GitHub is overhauling its Git storage backend, responding to a dramatic rise in traffic driven by AI agents. The current architecture, nicknamed Spokes, uses a three-phase commit protocol that requires a quorum of replicas to acknowledge each write. That ensures strong consistency but bottlenecks write speed, as every push is limited by the slowest replica. The new design writes each commit once to Azure Blob Storage, which handles replication automatically, and separates read requests onto a dedicated channel with lightweight compute workers. Maintenance tasks like compaction and garbage collection move to background processes, reducing latency on the serving path.
GitHub reports that between September 2025 and August 2026, monthly events on the platform grew from 218.2 billion to 473.3 billion. In September 2026 alone, commits hit 7.38 billion, a fivefold increase from the same month a year earlier. This load has taken a toll: the GitHub Availability Report logged ten incidents that degraded performance in April and nine more in May. The company says early internal tests of the new architecture show a 35x write improvement, though no timeline for the migration has been announced.
The move aligns with broader industry efforts to rethink Git for the agentic age. The article notes that former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke launched a hosting service called Entire, which offloads agent traffic to mirror repositories, and that Cursor, a SpaceX subsidiary, replaced Spokes-style quorum writes with an object-storage write-ahead log. GitHub's redesign aims to be non-disruptive, preserving existing developer workflows, review processes, and security controls while scaling for sustained concurrent reads and writes. Whether the new architecture will fully restore reliability remains to be seen, but the shift marks a significant departure from the quorum-based approach that has underpinned GitHub's storage for years.