One production change cut total query time on the artifacts table in half

Summary

The GitHub Actions incident on Thursday, August 6, was unacceptable in both its impact and particularity of its duration. The team continue to work through a deeper root cause analysis (RCA) on the incident, as there were many aspects in play that they want to fully understand before calling the investigation complete. Aside from immediate repair items discovered through their investigation, they are accelerating their architectural roadmap in GitHub Actions, aligned to their ongoing efforts around isolation, resiliency, and scale. It’s worth noting that the GitHub Actions service at the core of the aforementioned incident is still fully running in their data centers, a contributing factor to the lack of capacity they experienced. On their broader efforts, last month, they shared how a deliberate pause and stronger stability controls changed the way they move production traffic into Azure.