The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
| Section | Core Platform |
| Maturity | Non-marketable |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2024-03-04 |
The Gitaly direction page belongs to the Systems Stage within the Core Platform section, and is maintained by Mark Wood. The Gitaly Engineering team and stable counterparts can be found on the Engineering team page.
This strategy is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute. Please comment and contribute in the linked issues and epics. Sharing your feedback directly on GitLab.com is the best way to contribute to our strategy and vision.
If you would like support from the Gitaly team, please see the team's page detailing How to contact the Gitaly team.
Gitaly is the service responsible for the storage and maintenance of all Git repositories in GitLab for both our GitLab.com customers, as well as self-managed customers. Git repositories are essential to GitLab, for Source Code Management, Wikis, Snippets, Design Management, and Web IDE. Every stage of the DevOps lifecycle to the right of Create - Verify, Package, Release, Configure, Govern, Monitor and Secure - depends on the project repositories. Because the majority of GitLab capabilities depend on information stored in Git repositories, performance and availability are of primary importance.
GitLab is used to store Git repositories by small teams of a few people all the way up to large enterprises with many terabytes of data. For this reason, Gitaly has been built to scale from small single server GitLab instances, to large high availability architectures.
Gitaly provides multiple interfaces to read and write Git data:
While GitLab is the largest user of the Gitaly project, it is important to note that Gitaly is a standalone project that can be adopted separately from GitLab. As such, we strive to ensure that all business specific decisions are made within the GitLab application. Our belief is that Gitaly should provide the ability for management interfaces, but not make any specific management decisions.
For example, some users may want the ability to move repositories between different storage nodes for either cost savings or performance reasons. While Gitaly should provide an easy to use interface to efficiently move repositories, the calling application should be making the decisions around which repositories to move where.
Processes requiring no business data or inputs should be fully contained within Gitaly. These types of processes include repository maintenance and storage maintenance type tasks. We believe that these types of features provide substantial value for projects utilizing Gitaly and provide a compelling reason to chose Gitaly as a repository storage architecture.
The Gitaly team is divided into two sub-teams which both strive to provide scalable and performant Git repository storage. These two teams are the Git team and the Cluster team, and represent two distinct focuses for the Gitaly group. (For additional details, see the team page.
Git Team
Gitaly is built on top of the open source Git project, and we feel very strongly that we should be contributing to this project. As users and ambassadors of Git, it is our goal to actively engage in the Git community through bug fixes, feature additions, and mentoring. One of this team's major goals is to ensure we continue to enhance the Git project.
In addition to contributing to upstream Git, the Gitaly Git team is responsible for integrating Git within the Gitaly product. This involves optimizing our internal usage of Git, performing housekeeping on repository data and generally ensuring that the repository storage for our customers is performing as well as possible for all shapes and sizes of data.
Cluster Team
The Cluster team's goal is to provide a durable, performant, and reliable Git storage layer for GitLab. This team will tightly collaborate with the Gitaly Git team as they will build directly upon the Git tooling. Areas where the Cluster team will focus on is High Availability Git storage (Gitaly Cluster), scalability of Gitaly storage mechanisms, and improved user and administrative experiences.
In order to support highly available Git repository storage, Gitaly Cluster has been released. This provides redundant storage benefits such as voted writes, read distribution, and data redundancy. For full documentation, please see the details on Configuring Gitaly Cluster.
To fully appreciate the use-case for Gitaly Cluster, we must first clarify the role of highly available repository storage. From the Gitaly perspective, highly available (HA) storage means that a fault-tolerant interface for repository data exists, such that the loss of a single storage node will not compromise the ability to read / write Git data. Gitaly cluster fulfills this role by providing an interface to define multiple Gitaly storage nodes, and set a replication factor for stored repositories (how many nodes each repository should be stored on). In the event of a storage node loss, read and write operations continue as before, and when the cluster is returned to full capacity, the data is re-replicated to the returning node.
What HA repository storage does not provide is improved performance. Though in some cases write performance improves (through read distribution), the general concept is that you are trading storage cost and potential performance impacts for fault tolerance.
The one year plan for Gitaly Group is founded on three main principals discussed below. As Gitaly is one of the foundational elements of GitLab, these principals were chosen ensure that Gitaly is ready to meet future business needs.
In the unlikely event that there is a repository data issue necessitating in data restoration, we want to ensure that there are sufficient tools in place to allow our customers to be up and running as efficiently and painlessly as possible. To this end, the Gitaly team are actively involved in the GitLab Disaster Recovery Working Group where we play a critical role in defining opportunities to improve overall repository data recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). We also meet regularly with customers to better understand our self-managed customer needs.
