GitHub Availability Report: August 2020

In August, GitHub reported no incidents that led to service downtime and introduced updates to their Status Page to enhance transparency and real-time communication about service availability. The new page focuses on current availability and service degradation, while the 90-day history remains accessible under “incident history.” Users can subscribe for notifications on any status changes. Following a July incident, GitHub improved deployment tooling and Kubernetes configurations to bolster system reliability by removing the ImagePullPolicy of Always and implementing a mechanism akin to Kubernetes mutating admission controllers for sidecar container updates. These changes decouple Kubernetes Pods from Docker registry availability during container restarts, with further enhancements planned to increase Kubernetes deployment resilience.