UPDATED 00:22 EDT / FEBRUARY 11 2016

NEWS

GitHub thinks BIG with clustering support for large enterprises

Amid the rumblings of discontent over at GitHub, which reportedly stem from internal debates over whether the organization should focus on large businesses instead of smaller developers, it’s just rolled out a number of new features aimed at its biggest users.

GitHub Enterprise 2.5 offers improvements geared towards organizations with “tens of thousands of developers”, the organization said. Writing about the release in this blog post, Matt Colyer said the marquee feature of GitHub Enterprise 2.5 is the introduction of support for clustering, which means large businesses can now set up a “cluster” of servers that act like a single installation, enabling the support of significantly larger teams of developers. Colyer said the idea is that users can now support a large number of developers in what is essentially one space. GitHub has provided in-depth documentation on how the clustering feature works.

In an interview with TechCrunch, GitHub’s VP of Product Kakul Srivastava said the update means more users can be enabled on a single system as user’s teams grow.

“We have customers with tens of thousands of developers who need to be able to work together, and this is really important functionality to enable them to do this in a scalable way,” she explained, adding that the new feature doesn’t incur any additional costs.

Besides clustering, GitHub has been given a performance boost for when customers “fetch” large amounts of data at once. Normally, doing so takes up a lot of resources and can impact performance, but GitHub has made some tweaks to alleviate this.

There are also some interface enhancements, including updated designs for the login page and a new “look and feel” for the repositories, bringing GitHub Enterprise more inline with the hosted version.

Another new feature is improved Subversion support for those who don’t use GitHub for their version control system, while a new API, currently in preview, has been introduced for managing protected branches.

In prepared comments, Srivastava related how GitHub is focused on building “a new kind of enterprise company; for us and our customers, it’s not about open source or enterprise, but rather, open source and enterprise.” Srivastava added that GitHub’s developer focus means the organization is able to serve them wherever they code, be it open-source communities, personal projects and even large industries like banking, manufacturing and retail.

Still, the update is unlikely to deflect attention from what The Information says are serious internal disputes within the organization. In a recent report, it said the departure of several high-ranking GitHub executives was due to a dispute on whether or not it should focus on the small number of companies that “write big checks” or the legions of individual developers that make up the bulk of its user base.

Image credit: Designerpoint via pixabay.com

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