GIT AT ANY SCALE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

A distributed version control system means that all instances of a repository are identical. There are many hard scalability and reliability challenges that make this quite difficult. Git compresses and stores code and metadata into packfiles, a simple binary serialization format that isn't ideal for managing at scale on a server. These large binary files must exist on a file system for Git to access them. The three main approaches to running repositories on many disks and many machines are to distribute the filesystem, distribute the packfiles, or distribute Git itself.