Cirata unveils MultiSite tool to boost global code collaboration

Cirata has unveiled the latest iteration of its Cirata Gerrit MultiSite solution, designed to aid multi-location development teams by streamlining Gerrit instance data replication across several global sites. This enhancement aims to boost scalability, availability, and collaboration for development teams spread across different geographies.

According to Justin Holtzinger, Chief Revenue Officer at Cirata, the necessity for a solution like Cirata Gerrit MultiSite arises from the global distribution of software development teams. Traditional Gerrit instance data is not optimised for multi-location access and lacks the required resilience, resulting in latency bottlenecks that diminish developer productivity and increase the risk of outages. Cirata Gerrit MultiSite integrates with Gerrit to provide a scaling and fault-tolerant code review tool suited for companies with globally distributed teams.

The new version supports Gerrit 3.7 and boasts enhanced capabilities to address the shortcomings of both free and traditional disaster recovery solutions used in Gerrit-based source code management environments. These enhancements offer greater granularity, scalability, and automation, ultimately reducing development downtime and interruptions. Furthermore, the solution simplifies scalability, communication, and collaboration for global and expanding teams.

Key features of Cirata Gerrit MultiSite include:

• Enhanced availability: The full multi-primary replication offers developers access to multiple instances of Gerrit repository data across varied sites. This ensures high availability and minimal downtime by reducing latency caused by server failures or maintenance.
• Compliant data locality: By distributing workloads across numerous sites, the solution improves developer performance by offering faster data access response times, thereby reducing latency.
• Disaster recovery: With built-in disaster recovery capabilities, Cirata Gerrit MultiSite maintains synchronised copies of Gerrit repositories, reviews, and other metadata across multiple sites. Developers can switch to a replica at another site seamlessly, ensuring continued access to their codebase and work in progress.
• Geographic collaboration: This feature ensures that all distributed development team members can access the latest version of the code compliantly, regardless of location, facilitating near real-time collaboration and project coordination.
• Extensive scalability: The solution scales Gerrit by adding additional "primary" instances that are kept aligned using Cirata's proprietary distributed computing algorithms. This enables enterprises to adapt to changing business needs without compromising performance or availability.
• Compliance and governance: Ideally suited for regulated industries or organisations with strict compliance requirements, Cirata Gerrit MultiSite ensures data integrity and compliance by synchronising replicas of Gerrit instance repositories across multiple locations, adhering to geographical regulatory requirements for data redundancy and disaster recovery.

The most recent version of Cirata Gerrit MultiSite promises to address the critical challenges faced by multi-location development teams, providing a robust and scalable solution for efficient source code management and collaboration, the company shares.