Note di Matteo

Incredibile la crescita di GitHub recente. La quantità di codice scritta non è probabilmente mai stata così alta.

This exponential growth does not stress one system at a time. A pull request can touch Git storage, mergeability checks, branch protection, GitHub Actions, search, notifications, permissions, webhooks, APIs, background jobs, caches, and databases. At high scale, small inefficiencies compound: queues deepen, cache misses become database load, indexes fall behind, retries amplify traffic, and one slow dependency can affect several product experiences.

Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features. We are reducing unnecessary work, improving caching, isolating critical services, removing single points of failure, and moving performance-sensitive paths into systems designed for these workloads. This is distributed systems work: reducing hidden coupling, limiting blast radius, and making GitHub degrade gracefully when one subsystem is under pressure. We’re making progress quickly, but these incidents are examples of where there’s still work to do.

Elizabeth Pemmerl, GitHub’s chief revenue officer, also announced her resignation last week, according to sources at GitHub. “After eleven years on this amazing journey, I have decided it’s the right time for the next chapter,” said Pemmerl in a message to GitHub employees, seen by Notepad. Microsoft has appointed Dan Stein, former head of software and digital platforms for Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS), as the new chief revenue officer for GitHub. It’s the latest sign of Microsoft’s ownership influence on GitHub.

“There’s basically no more GitHub at all anymore,” one GitHub employee tells me. “It’s all Microsoft, and the company is collapsing, both in outages that are reallllly bad and have torched the company reputation… and in an exodus of leadership.”

Tom Warren in Inside Microsoft’s wave of executive departures

Le stacked PR su GitHub sono in preview:

Arrange pull requests in an ordered stack and merge them all in one click. Each PR represents one focused layer of your change, reviewed independently and landed together.

The gh stack CLI makes it easy to create stacks, perform cascading rebases, push branches and create PRs, and navigate between layers — all from your terminal.

Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)

GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.

Kyle Daigle, COO di GitHub in un tweet.

TIL su github-debug.com si può eseguire uno speed test verso diversi domini di GitHub per verificarne le prestazioni (GitHub ha ancora un suo AS e suoi datacenter anche se sta migrando verso Azure).

DNSimple spiega come gestiscono le repository GitHub con Terraform. Quando iniziano a diventare centinaia, gestirle manualmente genera inconsistenze:

• Repositories had different settings, even when they should have been identical
• Labels for issue triage varied from repository to repository, making cross-project tracking difficult
• Some repositories had issue templates, while others didn't
• Permission management was manual and error-prone
• Security features like vulnerability alerts weren't consistently enabled
• Pull request templates were copy-pasted (when they existed at all)

Dopo un tentativo con Repocop, per automatizzare il setup, hanno deciso di usare Terraform con aggiornamento delle configurazioni tramite Pull Request e Terraform Cloud.

Ieri: il control plane GitHub Actions costa $0.002/min anche con runner self-hosting.

Oggi (Jared Palmer):

We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions. The 39% price reduction for hosted runners will continue as planned (on January 1)

We missed the opportunity to gather feedback from the community ahead of this move. That's a huge L. We'll learn and do better in the future.

Actions is critical infrastructure for millions of developers and we're committed to making it a world‑class compute product. Although we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year, Actions itself is not free. There are real, web-scale costs associated with the service and behind the control plane (for logs, artifacts, caching, redis, egress, engineering, support, etc) for both hosted and self-hosted runners. We eventually need to find a way to price it properly while also partnering and fostering the rest of the ecosystem. However, we clearly missed some steps here, and so we’re correcting course.

You all trust Actions with your most important workflows, and that trust comes with a responsibility we didn't live up to. The way forward is to listen more, ship with the community, and raise the bar together.

Mega refactoring di GitHub Actions:

In early 2024, the GitHub Actions team faced a problem. The platform was running about 23 million jobs per day, but month-over-month growth made one thing clear: our existing architecture couldn’t reliably support our growth curve. In order to increase feature velocity, we first needed to improve reliability and modernize the legacy frameworks that supported GitHub Actions.

The solution? Re-architect the core backend services powering GitHub Actions jobs and runners.

Since August, all GitHub Actions jobs have run on our new architecture, which handles 71 million jobs per day (over 3x from where we started). Individual enterprises are able to start 7x more jobs per minute than our previous architecture could support.

Nuovi prezzi più bassi:

Ma compare una fee di $0.002/min per i self-hosted runner.

I provider alternativi di hosted runner provano a spinnarla positivamente. Blacksmith.sh:

In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds.

Depot invece l'ha presa male.

Sull'architettura di GitHub:

The current architecture is indeed suboptimal. We are in the process of decoupling the monolith and now about to accelerate an incremental migration to a modern frontend stack. This will allow us to have higher velocity and better DX. I’ll post more soon when we officially get started.

The current problem is that we are not fully migrated yet to azure + the rails app calls out to a react rendering service in a waterfall. Then there are then quite a few data and client side react paradigms (react router, a custom router, relay, and some react query more recently).

In new arch, we’ll have decoupled modern frontend with parallel data fetching and move from styled components to tailwind

(Jared Palmer)