Solutions for Gerrit

Unlock the power of global collaboration with Gerrit and Cirata’s MultiSite® technology.

Experience unparalleled code review and management with Gerrit, the leading tool for open-source Git. Integrated with Cirata’s MultiSite technology, Gerrit becomes a globally scalable and highly fault-tolerant solution. Perfect for organizations with distributed development teams, this combination ensures maximum availability, efficiency, and productivity. With Cirata’s support for enterprises of up to 18 sites and 15,000 developers, you can trust in a solution that scales with your needs.

Common challenges with global development teams

1. Mitigate high software engineering costs and hidden network delays

Software engineering costs are high for organizations, with network latency and outages significantly affecting productivity and causing financial losses. Addressing latency in centralized systems like standard GIT implementations is essential to maintain efficiency and reduce risks.

2. Enhance development efficiency for globally dispersed teams

Latency issues are often unnoticed near headquarters but frustrate global teams, leading to complaints and demoralization. Unplanned outages worsen the situation, emphasizing the need for a robust, consistent performance solution.

3. Avoid the pitfalls of isolated local instances

Many organizations attempt to reduce latency with isolated local instances for teams, but this hinders organizational agility, limiting collaboration and flexibility, ultimately reducing efficiency and effectiveness.

Introducing Cirata’s DConE® Solution: Revolutionizing Global Code Management

Cirata’s DConE solution transforms your Git and Gerrit environments into a multi-primary configuration, providing a powerful answer to the challenges faced by globally dispersed development teams. This innovative approach enables enterprises of any size to establish Gerrit instances close to their development teams, ensuring low-latency reads from local servers.

Writes are seamlessly coordinated by Cirata’s proprietary MultiSite technology, minimizing time trade-offs and creating a virtual single yet globally distributed repository. This solution not only addresses network latency and outage issues but also enhances collaboration and efficiency across the organization, eliminating the need for isolated local instances and ensuring consistent performance worldwide.

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Case studies from global leaders on how Cirata solved their challenges.

Scalability solution for a major phone manufacturer
Challenge
  • Horizontal scalability issues with 9,000+ users and 11,000+ repositories.
  • The Gerrit "high availability" plugin, which supports multiple read-only sites, was insufficient to handle the high access load on the read-write server.
Results
  • Implemented Cirata’s DConE solution, deploying 7 multi-primary sites across various locations to distribute and manage the end-user load effectively.
  • Continued use of the Gerrit "high availability" plugin to offload simple Git clones and fetches.
Efficient global collaboration for anelectronics manufacturer
Challenge
  • Need for efficient collaboration across global development sites.
  • Requirement for fast access to large files during Git checkouts.
Results
  • Enabled efficient global collaboration by replicating Git LFS storage across development sites. This ensures large files are latency-close, allowing for quick downloads and improved productivity.
  • Allowed for cost-effective management by locating Git project repositories only where needed, optimizing server usage for specific use cases.
Robust, no-failure software development for an automotive manufacturer
Challenge
  • Eliminate single points of failure in a single data center setup.
  • Ensure seamless maintenance without downtime.
Results
  • Deployed 3 primary-primary sites with single-copy identical data. This setup allows any one site to be taken down for maintenance while the other two remain fully operational in read-write mode.
  • Prevents server stalls by ensuring data is not locked in a down site, maintaining smooth operations.
  • Proxy server positioned in front of the three sites to ensure seamless availability and access.

Features and benefits of Cirata’s DConE solution

1. Full multi-primary implementation: Designed for WAN environments, offering horizontal scalability to meet the needs of the largest enterprises.
2. Flexible site configuration: Customize the number of sites to suit your implementation, whether within a single data center or across multiple global locations.
3. Enhanced developer experience: Keep your developers fully engaged with fast, low-latency operations. Eliminate delays in checkouts and UI responsiveness, boosting productivity.
4. Robust fault tolerance: Built with a “no single point of failure” architecture, ensuring continued operation at unfailed sites even during failures, as long as a quorum is maintained.
5. Automatic site recovery: Failed sites automatically catch up without requiring administrator intervention, provided no data loss occurred during the failure.
6. Read-only during major failures: In the event of significant failures (e.g., catastrophic networking issues), read-only repository operations can continue until a quorum is restored.

Products that drive our Gerrit solutions

Gerrit MultiSite
Gerrit MultiSite enables full “Active-Active” replication of your Gerrit server using a full PAXOS implementation and packaged in a simple to deploy and maintain format. Fully supported 24x7. Maximally scalable to huge numbers of repositories, users and sites.
Learn more
Git MultiSite
Your developers may never notice that it is there helping them out. Git repositoriesare replicated using Active-Active replication meaning that there is no need for a Proxy Server setup and/ordelayed replication (with the single point of failure that represents).
Learn more
“We really needed some way to ensure that all of our sites were up and running all of the time. We needed to be 24-by-7 globally with the same LANspeed performance and access at all three locations. Cirata’s active/active WAN clustering for Subversion was the only solution we found.”
— Angela Thomas, Development Tools Manager, Juniper Networks
Cirata's solutions are trusted by hundreds of global brands and industry leaders such as

Explore our in-depth demos and webinars for Gerrit MultiSite

Frequently asked questions

Is this different from the open-source Gerrit multi-site solution?
Yes, it is different. The open-source Gerrit multi-site solution utilizes various technologies to create a robust primary and secondary setup for a limited number of sites. However, it still has a single point of failure. In contrast, Cirata’s DConE solution offers a true multi-primary configuration with no single point of failure, ensuring continuous operation and enhanced reliability across numerous global sites.
How does Cirata Gerrit MultiSite handle outages and system failures? Does it self-heal?

