Git began as a tool to manage source control for the Linux kernel. Today, it’s become a standard among software developers. But Git version control was never designed to scale so massively. But that’s exactly what most organizations need it to do. Enterprises now face the daunting task of balancing developer needs against the implementation of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) for better, faster, higher-quality releases.
Read along or jump ahead to the section that interests you the most.
- Challenges with Git DevOps
- Unite All of Your Contributes with Helix4Git
Challenges with Git DevOps
If you’re currently responsible for driving your Git DevOps pipeline, you need to:
- Simplify and unify change management across all DevOps processes.
- Version all your build artifacts, code, and binaries — preferably in the same place.
- Document, trace, and audit from end to end, to identify vulnerabilities and defects.
But it’s not enough just to do all that. You need to do it all quickly. You need to be beat the competition while keeping your developers happy along the way.
Accomplishing this with Git, especially Git alone, presents challenges that threaten your entire Git DevOps pipeline. Custom large-scale tooling is only an option for the tech giants of the world. Companies need to have resources and entire teams dedicated to building and maintaining custom solutions. For most organizations, however, it’s more cost effective to satisfy developer needs with existing tools.
So, what are these Git DevOps challenges and how can you solve them?
Examining Your Branching Strategies
Your branching strategy is an essential component for automating and improving the quality of your software. Even though changing branching strategies can be difficult, your current strategy may not be compatible with (or optimized for) automation.
If you routinely spend time trying to figure out what went wrong when you merged, you’re not ready for automation. Smaller, short-lived branches can minimize risk and ensure fewer delays.
Let’s review two options:
Git Branching Model
Many Git teams use variations of Vincent Driessen’s “A Successful Git Branching Model.” Its greatest benefit is that it’s widely used, and there are numerous variations on the general theme. This model creates a central repo that is the single source of truth for your project. He is quick to point out that this repo is only considered to be the central one because Git is a distributed version control system. All repos are created equal at the technical level.
Key Components of Driesen’s Model
- One centralized Git repo called “origin.”
- One production-ready branch called “master.”
- One integration branch called “develop.”
Recommended Workflow
- Developers work locally, pulling and pushing from/to “develop.”
- Collaborators set up Git remotes so peers can pull changes as needed.
- The Git DevOps pipeline frequently merges changes from “develop” to “master,” with as much automation as possible. Then it releases a new version.
Trunk-Based Development
Trunk-based development (TBD) is well-regarded in the DevOps community. You may benefit from trunk-based development if you’re a large organization. It can help you achieve better quality and faster releases. Also, it can help you operate in an environment where compliance, governance, and security are highly valued.
Key Components of Trunk-Based Development
- A single, shared branch called “trunk.”
- Short-lived feature branches.
- A monorepo strategy.
Recommended Workflow
- Developers check out very small portions of code, which simplifies security and traceability.
- Developers collaborate in the “trunk” and either commit/push (small teams) directly or use pull-request workflow (large teams).
Teams that produce a high-commit rate, should have short-lived feature branches for code review and build checking (i.e., CI) before committing work to “trunk.” These branches accelerate code reviews, gating what gets added into “trunk.” Small, short-lived branches minimize merge conflicts.
Git DevOps pipeline goals should revolve around making it easier to introduce new features, fixes, and improve overall code quality. Addressing tooling challenges and adjusting your branching workflow to support these goals go hand in hand.
Scaling Git In the Build Process
Bringing together multiple Git repos has emerged as the biggest challenge to impact Git DevOps performance in CI/CD pipelines. This is because Git processes each file individually during such an operation. It happens whether developers are working in the same room or remotely.
Because of these facts, Git becomes slow with repos larger than roughly 1.8 GB of content. Splitting a large repo into many small repos can help, but only at the expense of bringing everything back together in the DevOps pipeline.
Google recognized this problem with Android and allocated significant resources to create their own repository management tool, Repo. Repo sits on top of Git to handle the very large number of Git repositories associated with Android. However, it only addresses the Android use case. Plus, it adds significant complexity at every stage of the Git DevOps pipeline. And it doesn't address the performance of Git itself at all.
Managing Change Across Your Git DevOps Pipeline
In today’s market, organizations must continually streamline and automate their Git DevOps pipelines to remain competitive. This can be especially challenging for complex projects that have developers, non-developers, and digital content beyond source code — such as graphics, video, audio, and other binary files.
Managing build and release artifacts is just as important as handling source code and other assets. It’s crucial to have a single source of truth where everything can be versioned and audited to drive good decisions.
Git’s design did not anticipate storing and handling large objects. Even the tools that attempt to address this gap — such as Git LFS — are almost impossible to manage at scale. Plus, they require designers and less-technical users to learn Git.
You need an actual solution. Something that easily accommodates all types of assets and makes the DevOps world transparent to designers.
Of course, you could rely on tools like Git LFS or build your own integration with file-sharing technology like Dropbox. But you would still have disparate workflows and steep learning curves for non-developers. And in the end, you’d still have to figure out how to move those large assets around the internet, through your own network, and into your DevOps pipeline after unifying it all.
Making the Leap From CI to Enterprise CD
Many organizations already enjoy the benefits of Continuous Integration (CI). But the largest benefits for the enterprise are reaped from Continuous Delivery (CD). This kind of automation decreases risk and improves flexibility. Once it’s in place, it also lowers cost and exposes process inefficiencies in real time.
