Microsoft turns to AWS as GitHub faces AI capacity crunch

(runtimewire.com)

106 points | by ilreb 1 hour ago

15 comments

  • kuschku 3 minutes ago
    What kind of vibecoded website is this?

    - the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer

    - the title tag doesn't seem to work properly (just shows the URL in the tab title, on Chrome and Firefox)

    - 2007-style keyword stuffing in meta keywords

    - the entire page is client-side react with a completely empty body?

    The agency that built it even proudly states on their website that they vibecode everything: https://gradientnoise.com/

    EDIT: Turns out, the articles are mostly AI-generated as well? https://blog.ryanmerket.com/how-i-built-runtimewire-a-one-pe...

  • jf 1 hour ago
    I helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner.

    One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.

    • jiggawatts 37 minutes ago
      Wait, are you trying to tell me that 1/100th the speed at 50x the price isn’t a great offer for Microsoft’s customers!?

      Heathen lies!

      Oh, wait… we have to use it? Oh, that’s terrible…

  • JumpCrisscross 11 minutes ago
    Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon.

    (Probably just tea leaves. If you wanted to be extra spicy, you’d note that Jassy just threw Fable under the bus.)

    • shrubble 4 minutes ago
      AWS gets a lot of money from both the unclassified government work they do plus the more secretive work. If they were required to disclose as part of that, they would disclose - why put all those contracts at risk?
    • CSMastermind 4 minutes ago
      Doesn't most of Anthropics revenue come from AWS still?
  • csbrooks 1 hour ago
    > commits were on pace to hit 14 billion in 2026, up from 1 billion in 2025

    So AI means 14x the checkins? That's not 14x features completed, but still... wow.

    • N_Lens 1 hour ago
      AI has 100x'd our productive capacity such that we're moving at unforeseen speeds at digging holes and refilling them!
      • shimman 42 minutes ago
        This is too generous, they aren't even filling in the holes.
        • californical 30 minutes ago
          It’s filling in a lot of the holes, but it’s putting a very convincing paper cover over the ones it misses. So it’s very hard to find the ones it didn’t fill, better hope your most valuable customers don’t walk over the paper ones!
    • 3eb7988a1663 55 minutes ago
      I am surprised it is that low. The Bun Zig-to-Rust AI port was 6755 commits in like two weeks. If you make 10 commits per working day, that is 2500/year.

      While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.

    • BobbyTables2 59 minutes ago
      Is that even a lot?

      Spread over a year, roughly estimating a generous 4 kbytes of data per commit, comes out to a throughput of a little under 2 MB/s.

      Of course, it isn’t spread out uniformly and there is also a lot of hashing and other things going on.

      Maybe pulls and clones drive more I/O ?

      • 3eb7988a1663 53 minutes ago
        I suspect there is a cacophony of work that happens when a commit hits the server. That request needs to get replicated, git repositories need to be repacked, pull requests need to calculate diffs, CI jobs need to execute, on and on.

        That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.

    • Aperocky 20 minutes ago
      That commit count alone should not become any problem for infrastructure, even for Azure. They probably developed some ungodly mess with actions that did not/could not translate very well on Azure infrastructure.
    • nomel 1 hour ago
      Seems very reasonable, from my use. I commit much more often, as checkpoints, with branch rules that prevent force pushes/deletions, so the agents can't delete anything. And, suspect MS is only counting commits, and not the eventual squashes to one commit.
      • larusso 31 minutes ago
        And every checking runs a whole CI run?

        We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state. We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons. We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.

        • nomel 25 minutes ago
          Nope. You can configure CI to not run for every commit of every branch (seems insane to have full CI for every commit, unless you don't allow your devs to push until done with something, which also seems insane).
  • inopinatus 14 minutes ago
    If there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand.

    This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.

  • ashishb 1 hour ago
    I wonder what percentage of pull requests are cascading updates caused by dependabot and multiple code review bots reviewing those PRs.

    My belief is it is likely 1% or more. And likely coming in as an avalanche.

  • not_kurt_godel 1 hour ago
    Saving this for the next time someone trots out the "All cloud providers are the same" line
  • rickette 20 minutes ago
    Easy to criticize this, but I rather see GitHub survive than fail under its own success. So thanks for acting on this MS!
  • JumpCrisscross 12 minutes ago
    Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon.

    (Probably just tea leaves.)

  • locusofself 41 minutes ago
    I have to imagine this is very temporary.
  • pjmlp 37 minutes ago
    So this is an Hotmail moment?
    • UnlockedSecrets 31 minutes ago
      Is this in reference to something that should be linked for those not alive or in the know at the time?
      • kqgnkqgn 24 minutes ago
        I'm not sure if it was entirely true, but there are stories that after Microsoft bought Hotmail in the mid-90's, they quickly attempted to move them from FreeBSD (?) to Windows NT. But it failed miserably, and they went back to the original stack for another ~decade.
      • pmontra 14 minutes ago
  • fortran77 33 minutes ago
    Still, it’s mostly text. You’d think it wouldn’t be that much of an issue.
    • andyst 13 minutes ago
      and programming is just typing!
  • citizenpaul 48 minutes ago
    My favorite part of this is that MS is just bending over to take it lest the gods scorn their "free" training data temple.
  • dr_kretyn 1 hour ago
    If they pull out "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." on AWS then I'm going to be impressed beyond mad.
    • Aperocky 22 minutes ago
      That only work on smaller business/organization.
    • solumunus 44 minutes ago
      How is this relevant or possible here.