The year 2021 has been a challenging one because of the COVID-19 global emergency; nevertheless, the Gerrit Code Review project has continued to deliver what the community expected:
- Two major releases (Gerrit v3.4 and v3.5)
- Two major summits (contributors and users)
- Improved engagement (+10% changes/contributor)
GerritForge delivered on the promise of making Gerrit more cloud-native, with a particular focus on AWS, the platform that most users have adopted for running in the cloud. GoogleCloud has also been our focus, assuring a cloud-neutral approach to Gerrit and providing support for events over PubSub.
Focusing on Gerrit unique values
A successful product focuses on what makes it unique and innovative, compared to anything else in the world.
We believe that the key aspects that make Gerrit Code Review THE platform of choice for developing software based on Git repositories are:
- Large-scale
Gerrit is THE best platform for developing large-scale projects, huge monorepos, and a large number of changes and refs. - Maximum availability
Large organizations and communities of developers need a platform that is always available, anywhere, anytime, 24×7, and 365 days a year. - Performance
The need to work remotely poses multiple issues, one of them being the increase of network latency. Gerrit multi-site distribution of the repositories and reviews allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to clone, push and review at optimal latency and performance. - Quality of tracing of reviews
Gerrit is based on single-commit code reviews, a winning approach in terms of review accuracy and supporting changes chains, and full traceability of the entire review history and workflow.
Many popular Git code-review tools exist in the Open-Source community; Gerrit is the winning choice when scale, availability, performance, and quality do matter.
GerritForge goals for improving Gerrit in 2022
Scale Gerrit beyond limits
GerritForge and the rest of the community have worked hard to identify the bottlenecks of large mono-repos with Gerrit. Some of them can be mitigated by keeping the Git repository lean and organized, despite the massive amount of push traffic and reviews coming from large teams.
We want to focus on improving at least ten times the following KPIs, without having a significant impact on the overall system performance:
- Number of changes and refs in a repository: millions of changes and tens of millions of refs
- Size of the repository: hundreds of GBs
GerritForge will step up its involvement in the JGit project in 2022 and introduce many innovations, some of them already implemented in the C-Git implementation:
- JGit support for multi-pack index
- Revamp of JGit cache, allowing the pluggability of high-performance implementations
- Improvement of JGit bitmaps for large number of refs
- Support for high-performance large storage systems
- Introduction of new performance metrics
- Replace Prolog with native submit rules in the owners plugin
99.999% up-time
GerritForge maintains a free service known as GerritHub.io to demonstrate what Gerrit can do and achieve. GerritHub.io is the most advanced and reliable Open-Source vanilla Gerrit deployment, apart from Google’s.
We achieved an astonishing 99.99% SLA in 2021; we want to push the GerritHub.io uptime further to 99.999%, reducing the annual downtime to just 315s.
In order to reach a five-nines uptime, we will work on:
- Granular probing and health-checks
- Advanced repositories performance monitoring and alerting
- Gerrit limits and deadlines
- RCAs
- Multi-site improvements
Goal #3: Increase 1000x times the Gerrit replication performance
GerritForge has presented the innovating pull-replication plugin at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021, showing that it is possible to replicate Git commits and changes meta-data across the globe with msec latency. The pull-replication plugin technology and speed is going to be improved and made available and Open-Sourced to anyone and match and outperform the traditional replication plugin features.
Join the 2022 endeavor
We need YOU and the Gerrit community’s help and support in this 2022 endeavor.
GerritForge has already increased his Team of contributors working on the project, including three Gerrit maintainers and two Gerrit release managers. However, Gerrit’s success is in the cooperation, contribution, and ideas of the whole community of contributors, Gerrit admins, and users.
Let us know what you think about our goals. We are happy to cooperate and work with anyone sharing the same values and goals.
2022 is the year where Gerrit Code Review is pushed beyond its limits even further, making it the MOST innovative tool for large-scale repositories and teams worldwide.
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