What is the Availability Report?

Historically, GitHub has published post-incident reviews for major incidents that impact service availability. Whether we’re sharing new investments to infrastructure or detailing site downtimes, our belief is that we can collectively grow as an industry by learning from one another. This month, we’re excited to introduce the GitHub Availability Report.

What can you expect?

On the first Wednesday of each month, we’ll publish a report describing GitHub’s availability, including a description of any incidents that may have occurred and update you on how we are evolving our engineering systems and practices in response. You should expect these updates to include a summary of what happened, as well as a technical explanation for incidents where we believe the occurrence was novel and contains information that helps engineers around the world learn how to improve product operations at scale.

Why are we doing this?

Availability and performance are a core feature, including how GitHub responds to service disruptions. We strive to engineer systems that are highly available and fault-tolerant and we expect that most of these monthly updates will recap periods of time where GitHub was >99% available. When things don’t go as planned, rather than waiting to share information about particularly interesting incidents, we want to describe all of the events that may impact you. Our hope is that by increasing our transparency and sharing what we’ve learned, rather than simply reporting minutes of downtime on a status page, everyone can learn from our experiences. At GitHub, we take the trust you place in us very seriously, and we hope this is a way for you to help hold us accountable for continuously improving our operational excellence as well as our product functionality.

#engineering #github #availability report