Our one year focus areas are:
There's no question, repository data sets are growing rapidly. With the prevalence of machine learning and artificial intelligence adoptions, we're seeing a steady increase in repository size as well as the number of files needing to be stored. The Gitaly team needs to ensure that repository storage scales with these expanding data storage needs.
Our goals here are:
Git can be an intimidating tool with very complex syntax. For those customers beginning their Git journey, or those who wish to expand what is possible, the Gitaly team wants to ensure success. We also recognize that administrators of self-managed instances want to more easily configure and manage repository storage. In order to assist in both of these user journeys, we plan to do the following:
Over the next quarter, the Gitaly team is focused on the following areas. While this is not an exhaustive list, it does give some insight into our major focus areas.
Reftables are a new storage data structure within Git that we have the privilege of contributing to upstream Git. This back end for Git references will improve the performance of repositories with many references, as well as eliminate the current race condition around updating reference. This will translate into better support for monorepos and will help ensure continued stability for our GitLab.com offering.
As our customers continue to grow their repositories (both in count and in size), it is critical that the underlying Gitaly services can scale appropriately to meet these demands. As a team, we have decided that the solution to several of the existing scalability issues surrounding Gitaly cluster is a paradigm shift in how we replicate Git data. As such, we have begun initial efforts in shifting to a decentralized architecture for Gitaly Cluster.
The highlights of this forward thinking approach are as follows:
While this is not an area we own as a team, we believe that it is crucial for us to support the teams working in these areas to ensure that Git backups and data management allows for rapid and accurate restoration of Git data. The team is heavily involved in leading the GitLab disaster recovery working group. As leaders in this working group, we're collaborating with a broad cross-functional team to help ensure our service's success long-term. As part of this effort, we're architecting a solution for implementing write-ahead logging on GitLab.com.
We are in the beginning stages of investigating the known limitations around Gitaly running well in Kubernetes. This is going to be an ongoing theme across the next year, but we wanted to begin by ensuring that we understood first and foremost what issues exist today. The team is taking a data driven approach involving load testing in an effort to ensure we have clearly identified functional gaps.
In order to best represent our Transparency Value, it is just as important to clarify what the Gitaly team cannot prioritize currently. This does not mean that we do not recognize the need for some of these features, simply that we have a finite team.
Better Support for Administrative User Journeys
We want to ensure that in the future, we support user journeys such as adding, removing, and replacing nodes cleanly, and provide a basic administrative dashboard to monitor node health.
Partial Clone is built-in to Git and available in GitLab 13.0 or newer. Scalar is compatible with partial clone, and Microsoft is contributing to its improvement based on their learnings from the GVFS protocol.
Divergent solution for CDN Offloading
While we recognize that a lot of good work has gone into independent solutions, we are committed to work with the Git community on a CDN approach. We intend to support, implement, and contribute to this solution as it be comes available. This is currently being explored in our Support Git CDN offloading epic.
BIC (Best In Class) is an indicator of forecated near-term market performance based on a combination of factors, including analyst views, market news, and feedback from the sales and product teams. It is critical that we understand where GitLab appears in the BIC landscape.
The version control systems market is expected to be valued at close to US$550mn in the year 2021 and is estimated to reach US$971.8md by 2027 according to Future Market Insights which is broadly consistent with revenue estimates of GitHub ($250mn ARR) and Perforce ($130mn ARR). The opportunity for GitLab to grow with the market, and grow it's share of the version control market is significant.
Git is the market leading version control system, demonstrated by the 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey where over 88% of respondents use Git. Although there are alternatives to Git, Git remains dominant in open source software, usage by developers continues to grow, it installed by default on macOS and Linux, and the project itself continues to adapt to meet the needs of larger projects and enterprise customers who are adopting Git, like the Microsoft Windows project.
According to a 2016 Bitrise survey of mobile app developers, 62% of apps hosted by SaaS provider were hosted in GitHub, and 95% of apps are hosted in by a SaaS provider. These numbers provide an incomplete view of the industry, but broadly represent the large opportunity for growth in SaaS hosting on GitLab.com, and in self hosted where GitLab is already very successful.
Support large repositories
As applications mature, the existing code base continues to grow. As such, average repository sizes are on the rise and version control systems must be able to handle these large repositories in a performant manner. Additionally, many development tasks may require version control of large files, which again, should be handled seamlessly.
