GitHub Updates Its Enterprise Product With Clustering Support, Updated Design

GitHub Enterprise, the company’s on-premises solution for managing code, is getting a major update today. It comes at a time when there seems to be some upheaval in the company around the importance management has been putting on this product.

The marquee feature of GitHub Enterprise 2.5 is support for clustering. With this, businesses can now set up a cluster of GitHub Enterprise servers that act as a single installation, enabling it to support significantly larger teams.

“With GitHub Enterprise 2.5 more users can be enabled on one system as teams grow,” Kakul Srivastava, GitHub’s VP of Product, tells me. “We have customers with tens of thousands of developers who need to be able to work together, and this is really important functionality to enable them to do this in a scalable way.”

She also noted that clustering doesn’t currently come at an additional cost to GitHub’s enterprise users.

This new version also includes interface improvements with updated designs for everything from log-in screens to the look and feel of the GitHub repositories. This brings GitHub’s enterprise product in line with its hosted version.

Also new in this version is improved Subversion support — for those who aren’t using git as their version control system — as well as an API for managing protected branches (that is, branches developers can neither delete nor force-push their code to). This new API is currently in preview.

I couldn’t help but ask Srivastava about the rumors around how GitHub’s focus on enterprise customers is creating a lot of friction inside the company and in its relationship with the users on its hosted platform.

In a written statement, Srivastava said that she believes GitHub is “building a new kind of enterprise company; for us and our customers, it’s not about open source or enterprise, but rather, open source and enterprise.” She added that GitHub’s “focus on the developer gets to the heart of serving them wherever they code — personal projects, open source communities, and even the very largest enterprises in industries such as banking, retail, and manufacturing.”

None of this, of course, addresses the concerns around the company’s changing culture, but there can be little doubt that GitHub’s future is directly tied to enterprise customers adopting its services to manage their code.