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GitHub details new Git storage built for thousands of agent writes
GitHub engineers said a new Git storage architecture, in limited private preview, is designed so thousands of agents can push to one repository at once.
GitHub engineers said the company has built a new Git storage architecture meant to let thousands of software agents push to a single repository at once, and that the system is in a limited private preview after being announced last week at GitHub Universe1.
In a Nov. 5 post on the GitHub Blog, Karthik Raman and Brian Celenza wrote that internal testing showed the design supporting 5,000 concurrent agents on a repository, sending 7,200 pushes per second, while serving read traffic with consistently low latency1.
They framed the work as the foundation for what GitHub calls agentic development at the scale of hundreds of millions of developers, and said the company has been building it under the live service1.
The post is the latest in a series. GitHub previously described moving copies of nearly all repositories into Azure, scoping write quorum to individual Git references, and standing up virtual replicas backed by Azure Blob Storage1.
The new design, internally called Project Rubicon, rests on two principles GitHub said it set earlier: minimize coordination, and decouple storage from compute1. Engineers argued that Git objects are immutable and content-addressed, so two writers can store them without agreeing, while only the reference update needs consensus1.
In the architecture they described, Git objects live as packs in Azure Blob Storage. References and the pack manifest live in a replicated log service called Ref-CAS, for Reference Compare-and-Swap1. Virtual replicas cache state and serve Git, API, and web requests; they do not hold the durable copy of the repository1.
On a write, a virtual replica indexes the incoming pack, uploads it to Blob Storage, then commits one transaction to Ref-CAS that lists the pack and updates references1. Later, dedicated compaction nodes merge packs and run garbage collection so reads stay fast as write volume grows1.
On a read, a virtual replica checks its reference version with Ref-CAS, pulls needed packs from Blob Storage into cache, and serves the request from there1. GitHub said it aims for every repository, from a side project to a busy monorepo, to run on the same architecture without special handling for hot repos1.
The company listed follow-on work including fetching single objects from Blob Storage, packing by object type, partial and global replicas, scale-to-zero capacity, an atomic commit API, and cheaper agent operations that avoid a full clone1.
GitHub said the architecture is available in a limited private preview now, with a broader rollout early next year1. Independent verification of the test numbers was not in the post1.
