Infrastructure

From maintaining our robust CI/CD tooling to scaling our databases and ensuring our tools are kept up-to-date, maintaining the infrastructure of the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform is a big job. This is how we do it.

Featured

How GitHub reduced testing time for iOS apps with new runner features

Learn how GitHub used macOS and Apple Silicon runners for GitHub Actions to build, test, and deploy our iOS app faster.

Upgrading GitHub.com to MySQL 8.0

GitHub uses MySQL to store vast amounts of relational data. This is the story of how we seamlessly upgraded our production fleet to MySQL 8.0.

Scaling merge-ort across GitHub

GitHub switched to performing merges and rebases using merge-ort. Come behind the scenes to see why and how we made this change.

Experiment: The hidden costs of waiting on slow build times

How much does it really cost to buy more powerful cloud compute resources for development work? A lot less than you think.

Latest

How GitHub converts previously encrypted and unencrypted columns to ActiveRecord encrypted columns

This post is the second part in a series about ActiveRecord::Encryption that shows how GitHub upgrades previously encrypted and unencrypted columns to ActiveRecord::Encryption.

Why and how GitHub encrypts sensitive database columns using ActiveRecord::Encryption

You may know that GitHub encrypts your source code at rest, but you may not have known that we encrypt sensitive database columns as well. Read about our column encryption strategy and our decision to adopt the Rails column encryption standard.

Improve Git monorepo performance with a file system monitor

Monorepo performance can suffer due to the sheer number of files in your working directory. Git’s new builtin file system monitor makes it easy to speed up monorepo performance.

How we think about browsers

Discover how GitHub thinks about browser support, look at usage patterns, and learn about the tools we use to make sure our customers are getting the best experience.

4 ways we use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

From automating builds and releases to taking care of large-scale regression testing, here are a few ways we use GitHub Actions to build GitHub.

Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale

In 2019, to meet GitHub’s growth and availability challenges, we set a plan in motion to improve our tooling and ability to partition relational databases.

GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces

Over the past months, we’ve left our macOS model behind and moved to Codespaces for the majority of GitHub.com development.

Why (and how) GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

Over the years, GitHub engineers have developed many ways to observe how our systems behave. We mostly make use of statsd for metrics, the syslog format for plain text logs…

How we ship code faster and safer with feature flags

At GitHub, we’re continually working to improve existing features and shipping new ones all the time. From our launch of GitHub Discussions to the release of manual approvals for GitHub…

How we scaled the GitHub API with a sharded, replicated rate limiter in Redis

About a year ago, we migrated an old rate limiter in order to serve more traffic and accommodate a more resilient platform architecture. We adopted a replicated Redis backend with…

Making GitHub CI workflow 3x faster

Using deferred compliance in GitHub’s CI process to improve developer productivity.

Building GitHub: introduction

An introduction to our blog series on GitHub’s investments in technical excellence.

Upgrading GitHub to Ruby 2.7

GitHub recently upgraded to Ruby 2.7. Learn how the team approached the deprecation warnings, why upgrading is important, and the notable performance improvements.