So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes
Octocats claim 35x write improvement
GitHub is renovating its Git storage system to cope with the surge in demand from AI agents, aiming to restore reliability. The revamped storage, dubbed Spokes, will decouple writes from reads, offload maintenance, and let object storage handle redundancy. Most significantly, it bypasses the three-phase commit protocol, previously a bottleneck for write speed.
Early tests indicate a 35x improvement in write performance. This transformation, designed to be non-disruptive, will keep developer workflows, review processes, and security controls intact. The company expects this migration to support large engineering teams running busy CI pipelines alongside burgeoning fleets of agents. GitHub's user traffic doubled between September 2025 and August 2026, reaching 473.3 billion events per month.
This heightened activity has led to frequent service incidents. The new architecture will accommodate this surge by writing commits to Azure Blob Storage, which autonomously manages replication, and separating read requests onto a dedicated channel handled by lightweight compute workers.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
