How Globant uses GitHub

With GitHub, Globant's globally distributed workforce helps companies keep their edge.

Company Overview

Globant was founded in 2003 by four friends in Argentina with a shared vision to help companies tap into the power of technology for digital transformation. In 2006, Globant became the first company outside the Googleplex to partner with Google. Today, the company has 9,000 employees across 48 offices in 35 cities worldwide, serving clients including LinkedIn, EA, and Coca-Cola. Globant has been recognized as one of the top 10 innovative companies in South America by FastCompany.

GitHub Adoption:

• Industry: IT and software development
• GitHub users: 2,000 daily active users (planning to reach 3,000+)
• Customer since: July 2017

Why GitHub

Globant evaluated multiple version control solutions as the company scaled. After seven years using Subversion, the team incorporated Git through WANdisco. As self-provisioning became more important, they migrated to GitHub in 2017.

The decision to choose GitHub was driven by several factors:

• Geographic distribution: With offices in 17 countries, Globant needed a solution that was easy to distribute geographically. GitHub's multimaster geo-distributed replicas allow the globally distributed workforce to feel like one team.
• Developer preference: Developers strongly prefer GitHub and don't want to consider other tools. Many graduate from school already knowing how to use GitHub, which helps with recruitment and onboarding.
• Scalability: GitHub provides a friendly, well-known interface for all users across the organization.

Implementation and Infrastructure

Globant currently operates two on-premises GitHub instances—one public and one private for clients who prefer their repositories and code housed in Globant's own data centers. The company is migrating one instance to GitHub.com to reduce administrative overhead while maintaining security and reliability.

Integration and Automation:

Jenkins is integrated with GitHub to reduce manual deployment effort and save overtime hours and night shifts. Globant is also considering switching to GitHub Actions to create customized workflows.

High Availability:

With teams across multiple time zones—India, San Francisco, Miami, Argentina, and South America—Globant maintains a high-availability environment. On-premises instances are hosted in San Francisco data centers and can be easily replicated in Miami to minimize service disruption. The company has one administrator in every time zone to handle any issues, and GitHub provides instant support when needed.

Organizational Impact

GitHub access extends beyond developers. Operations staff, technical writers, managers, security, researchers, testing, QA, and other roles at Globant use GitHub with their credentials, enabling transparency, collaboration, and productivity at scale.

Self-Provisioning and Collaboration:

With self-provisioning capabilities, developers can solve problems and collaborate with other teams without requesting specific permissions. This eliminates delays from paperwork and permissions processes.

Code Reuse and Innovation:

Globant uses innersourcing to encourage code discovery and reuse. The company writes its own frameworks and libraries for topics like authentication and prioritizes reusing code across teams. Good documentation and the ability to explore vulnerabilities help teams track down and fix bugs faster, improving speed and quality while maintaining proper quality assurance testing.

According to Pablo Villarreal, Globant's Chief Security Officer and Head of Systems Engineering: "Developers are very well-versed in the use of GitHub. They prefer it, and don't even want to consider other tools."