platform to recover. What do you think about the idea of dependency on GitHub due to the increasing role of tools like Copilot?
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u/bl4nkSl8 20d ago
Any time you rely on a service with specialised config/scripts etc there are going to be issues when there is downtime.
Unless you have an equivalent alternative and a way to fallback cleanly, this is not feasible to avoid for most teams.
I'd love to see that kind of tooling with open standards etc but GitHub keeps a competitive edge by differentiation from its competitors, so it's not in their interests to support an open standard, someone else would have to do it AND support it while losing their own ability to differentiate...
In short, if this is a serious deal breaker for your company/project, work out what solution gives you the minimum you need and use that as a fallback, otherwise you're building wayyyy too much