JFrog Artifactory on OpenShift Has Arrived

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More and more DevOps practices rely on Kubernetes to deploy containerized microservices. However, as an open source project, Kubernetes may not provide all the elements required for an enterprise environment such as business-level support, testing body or guided practices by a reputed entity/company.  To address these enterprise requirements,  Red Hat released Openshift, which is, essentially, an enterprise version of Kubernetes. The OpenShift Container Platform adds management and monitoring capabilities on top of Kubernetes and comes with the support required by enterprise  DevOps teams allowing them to enjoy the benefits of Kubernetes with confidence.

But enterprises require more from their applications. Things like scale, accessibility, and reliability. OpenShift aims to deliver these requirements to deployed applications, but for the whole distribution pipeline to be scalable, accessible and reliable,  the DevOps tools must also be able to provide the same capabilities. External tools cannot always deliver on these requirements. If a 3rd-party tool experiences an outage or if there are network issues, the tool may become unavailable.   

In a post published a few months ago, we announced that Artifactory would be available on OpenShift and we are happy to deliver on that promise. Artifactory on OpenShift provides the scalability, accessibility, and reliability that enterprises working with Kubernetes need, by removing any dependency on the network or external resources. It caches all binaries downloaded from external public repositories such as the Red Hat Docker repository, the Red Hat RPM repository, Docker Hub or npmjs.com. This means that all binaries and the Docker images corresponding to containerized microservices can be pulled locally from Artifactory for distribution without depending on network speed or connectivity to these external public resources.

Using OpenShift namespaces and Artifactory’s promotion capabilities, you can build a promotion pipeline through which to present the application to different audiences while sharing the same service layer, making the validation tasks more effective and safer. For example, with a separate Artifactory repository to store the version at every stage in your distribution pipeline (development, testing, production, etc.) and one OpenShift namespace where the versions of a given stage are automatically deployed, Artifactory’s Build Promotion feature makes it possible to move the versions from one stage to another with a single JFrog CLI command or REST API call.   

With Artifactory supporting OpenShift, you can now get universal binary management with all the benefits. Artifactory integrates with your existing ecosystem to support end-to-end binary management that overcomes the complexity of working with different software package management systems, like Docker, NPM, and Java providing consistency to your CI/CD workflow.

You can now install Artifactory on OpenShift using templates that are located in JFrog’s GitHub repository.

Here are some of the benefits you can get by using Artifactory in your private OpenShift cluster:

1. Secure, private repositories for your OpenShift cluster with fine-grained access control according to projects or development teams.
2. Reliable and consistent access to remote resources, in particular, the Red Hat public repository (Docker, RPM) and the Official Incubator repository, through remote repositories in Artifactory which provide proxy and caching functionality.
3. Enterprise features such as high availability, repository replication for multi-site development and different options for massively scalable storage.

JFrog Artifactory brings enterprise-grade repository management to your OpenShift cluster to optimize your CI/CD workflow. Stay tuned for our follow-up post where we will show how JFrog Xray works with Artifactory to address the security of your binary artifacts on OpenShift.