Last year we announced the deprecation of several weak cryptographic standards. Then we provided a status update toward the end of last year outlining some changes we’d made to make the transition easier for clients. We quickly approached the February 1, 2018 cutoff date we mentioned in previous posts and, as a result, pushed back our schedule by one week. On February 8, 2018 we’ll start disabling the following:

GitHub’s Spokes system stores multiple distributed copies of Git repositories. This article discusses how we got Spokes replication to span widely separated datacenters.

At GitHub, we use MySQL as the main database technology backing our services. We run classic MySQL master-replica setups, where writes go to the master, and replicas replay master’s changes asynchronously. To be able to serve our traffic we read data from the MySQL replicas. To scale our traffic we may add more replica servers. Reading from the master does not scale and we prefer to minimize master reads.

GitHub is at a scale that provides exposure to interesting aspects of running a major site and are working to mature and level-up many parts of our infrastructure as we grow. One of the areas where this is evident is in how your requests find their destination using DNS and make their way into our sites over transit and peering. Many organizations are either too small to need to tackle these sorts of problems or so large they have groups to maintain existing solutions for each portion of them. It is really compelling to be able to directly work on such projects and closely with great engineers who are solving others still.

Over the past 18 months we’ve made a significant investment in GitHub’s physical infrastructure. The goal of this work is to improve the redundancy and global availability of our system. In doing so we’ve solidified the foundation upon which we will expand our compute and storage footprint in support of our growing user base.