But CD is complicated if you need to support Git teams. CD requires teams to automate everything — integrating code (at least daily), building, storing binaries back into version control, deploying those binaries to QA, testing, and ultimately pushing to production.
Business stakeholders want the benefits of CD, but they also fear that one false move could halt their mission-critical production systems. DevOps professionals know that rewards outweigh risks, especially after taking steps to mitigate those risks. With a solid CI foundation and some hard work, you too can join the ranks of the CD elite.
Version control is the bedrock technology for CI/CD because it’s the conductor by which the entire pipeline is orchestrated. From commits to successful reviews or failed tests, there are so many events that dictate which actions your systems should take.
The overarching goal of CI/CD is to deliver on the promise of DevOps. Version control drives the delivery of that promise by providing the performance and insight needed to improve software release cycles, software quality, security, and the ability to get rapid feedback on product development.
Versioning 101 for Enterprise CD
Version control enables CD. You need a version control robust enough to handle:
- Design assets
- Databases
- Database scripts
- Build tools
- Libraries
- Build artifacts
In a perfect world, your Git DevOps pipeline would be an out-of-the-box, all-in-one solution. But that tool doesn’t exist. That’s why the Git world has such a large community of active contributors, whose creative work allows other users to integrate virtually any tool into their Git DevOps pipeline.
Similarly, you’ll find many open source software solutions to improve automation and efficiency. And, of course, add-ons and other systems (Maven, Repo, Artifactory, or others) can help support many large repos, design assets, and build artifacts.
But there is another way. You can streamline your Git DevOps pipeline, accelerate development, and deliver fast.
Scale Git DevOps with Helix4Git
In short, you need an integrated environment for design, code, and build artifacts. Helix4Git is an out-of-the-box solution for scaling Git.
With Helix4Git, it’s possible to make Git work for even the largest of enterprises. You can feed giant projects — GBs of assets across millions of files — into your Git DevOps pipeline.
Unite All of Your Contributors
Helix4Git works for all of your contributors. It takes what developers like about Git and extends it in significant ways to serve enterprise DevOps needs. And it offers plugins and integrations that allow non-developers to version graphic files, binaries, and more.
Helix4Git lets distributed teams around the world enjoy LAN-speed performance for their daily work. At the same time, all their commits are synchronized automatically over WAN links. That’s a huge performance boost.
Speaking of performance, uniting teams involves delivering feedback quickly. Often, developers don’t blame Git when the build is slow and it negatively impacts their productivity. They blame the admin, who is tasked with addressing Git’s shortcomings.
This is because it is a known reality is that Git can be slow when you're moving files. And over WANs, because of distance, latency, and single threading, this performance hit is often magnified for remote developers.
One way to tackle these problems is to introduce a local proxy/cache at each site. Helix4Git enables reliable and fast content replication around the globe. You can mirror Git repos and enable developers to clone from a local server. Conversely, you can write-back to the master server by setting up the remote site. Although with most Git implementations this is a do-it-yourself solution, Helix4Git offers this capability natively.
Economically Scale Git
Helix4Git also implements a more efficient way of storing and moving Git data. Helix4Git supports multiple parallel threads for faster file transfers. This optimizes your DevOps pipeline.
Helix4Git offers a cost-effective, out-of-the-box solution that overcomes the performance challenges associated with having many and very large Git repos. At the same time, it simplifies CI/CD pipelines by keeping everything together in that all-important single source of truth.
All tests performed with shallow clone of Linux kernel on a 1 Gbps link and four parallel threads of p4 sync. For WAN test, a 200 ms round trip latency was added between client and server.
Streamline Your Git DevOps Pipeline
Git LFS and DropBox can only do so much when it comes to large files. But with Helix4Git, you can manage large binary files alongside Git source code. This dramatically accelerates large file transfers and improves pipeline performance.
You can bring Git users and their assets into your Helix Core infrastructure and build pipeline, offering developers whatever solution they prefer. Perforce fans can continue using Helix Core with its file-locking and exclusive-checkout benefits. Git loyalists can enjoy faster operations (clone, pull, and fetch) at remote sites. And non-developers can use their same tools while versioning assets in Helix Core. Win-win-win.
For teams that want to use Git LFS, Helix Core can support that too. You can store or mirror external Git LFS repos in Helix Core, helping you to increase the speed of large file transfers and other server requests. Helix4Git supports parallel threads, which means it can handle both large teams and large files faster than Git LFS with open source Git servers.
Helix Core’s high-performance server merges with Helix4Git to support all of your development needs. Now you can manage of all your code — including large graphics and binaries — better than Git LFS. Plus you have access to all your build artifacts.
Optimize Your Git Enterprise Server with Helix4Git
Making Git work in the enterprise is a balancing act between developer satisfaction and overall productivity. But with Perforce, you have many options, including tools that were built to withstand petabytes of data worked by tens of thousands of concurrent users in even the most complex and secure DevOps environments.
Helix Core has been solving customers’ performance and scale challenges from the beginning. Our solutions were built from the ground up to support distributed teams that need to move large data sets over long distances and accelerate multi-file, multi-repo product builds.
Helix4Git makes it easy to scale, automate, and gain visibility into your Git DevOps pipeline while letting developers choose their front-end tools. We also offer Helix TeamHub for code management. These tools support large-scale, Git-based projects with continuous build, integration, and test processes.
By providing a more efficient way to handle Git data, Helix4Git lets you to close the feedback loop to your developers faster and achieve 40-80% faster builds.
