With Stash, Atlassian has been offering a Git-based code-management solution for quite a while now. Up until now the company was mostly going after relatively small teams with this service, but today it is launching Stash Data Center, its Git solution for large enterprises.
Unlike the regular Stash service, Stash Data Center can run on a cluster instead of a single server. Thanks to this, Stash Data Center can easily support 10,000 developers. For them, Stash Data Center will look and work exactly like the current version. They may notice fewer slowdowns, faster compile times and less downtime, but their daily workflows won’t change.
As Atlassian’s general manager for developer tools Eric Wittman told me, Stash allowed the company to learn a lot about Git over the last few years — and especially about how to help companies transition to it. But now it is seeing more large enterprises that want to adopt Git, too, but at a much larger scale.
“Git is a different way of working,” Wittman said. “Development is more collaborative than before, but now the question becomes: how do you do this at scale?” With the move to Git, enterprises are also adopting continues integration as a development practice and so by default, developers are hitting their source code management servers more heavily than before (admins, of course, will notice a few differences).
For the time being, Atlassian assumes that Stash Data Center users will install the service on their own clusters behind their firewalls. In the long run, it may also run on public clouds like AWS.
Atlassian decided that it would charge a monthly fee based on the number of users (it sells perpetual licenses for the regular version of Stash). As Wittman told me, the company made this decision because the R&D cost for Data Center is far higher than for the regular version.