Another day another outage

Another day and another GitHub outage, splashed on the front page of Hacker News. Haven’t I seen another outage of the same service on the front page recently? Yes, I have.

Why not simplify? Why do tech nerds love adding multiple layers of complexity, often unnecessarily? And then cry about it when it all comes crashing down. Whatever happened to the idea of “no single point of failure”? And, where is the back-up plan for when GitHub suffers its next outage?

The comments attached to this latest episode make for grim reading -- some people’s lives literally depend on GitHub, and that is terribly sad. On the other hand, however, those same people chose to put all their eggs into one basket.

To quote Pai Mei, Kill Bill: Volume 2:

What if your enemy is three inches in front of you? What do you do then, curl into a ball, or put your FIST through him? Now begin.

Simplify. Manage your risks. Now begin.