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 # Gitaly
 
-- [Reasoning and design of Gitaly](design/README.md)
 - [About the name Gitaly](#name)
 
+## Summary
+
+Gitaly is an abstraction and caching layer on top of Git. It serves as a GitRPC
+daemon that reduces IOPS by aggresively caching expensive git operations and providing
+an API so GitLab can perform queries for metadata and serve them directly from memory
+instead of reaching the filesystem.
+
+[Reasoning and design](design/README.md)
+
 ## Name
 
 Gitaly is a tribute to git and the town of [Aly][aly-wiki]. Where the town of
 Aly has zero inhabitants most of the year we would like to reduce the number of
 disk operations to zero for most actions. It doesn't hurt that it sounds like
-Italy, the capital of which is [the destination of all roads][rome]. All git actions in
-GitLab end up in Gitaly.
+Italy, the capital of which is [the destination of all roads][rome].
+All git paths lead to Gitaly.
 
 [aly-wiki]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aly
 [rome]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_roads_lead_to_Rome