Meet Praefect: The traffic manager making your Git data highly available

As GitLab faced challenges in scaling its infrastructure, particularly with Git, the company developed Gitaly to improve Git access speed by bypassing the need for network-attached filesystem access. The initial solution involved eventual consistency, where repositories had three copies to ensure read access in case of primary server failure, which was rolled out in version 13.0. The next phase involved achieving strong consistency, ensuring all copies were up to date simultaneously, a feature dependent on Git's awareness of transactions, and rolled out for most write requests. To address the cost implications of tripling storage requirements, GitLab improved performance by enabling any of the three copies to handle read requests, with the feature becoming generally available in version 13.8. Praefect, a component introduced to manage traffic and ensure high availability, is being gradually adopted by customers, with GitLab planning further features like HA Distributed Reads and variable replication factors for future releases.

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