> I believe they have since improved in this area, but it was clear that while GitHub itself offers an extremely available service, GHE is severely lacking in this respect.
That is correct. On earlier versions of GitHub Enterprise backing up data was quite a hassle. For a consistent (repository) backup taken on the VM level you didn't have to shut it down, but you've had to switch the appliance into maintenance mode, effectively preventing people from getting things done. This isn't the case anymore though as we've shipped new backup utilities [1] and support for HA setups with the 2.0.0 major release [2] some time ago.
Actually, things are running pretty smooth for months now - see for yourself at: https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month. If that's not your experience, you can reach out to support@github.com and we'll look into it.
We love github, don't get me wrong (and we pay decent $ for it). But I'm looking at track record / experience with it doing production auto deploys for years.
S3 has 9 9s of durability and is "closer" to where our servers run so there are less possible points of failure. We have had 0 issues since migrating to s3 backed git repo 2 years ago.
We still use github for day-to-day scm mgmt as you guys have tons of extra value add.
That is correct. On earlier versions of GitHub Enterprise backing up data was quite a hassle. For a consistent (repository) backup taken on the VM level you didn't have to shut it down, but you've had to switch the appliance into maintenance mode, effectively preventing people from getting things done. This isn't the case anymore though as we've shipped new backup utilities [1] and support for HA setups with the 2.0.0 major release [2] some time ago.
[1] https://github.com/github/backup-utils
[2] https://enterprise.github.com/releases/2.0.0