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.
When GitHub’s customers shifted their coding focus to AI agents, activity on the platform spiked significantly. Between September 2025 and August 2026, GitHub traffic doubled, from 218.2 billion events per month to 473.3 billion. In September alone, commits hit 7.38 billion, a 5x increase from September 2025.
This shift in traffic is stressing the system. According to the GitHub Availability Report, the service suffered 10 incidents in April alone that degraded performance. Another nine incidents landed in May, with each generating more bad publicity than the previous one.
So long, Spokes
GitHub's current storage architecture, nicknamed Spokes, uses a three-phase commit protocol, storing full repo copies across multiple local disks and requiring a quorum of replicas to acknowledge each write. While this approach ensures strong reliability, it bottlenecks write speed, as every push is bounded by the slowest replica required for quorum.
The new architecture writes a commit only once, to Azure Blob Storage, an object store service that automatically handles replication (and hence redundancy) on its own, eliminating the quorum bottleneck. GitHub also gooses performance by separating read requests into their own channel, a job handled by lightweight compute workers. The only coordination between reads and writes is over the reference branch pointers.
Maintenance duties – such as compaction and garbage collection — are moved from the serving path to operate as background processes, further reducing system lag.
Git in the age of agents
GitHub seems to be on the same page with others in rethinking Git for the agentic age.
Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke launched a Git-hosting service called Entire, which offloads agent traffic to mirror repositories, allowing a customer’s core GitHub repos to just serve the core development traffic.
SpaceX subsidiary Cursor, which uses Git to back its agent-support service, also refined the storage layer for better performance. Cursor engineers also rejected Spokes’ three-phase commit in favor of uploading pushes into an object storage write-ahead log (WAL), which captured all changes as immutable objects, caching at least one copy on super-speedy solid-state disks.
Respect for the Octocats
While it's cathartic to hate on a service that often goes down, you have to feel empathy for the GitHub engineers who, when they created the service, couldn’t have guessed what they signed up for.
“I've worked at extreme scale before and seen companies spend three months just preparing for events that will increase their traffic by 10% or 20% [...], which is nothing compared to what GitHub's facing now,” wrote PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert in an X message.
We can all hope the new storage architecture will give GitHub's engineers some well-earned rest. ®