So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes

Responding to unprecedented demand from AI agents, GitHub is rebuilding its Git storage architecture from scratch. Early tests with the new architecture show a promising 35x write improvement in internal tests. GitHub will need a miracle of that proportion just to keep up with customer demand. The plan involves decoupling writes from reads, offloading maintenance, and letting object storage manage redundancy. Most impressive is that the redesign is happening under the hood, with the goal of a non-disruptive change that won't alter developer workflows, review processes, or security controls. Running an enterprise-grade code repository means supporting “large engineering teams running busy CI pipelines alongside growing fleets of agents. Supporting these teams means building Git infrastructure for sustained, concurrent reads and writes at a scale few repositories reach today,” wrote Brian Celenza, GitHub principal software engineer, in a blog post describing the updates. Celenza did not offer a timeline for this ambitious migration. …