{
  "id": 13056227,
  "title": "So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/09/so-long-spokes-github-rewrites-storage-to-restore-reliability-just-in-13056227",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-09T06:03:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register",
    "slug": "the-register",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/10/09/so-long-spokes-github-rewrites-storage-to-restore-reliability-just-in-time-for-agentic-hordes/5302148"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Responding to a surge in demand from AI agents, GitHub is redesigning its Git storage system. Early internal tests reveal a remarkable 35x improvement in write performance. To maintain pace with customer needs, the company plans to decouple writes from reads, offload maintenance, and rely on object storage for redundancy. Most impressively, the redesign is being accomplished behind the scenes, aiming for a seamless change that won't disrupt developer workflows, review processes, or security controls. Brian Celenza, a GitHub principal software engineer, highlighted the need to build Git infrastructure for sustained, concurrent reads and writes at an unprecedented scale in his blog post. The company has not provided a timeline for this ambitious migration. As GitHub's users transitioned their focus to AI agents, platform traffic doubled between September 2025 and August 2026, from 218.2 billion to 473.3 billion events per month. Commits jumped by 5x in September 2026 alone, increasing to 7.38 billion. This surge in traffic has put significant stress on the system, with 10 incidents in April and another nine in May, each incident causing performance degradation. GitHub's current storage architecture, known as Spokes, utilizes a three-phase commit protocol, storing full repository copies on multiple local disks and requiring a quorum of replicas to acknowledge each write. While this method ensures strong reliability, it slows down write speed, as every push is limited by the slowest replica necessary for the quorum. In comparison, the new architecture writes a commit just once to Azure Blob Storage, a service that automatically manages replication (and consequently redundancy) on its own, eliminating the bottleneck caused by the quorum. GitHub also enhances performance by directing read requests through their own channel, managed by lightweight compute workers. Coordination between reads and writes is limited to reference branch pointers. Maintenance tasks, such as compaction and garbage collection, are shifted from the serving path to run as background processes, reducing system lag. GitHub seems to be moving in the same direction as others who are rethinking Git for the age of AI agents. Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke launched a Git-hosting service called Entire, which offloads agent traffic to mirror repositories to allow a customer's core GitHub repos to serve core development traffic. SpaceX's subsidiary Cursor, which uses Git to back its agent-support service, has also improved its storage layer for better performance. Cursor engineers discarded Spokes' three-phase commit in favor of uploading pushes to an object storage write-ahead log (WAL), which stores all changes as immutable objects, caching at least one copy on super-fast solid-state disks. Despite the frustrations caused by frequent service downtimes, empathy is warranted for GitHub engineers who, when creating the service, couldn't anticipate the scale they would face. PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert conveyed this sentiment on X. It's comforting to hope that the new storage architecture will provide GitHub's engineers with some much-needed rest.",
  "summary": "Octocats claim 35x write improvement",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "The Register Science",
        "title": "So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/09/so-long-spokes-github-rewrites-storage-to-restore-reliability-just-in",
        "published": "2026-10-09T06:03:00.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}