Yes, Cirata Gerrit MultiSite is designed to handle outages and system failures with a self-healing capability.

Example Scenario:
  • Network Failure: If a network issue isolates a machine, it switches to read-only mode. The rest of the machines maintain full functionality as long as a quorum is achieved. Once the network is restored, the isolated machine automatically catches up with any changes and returns to read-write mode without needing administrator intervention.
  • System Failure: If a machine is turned off, fails, or the system is stopped, the remaining machines continue to operate normally. The affected machine will automatically rejoin the network and catch up on changes once it's back online, ensuring seamless recovery.

Cirata Gerrit MultiSite’s self-healing automation ensures minimal disruption and maintains system integrity and performance.

Will this solution operate in a public cloud environment?
Yes, Cirata’s MultiSite solutions are fully compatible with both public and private cloud environments. This flexibility allows you to deploy the solution wherever it best suits your organizational needs, ensuring seamless integration and optimal performance.
How does Cirata Gerrit MultiSite significantly improve performance and reliability?

Cirata Gerrit MultiSite enhances performance and reliability through its advanced multi-primary server configuration. Here's how it works:

  • Scalability for Large Engineering Teams: For customers with thousands of engineers, a single Gerrit server often can't handle the high volume of operations. Cirata Gerrit MultiSite enables horizontal scaling by deploying multiple primary servers, either within the same data center or across global locations. This setup ensures that even large teams can efficiently use Gerrit.
  • High Availability: Customers continue to use the Gerrit High Availability plugin to offload read-only operations and automation tasks to separate machines. This offloading, combined with the multi-primary configuration, ensures seamless handling of large volumes and prevents server overload.
  • Enhanced Reliability: By distributing the load across multiple primary servers, Cirata Gerrit MultiSite reduces the risk of failures and downtime, ensuring continuous and reliable performance. This setup allows organizations to maintain high productivity levels and handle large-scale engineering operations effectively.
How does latency impact engineering productivity?

Latency significantly affects engineering productivity due to the limitations of the TCP protocol, which is "bandwidth limited by latency." This means that higher latency results in lower maximum bandwidth usage, regardless of the available bandwidth.

For example, consider a "git clone" operation. When a client runs the "git clone" command against a Gerrit server with 330ms latency (e.g., from the middle of the USA to India), and the repository is around 500MiB (compressed, with some binaries and not using Git LFS), the clone could take about half an hour to complete. In contrast, the same operation on a local network with sub-millisecond latency would take just seconds.

This significant time difference translates to engineers waiting for operations to complete instead of being productive. By reducing latency with Cirata’s replicated products, engineering teams can drastically improve their efficiency, making the return on investment (ROI) exceptionally high.

How does Cirata's patented Paxos implementation (DConE) work, and what are the benefits compared to alternatives?

Alternative methods often involve "read-only" repositories that forward all write operations to a central site. This central site becomes a single point of failure; if it’s inaccessible, remote sites cannot update, and if it fails, there’s no guarantee which copy has the latest data.

Cirata’s DConE implementation offers a superior solution through true multi-primary replication. Here’s how it works and its benefits:

  • True Multi-Primary Replication: Unlike traditional methods, Cirata’s DConE ensures that updates are coordinated across multiple primary servers. This eliminates the single point of failure and ensures data consistency across all sites.
  • Content Delivery Policy: Before an update is made, the Content Delivery Policy is satisfied to ensure data integrity. DConE then coordinates a vote among the replicas and schedules the update in a globally unique order.
  • Consistent Updates: Each replica executes updates in the same globally unique order, ensuring all sites have the latest data. The Git MultiSite UI provides visibility into the update state, so you always know which replicas have the complete set of updates.
  • High Availability and Reliability: By distributing write operations and coordinating updates across multiple sites, DConE enhances system reliability and availability, even in the event of site failures.
  • Improved Performance: End-users benefit from faster access to data without the latency and downtime risks associated with a single central repository.

These features make Cirata’s DConE implementation a robust and reliable choice for distributed development environments.

How does Cirata Gerrit MultiSite handle high latency WAN environments, and what are the typical latency improvements observed?
Cirata Gerrit MultiSite is specifically engineered to manage high-latency WAN environments through advanced modifications to standard algorithms. This includes optimizing retries and timeouts to scale effectively with increased latency. Over the years, we have refined and hardened our code to perform robustly under high latency conditions. As a result, our customers experience a system that delivers optimal performance even in challenging network environments, ensuring that development operations remain smooth and efficient despite latency issues.
What is the pricing structure for Cirata’s MultiSite software?
The pricing for Cirata’s MultiSite software is determined by the number of sites and users. This flexible pricing model ensures that you only pay for the scale and scope of your specific deployment, making it cost-effective for organizations of all sizes. For detailed pricing information tailored to your needs, please contact our sales team.
Ready to break down the barriers, solve your challenges, and unify collaboration for your distributed teams?Reach out today for more information and to speak to an expert.
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Featured resources

Data sheet
Gerrit MultiSite
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White paper
The distributed coordination engine
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Whitepaper
Distributed Gerrit Code Review: A comparison
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