Meet Praefect: The traffic manager making your Git data highly available

This post introduces Praefect, a new component designed to provide high availability for Git data by acting as a proxy to Gitaly storage nodes. It details the evolution from eventual consistency (three copies, read-only access to secondaries) to strong consistency (all three copies always up to date, three-phase commit transactions via Git hooks). It also discusses the cost implications of replication and the upcoming features like read distribution and variable replication factor. Challenges and lessons learned regarding optional components and early production deployment are also highlighted.