GitHub's new Git storage architecture

chjail-11

As if more developers means better code. Wasn't it Bonhoeffer who said stupidity is when smart people don't question authority?

rochacon

So that is why I got a bunch of 500's during push this week :) Hope it helps improve reliability, it was getting hard to defend GitHub with all the recent outages.

yakkomajuri

If I'm reading this right, this is (really solid) future planning but won't help with the current outages? I'd have thought so from the headline + initial content but then they say that the horizontal scale techniques are basically carrying over from the existing architecture (where it seems the problem is?) and this is mostly to help with what they call "vertical scale" (intra-repo scalability). They also admit right after that the most active repos today will receive short bursts of at most dozens of writes. So this seems like really useful planning for a near future that likely helps prevent more issues but isn't really meant to help current issues. Am I reading this right? Of course improvements like this are always useful either way. Not dunking here at all.

mococa

So we can have one more 9?

pksunkara

Most of this is similar to what https://enroute.sh already did scaling Git. https://enroute.sh/blog/everyone-is-doing-git-on-s3-wrong

crote

Sorry, but thousands of pushes per second, per repository?! In what world could that possibly seem like a sound idea? Sure, it's nice that you can technically handle it, but to me it sounds like at that point something has gone absolutely horribly wrong in the way you set up your agents. Last time I checked, GitHub was intended as a platform to upstream finished work items , not a realtime cross-agent chat channel. Handling thousands of git pushes per second implies thousands of issues, thousands of PRs, tens of thousands of comments, thousands of Actions runs, and dozens of releases. How's that part of their infra going to scale? How about introducing rate limits instead, nudging people to not have agents push every individual single-line changes to GH, but instead have them collaborate as a local cluster and only upstreaming PR-sized chunks of finished work? If you still need thousands of pushes per second you'd be looking at millions of lines of code, and at that point you're looking at an insane monorepo which is growing at a rate of terabytes per day , and which basically instantly becomes unusable due to being impossible to clone or check out.

mitxela

You could also just ban people who spam you and consume immense amounts of server time. Or make them pay for the server time.

fifjcj38384

it’s pretty ironic we got all the complexity of distributed source control with all of the drawbacks of centralisation

jxramos

Agent scale is definitely on the mind around industry, I wonder what github folks would say in response to https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-contro... . It's an interesting read to step back and consider source control from first principles and rebalance the tradeoffs for what qualities matter in this new regime.

fnord77

Which repo were they referring to that was growing too big vertically?

usr1106

Based on Azure... Isn't that one of the more unreliable clouds in the market? Edit: https://assets.theregister.com/2026/04/04/azure_talent_exodu... The blog post that story is based on was also on HN. Edit2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 (1297 points)