GitHub's new Git storage architecture (github.blog)

184 pointsby DAlperin21 hours ago52 comments

pksunkara 15 hours ago

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

cedel2k1 14 hours ago

At this point GitHub should likely just try snatching the Enroute guys :)

esafak 14 hours ago

Looks cool. Anybody here with experience to share?

lelandfe an hour ago

N.b the slow sun rise with the parallaxing hills on scroll is a great bit of 2000's-style CSS.

It might be more of a send up to Firewatch these days: https://www.firewatchgame.com/

But I'm still waiting on someone to revive 2008's darling, resizing parallaxing: https://web.archive.org/web/20080302013806/https://www.think...

yakkomajuri 16 hours ago

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.

pksunkara 15 hours ago

Since they wouldn't need to actually have the inactive repositories on disk anymore, I reckon it should solve the horizontal scale issue too by reducing the compute/disk capacity that needs to be maintained.

rockwotj 14 hours ago

personally I see more issues with actions over pushing

Walf 8 hours ago

What? 7.2k CI runs per second is a piece of cake! ;-)

dwm 5 hours ago

This looks a lot like Cursor's Continuity, though Github are reporting an order of magnitude greater write throughput.

https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale

jxramos 12 hours ago

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.

jason1cho 8 hours ago

Thousands of changes per day means no human reads all these changes.

There're really security issues, and a black box creates black boxes.

mdbug 5 hours ago

Humans are also black boxes

schaefer an hour ago

>> Humans are also black boxes

I have no idea why I like this comment, but I do.

1718627440 3 minutes ago

There are not, because humans are where the light shines out of in this analogy.

rochacon 16 hours ago

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.

mitxela 12 hours ago

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

petervandijck 7 hours ago

I wonder if they’re working on a non git version forward looking for agents as well

mpalmer an hour ago

This new brilliant idea that agents need something different/better than git is simply ridiculous.

The problems of scale we're encountering are because bad developers are deploying bad quantities of bad agents against bad repos.

Vibe-coded repos occupy GB of space, utterly useless PRs are opened and closed due to conflicts with other useless PRs, and it turns out git is the problem!

chrisweekly an hour ago

I thought Actions (for free repos) was the main culprit, no?

dbalatero 19 minutes ago

You're not wrong, but GitHub can only control what they can control. They cannot hold everyone at gun point and make them stop vibe coding. They also cannot shutdown Anthropic/OpenAI - you'll have to wait for their A/OAI's debts to come due for that one.

fnord77 12 hours ago

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

jacques_chester 11 hours ago

Possibly Shopify's monolith.

Or alternatively someone is doing something very silly.

byroot 8 hours ago

Nah, they replaced GitHub with some in-house videcoded stuff a few months ago, and from what I hear from the grapevine it's not going well.

But there's a number of other big private repos with a high rate of merge on GitHub, and indeed it's currently a bit painful, e.g. the subroutine that check whether a PR can be merged tend to take ages. So my read is that they want to better support these big customers out of concern that they might leave too.

derwiki 2 hours ago

https://github.com/tobi/walgit

qrobit 7 hours ago

The biggest very active repo I know of is nixpkgs, and I heard it was a stress test for GitHub already.

flykespice an hour ago

Possibly this dude's repos? https://github.com/xesf

Every day, he sends hundreds of commits to his (most likely vibecoded) repositories of retro games recompilation.

crote 13 hours ago

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.

clivedup 13 hours ago

My understanding is that forks on GitHub share the same storage in the GH backend.

It's not unreasonable to imagine thousands of commits per second to the kernel, especially if you consider that bots might be watching LKML and applying patches to various forks.

> 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?

For each issue my agent might raise 5 independent PRs as experiments.

Further, the more changes there are, the more important it is that they don't conflict, which means smaller changes, which means even more changes.

Bots interleaving typos, single line whitespace fixes, single dependency bumps, etc.

mitxela 12 hours ago

Welcome to the new AI future, where everyone is insane and reality doesn't matter.

I'm starting to think AI isn't a productivity machine, but rather a machine for hypnotising people into the false belief of productivity.

