JFrog Private Distribution Network accelerates large-scale application delivery

JFrog announced Private Distribution Network at its annual DevOps user conference swampUP.

A new innovative capability of JFrog Distribution, part of the JFrog DevOps Platform, Private Distribution Network enables enterprises to easily set up and manage a secure, massively scalable hybrid distribution network for software updates.

Private Distribution Network provides two integrated network utilization and acceleration technologies – HTTP-based, secure P2P and CDN – that can be rolled out across large-scale mixed-infrastructure and multi-tiered, customizable network topologies, and are managed as-a-service with usage-based pricing.

With Private Distribution Network, enterprises can accelerate software distribution by multiple orders of magnitude to speed up deployments of application updates and of concurrent downloads of binaries across tens of thousands of environments, edges, and embedded/IoT devices.

“JFrog’s vision of Liquid Software is all about enabling the seamless and secure flow of updates from the developer’s keystrokes to any device. The end points are growing in number, creating immense challenges around infinite-scale, trusted software distribution,” said Yoav Landman, co-founder and CTO, JFrog.

“Enterprises that struggled with delivering applications closer to the consumer edge, rolling out releases across massive runtime environments or IoT fleets can now easily accelerate and scale to meet their distribution needs with a Private Distribution Network, enabling the consumption of software as fast as possible with complete traceability and control from any source to any deployment target.”

The challenge

Once applications are developed, software binaries and Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) need to be quickly, securely and reliably distributed – often multiple times throughout the process – over the network to the next phase in the SDLC or to the last-mile of deployment to production.

IDC predicts that more than 50% of new infrastructure will be deployed at the edge by 2023, with 7 million edges and 38 billion ‘things’ coming online this year alone. The exponential growth in edge and IoT, coupled with the increased adoption of cloud-native applications and more frequent deployments, have all created new challenges and bottlenecks for software distribution at scale — particularly when needing to release updates to thousands of environments/devices and overcoming the physical limitations of the network.

The JFrog Platform is the only end-to-end, central DevOps solution that bridges the gap between delivery processes and network bottlenecks/impediments to delivery at scale, and is the only solution to address the paradigm of Software Distribution and solve for the new challenges of modern delivery at scale.

Key benefits

Customers can define their topology and deploy distribution nodes in a multi-layer, cascading network that serves as content cache and network optimization. These enable enterprises to accelerate software distribution, speed up deployments and handle high volume of downloads across large-scale runtime environments.

JFrog’s Private Distribution Network is designed from the ground to enable speed, trust, scale, and simplified operations:

• Support hybrid distribution – across large-scale, mixed environments spanning on-prem datacenters, cloud/multi-cloud infrastructure, edges, IoT, and embedded devices.
• Trusted distribution – ensure security, compliance and governance with immutable, signed distributed releases, validation of distributed transactions, out-of-the-box support for open source security vulnerability and licenses compliance policies, RBAC, and traceability and visibility into the source, destination, and integrity of all distributed packages and downloads.
• Improved network utilization and resiliency – with patent-pending network optimization technology and stacked layers of caching and acceleration – including for use cases requiring getting past inbound-only firewalls, or to limited-connectivity on-prem resources such as edges at factories, retail stores, and more.
• Infinitely scalable – supporting releases across large-scale infrastructure with flexibility of the deployment topology that can overcome network constraints and download spikes.
• Binaries-focused package-aware distribution – to effectively manage and track the exponentially growing number of binaries across all endpoints.
• Software distribution, native to DevOps – Tightly integrated with the organization’s SDLC processes, CI/CD pipelines, binary management practices, and security policies.
• No management overhead and low TCO – with lightweight edge accelerators and self-service management experience (unlike DIY solutions).
• Pay-per-use pricing – across all environments, tying costs with business and infrastructure growth.
• Speed up deployments at scale – with a click of a button, companies can distribute software to any of the distribution groups across massive-scale, hybrid infrastructure and edges’ footprints.
• Support a high volume of concurrent downloads/consumption of software binaries, either by a large number of production nodes that access binaries for concurrent deployment or by the ecosystem, partners and customers. Overcoming network limitations by using groups of tens or hundreds of lightweight Distribution Nodes. HTTPs-based, firewall-friendly, customized P2P protocol is used to achieve content High Availability.

JFrog’s Private Distribution Network is currently available as a private beta, and will be generally available in Q3, 2021. Private Distribution Network solution will allow for easy scaling with no upfront costs, with pay-per-use pricing based on throughput consumption.