GitHub is proud to handle thousands of requests per second from our millions of users. The Internet, however, can be a fickle beast of cables and sparks, and sometimes those requests don’t happen very fast (or at all). While we’re happy to help you troubleshoot connection issues to us, we also know our users like swift answers and a hands-on approach.

Earlier this year, we announced the deprecation of several weak cryptographic standards. As noted during our initial announcement, the vast majority of HTTPS clients connect to GitHub using TLSv1.2 and won’t be affected by our disabling of TLSv1/TLSv1.1. Since the announcement, we have been focusing on the impact of disabling the diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 and diffie-hellman-group14-sha1 key exchanges for SSH. As of last week, we have enabled diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256. This key exchange method is widely supported and will allow most legacy clients to seamlessly transition away from diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 and diffie-hellman-group14-sha1.

Visibility is essential to effectively operating complex systems. As our network has grown, we’ve had to improve the the way we collect data about it to keep up. Key to these improvements has been the ability to tag metrics. Tagging has allowed us to build dashboards that start at a high level and facilitate drilling down into interesting or problematic areas by filtering and aggregating on multiple dimensions. A simple example below shows data flowing across a set of our spine switches during a rolling update:

Over the last year, GitHub has gradually evolved the infrastructure that runs the Ruby on Rails application responsible for github.com and api.github.com. We reached a big milestone recently: all web and API requests are served by containers running in Kubernetes clusters deployed on our metal cloud. Moving a critical application to Kubernetes was a fun challenge, and we’re excited to share some of what we’ve learned with you today.

We recently launched Topics, a new feature that lets you tag your repositories with descriptive words or phrases, making it easy to discover projects and explore GitHub.com. Topic suggestions on public repositories, provides a quick way to add tags to repositories.