__s 8 hours ago

Yesterday's "web scale" is today's "agentic workload"

conartist6 5 hours ago

You weren't supposed to notice

gonzalohm 3 hours ago

That's exactly my thoughts! AI generated code is not good code, it's just engineered to look good

swat535 22 minutes ago

How do people afford such costs though? At that rate, you're not running flagship models due to cost and limits.. right..?

MisterMunchkin 7 hours ago

Yeah it’s just total slop. If your code is slop anyway, why commit it? Just push it at major milestones. It’s not like it matters if you lose it.

locknitpicker 6 hours ago

> Sorry, but thousands of pushes per second, per repository?! In what world could that possibly seem like a sound idea?

The only conceivable scenario that I can imagine leading to this volume of writes is a push-based GitOps repository for a huge cluster holding a large volume of apps, each one with many services. Each commit in one if these services triggers a commit to the gitops repo to update the reference to the new container image, which in turns triggers a deployment update.

There is no software project on earth that justifies a rate of changes in magnitudes of dozen of commits per second. This is a symptom of a huge problem, not a sign of times. Even in monorepo mania this sort of thing is inconceivable.

But that's also what you get with vibecoding: lots of output from people who do not have a clue about what they are doing.

FabCH 28 minutes ago

You basically described Google’s monorepo… about 10 years ago.

Companies pay GitHub for enterprise repositories. It’s not completely wild that a 2026 large scale company would have the same scale as 2016 Google…

usr1106 11 hours ago

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)

landoncrabtree2 8 hours ago

Define unreliable? Azure has a 99.97% historical uptime, AWS at 99.95%. Azure is #2 in market share, right beyond AWS. Engineer anecdotes about internal strife doesn’t equate to external reliability. I’m sure you can find AWS engineers complaining about AWS, or GCP, or insert company. (Also, Microsoft owns Azure and GitHub, so what did you expect?)

Traubenfuchs 30 minutes ago

> sending 7,200 pushes per second to a repo

Imagine the token costs!

My company with about 60 devs in the backend dev slack channel probably produces less commits per year together.

Does my company already belong to the permanent AI underclass?

mococa 15 hours ago

So we can have one more 9?

cr125rider 15 hours ago

It will be nice having maybe a few at the beginning of the number!

UltraSane 14 hours ago

Maybe every other month.

williamdclt 3 hours ago

They already give us one, you want a _second_? Entitled behaviour

amelius an hour ago

Can't they implement some kind of read-only mode?

lionkor 28 minutes ago

93.999

fifjcj38384 12 hours ago

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

locknitpicker 5 hours ago

I don't think this is ironic at all. The source control system is decentralized, in the sense that you can checkout a repo and use it as the central source or truth for everything.

For example, you can clone a repo from GitHub into your workstation,and then clone that repo into multiple folders in your workstation where you unleash agents to implement changes. The you pull those changes to your local repo or even directly to GitHub or GitLab or whatever. That's pretty decentralized.

Now, compare this to the god awful mess that was subversion.

COMMENT___ 4 hours ago

For god's sake, the git workflow you've just described is centralized. It has nothing to do with decentralization in practice.

GitHub is still a single source of truth in that scenario.

BTW, it's unclear what exactly you think is wrong with SVN. Works great when used properly (like any tool, you know).

bob1029 6 hours ago

I think perforce might be the better VCS if you intend to have a bunch of autonomous agents attempt to collaborate over one big pile.

Multiple terabytes is no problem out of the box. You get exclusive locking of files. You can easily take partial checkouts of the monolith. Centralization is a feature in this particular context. Git works great if the need for coordination is moderate. If you've got thousands of automated developers with their hands in the cookie jar, exclusive locks start to look really compelling. Perforce sucks with a highly distributed team, but in the case of an AI agent swarm we presumably have the ability to instantly nuke an agent's checkout if needed. I don't have to contact the agent and wait for them to get out of bed.

kccqzy 2 hours ago

Perforce is not bad, but using exclusive locking is just bad practice, for both humans and agents. Especially for agents. Agents are good at resolving merge conflicts.

dizhn 3 hours ago

"we’ve been building it underneath GitHub while it keeps running."

Holding on for dear life and failing is more like it.

chjail-11 16 hours ago

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