Atlassian’s Stash Data Center Comes Out Of Beta, Brings Git To The Enterprise

After a few months of public beta testing, Atlassian today officially launched Stash Data Center, its Git-based, code-management service for enterprises. The service allows businesses to run Git on a server cluster that can support a large number of developers. The largest beta deployment, the company tells me, supported about 12,000 developers.

As Atlassian’s VP and general manager of its developer tools unit Eric Wittman reminded me when I met with him in the company’s San Francisco offices last week, Git is turning 10 in April, but enterprises are only now starting to adopt it. He argues the reason for this is that Git itself can be hard for companies to get their head around. “Distributed version control is great, but Git is very raw,” he said. “Unless you can get into the headspace of understanding the underpinnings of Git, it’s not very approachable.”

Stash and Stash Data Center aim to make Git more approachable and manageable for large enterprises.

Git_management_your_way

Those businesses that try to adopt Git often hit the tool’s limits, especially as their teams grow. Access and permissions become issues, for example, and Git can be very tough on the hardware, which makes it hard just to scale the system as teams grow. Stash, unsurprisingly, includes support for fine-grained permissions, and Atlassian is especially proud of the clustering technology it uses, which runs with very little overhead and allows the service to scale pretty easily.

Wittman tells me that about a third of the Stash team worked on this project for about a year. Some of the customers that adopted Stash Data Center during the beta period include Amadeus,  Cisco, Splunk, Blackboard and Ciena.