Company
Date Published
Author
Sam Kottler
Word count
1167
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Over the past 18 months, GitHub has significantly invested in enhancing its physical infrastructure to improve redundancy and global availability, which is crucial for supporting its expanding user base. This effort includes the development of four facilities, comprising two points of presence (POPs) and two data centers, organized in a hub-and-spoke design with a dedicated backbone between Seattle and northern Virginia for consistent latencies and throughput. The POPs focus on internet and backbone connectivity without storing customer data, while the data centers, located in standalone cages in less connected facilities, are dedicated to customer data storage and request handling. GitHub emphasizes uniformity in cabinet types to ensure repeatability and ease of expansion, with structured cabling and pre-labeled patch panels simplifying new capacity addition. Through collaboration with a cabinet integrator, the process of expanding compute and storage capacity is streamlined, allowing for rapid deployment and provisioning of new cabinets. These infrastructure enhancements have positioned GitHub to continue its growth confidently and are supported by the adoption of a repeatable expansion process that decouples regional network edges from compute and storage systems.