Ensure data safety
Application code has a very high value to organizations. It is unacceptable to have a solution which does not make it easy to ensure the integrity of your data, as well as provide easy means of backing up and restoring your data should something go wrong. Ideally, these solutions should use efficient and cost effective storage to optimize your business infrastructure.
Important competitors are GitHub.com and Perforce which, in relation to Gitaly, compete with GitLab in terms of raw Git performance and support for enormous repositories respectively.
Customers and prospects evaluating GitLab (GitLab.com and self hosted) benchmark GitLab's performance against GitHub.com, including Git performance. The Git performance of GitLab.com for easily benchmarked operations like cloning, fetching and pushing, show that GitLab.com similar to GitHub.com.
Perforce competes with GitLab primarily on its ability to support enormous repositories, either from binary files or monolithic repositories with extremely large numbers of files and history. This competitive advantage comes naturally from its centralized design which means only the files immediately needed by the user are downloaded. Given sufficient support in Git for partial clone, and sufficient performance in GitLab for enormous repositories, existing customers are waiting to migrate to GitLab.
This section contains messaging, questions, and resources for our sales counterparts to successfully position and sell Gitaly Cluster. It is important to note that Gitaly Cluster is not perfect for every installation. Our goal is to provide options for our customers so they can choose the best repository storage mechanism for their particular business needs.
Gitaly is a centralized service which handles all access to files to file storage for GitLab. Gitaly services Git requests from the GitLab web application, command line, and via the API. Gitaly is highly configurable and can utilize one or more storage locations to read / write repository data.
The Gitaly service is required for all GitLab installs, and is a separate product from Gitaly Cluster. While Gitaly handles accessing repository storage, Gitaly Cluster provides a highly available repository storage solution for our customers.
Gitaly Cluster was built to address the industry-wide difficulty around expanding Git repository storage in addition to the lack of high availability (HA) Git storage for critical applications. A prominent theme in industry is the idea of an ever expanding NFS storage location for repository storage. While this can work, over time performance degrades, and management becomes increasingly complex. Additionally, while the NFS file system is ideal for many types of files, it's well documented that the types of file accesses created by Git repository access can cause performance issues.
Our goal with Gitaly cluster is to build a Git repository storage system capable of scaling with our users needs, and providing a configurable level of redundancy to keep businesses operating, iterating, and growing.
Gitaly Cluster is a unique open-core project aimed at providing a scalable and high availability platform for Git repository storage. Gitaly Cluster enable horizontal scalability, allowing our customers to grow their storage in a simple, and well defined manner. We also capitalize on the redundant copies of data needed for HA by increasing read performance through read-distribution.
Customers should utilize Gitaly Cluster in a few key situations:
Customers may not desire to utilize Gitaly Cluster for the following reasons:
Documentation Resources
Enablement Presentation (Internal GitLab Only)
As Gitaly and Gitaly Cluster evolve, it is sometimes necessary to deprecate features. When this occurs, we will follow the documented Deprecations, removals and breaking changes procedure. This ensures that all stable counterparts within GitLab are informed, and that the GitLab Documentation is also updated to keep our customers informed.
In addition, we will track all deprecations throughout the 16.x milestones, and breaking changes occurring in the 17.0 milestone on the following epic:
Gitaly is a non-marketable category, and is therefore not assigned a maturity level.
Systems Administrators directly interact with Gitaly when installing, configuring, and managing a GitLab server, particularly when high availability is a requirement. In the past, systems administrators needed to create and manage an NFS cluster to configure a high availability GitLab instance, and manually manage the failover to new Gitaly nodes mounted on the same NFS cluster. In order to scale such a solution individual storage nodes needed to be re-sized, or a sharded Gitaly approach was required. Now that Gitaly Cluster is available, is possible to eliminate the NFS cluster from architecture and rely on Gitaly for replication. Gitaly Cluster brings with it automatic failover, horizontal scaling, and read access across replicas will deliver 99.999% uptime (five 9's) and improved performance without regular intervention. Systems administrators will have fewer applications to manage, as the last projects are migrated to GitLab and other version control systems are retired.
Developers will benefit from increasing performance of repositories of all shapes and sizes, on the command line and in the GitLab application, as performance improvements continue. Once support for monolithic repositories reaches minimal and continues maturing, developers will no longer be split between Git and legacy version control systems, as projects consolidate increasingly on Git. Developers that heavily use binary assets, like Game Developers, will at long last be able to switch to Git and eliminate Git LFS by adopting native large file support in Git.