Building Enterprise Software on GitHub

At Basho, we develop and package Riak, a distributed key-value store, and Riak CS, an S3-API compatible object store. Many large companies rely on Riak and Riak CS as a critical part of their infrastructure, which means that any packaging or release mistakes are costly and disruptive. This talk describes how we build reliable software on the Github platform, using both the tools and API that Github provides, as well as home-grown tools we’ve made to augment GitHub for working with multiple repositories that, together, form our releases. Our tools help address areas such as issue tracking, unit and integration testing, and automatic build results triggering automatic branch merging.

In many ways, Basho is unique because we not only ship enterprise software to paying customers, but we also provide most of our code as Apache Licensed open source. We need to please both those customers who pay us for the software and those who are open source users who depend on our openness and quality. We currently have 136 public repositories and 104 private repositories on GitHub, so good tooling is extremely important to keep track of issues and changes going into our software.