Move to loading assets from repo rather than raw.githubusercontent.com

[mvl22]

As raw.githubusercontent.com could potentially go down, we should move to loading the assets from a pulled version of the main repo.

Needs deployment support, and AJAX Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.

[Robinlovelace]

Idea: how about GitHub pages?

[mvl22]

Idea: how about GitHub pages?

That retains the same problem.

"As {$github-service} could potentially go down"

[Robinlovelace]

Doesn't the problem that it could go down affect every web hosting service, especially those without substantial redundancy built-in?

[dabreegster]

Doesn't the problem that it could go down affect every web hosting service, especially those without substantial redundancy built-in?

There should be multiple levels of redundancy in any distributed system. Individual hosts/services have many levels internally, and of course Github has particularly good redundancy for their static file hosting. But having the two copies of the actdev site hosted on different servers doesn't really help if Github still happens to go down, and both copies depend on it. Hosting all of the files on two separate servers means a Github outage doesn't affect anything.

[mvl22]

Doesn't the problem that it could go down affect every web hosting service, especially those without substantial redundancy built-in?

Yes, but we have a second server set up with the site.

As d says, this is just about removing dependency / one point of failure that currently both copies have. Though it adds slightly more complexity (another repo to pull in, and making sure that browsers do AJAX requests properly, rather than just pointing to URLs hosted elsewhere).

I've not prioritised this yet as I think Github has plenty of redundancy and the change could add new risks at this late stage.