Announcing the Industry’s First Private Distribution Network

Today, at our DevOps user conference swampUP, we were thrilled to announce a new groundbreaking innovation from JFrog: The industry’s first Private Distribution Network!

Private Distribution Network (PDN) enables enterprises to easily set up and manage a secure, massively-scalable, hybrid distribution network for software updates. This new innovative technology accelerates software distribution by multiple orders of magnitude, to speed up deployments and concurrent downloads across large-scale environments – spanning hybrid infrastructure, edges, and IoT devices.

Before we get into all the tech goodies, let’s talk a bit about the challenges we’re solving:

Enterprises must become software distribution experts

To meet customer demand, support new use cases, and ensure optimal experiences, enterprises must run more of their applications closer to consumers to minimize latency. This means growing use cases for edge applications– from ‘thick’ to ‘thin’: remote “mini” datacenters, industrial enterprise edges, IoT gateways, and single-purpose devices. IDC predicts¹ 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.

As enterprises continue to drive their portfolios across datacenters, cloud/multi-cloud and remote edges, new challenges in software distribution at scale have emerged. The ability to release software rapidly to thousands of endpoints across a large-scale, hybrid footprint several times a day can create bottlenecks not only due to the volume of endpoints themselves, but also the unique topologies and network limitations affecting each deployment mode across these heterogeneous environments.

The race to the runtime is the race to the consumer. This race is also the race of binaries distribution: How fast can you propagate all endpoints/devices? What volume of concurrent downloads can you support? How do you handle flaky or clogged networks? Security? Permissions? Package integrity? Management overhead?

Struggling to address these new challenges to large-scale delivery, we see enterprises invest a lot of effort trying to solve the problem of a private distribution network. Today, we’re proud to announce we’re alleviating this pain and complexity with an OOTB solution!

Introducing Private Distribution Network:

Private Distribution Network (PDN), a new innovative capability of JFrog Distribution, is an OOTB solution for accelerating the secure, reliable distribution of software updates across any BYO, hybrid, large-scale infrastructure or devices’ footprints, on any network topology.

Private Distribution Network Provides:

• Two integrated network utilization and acceleration technologies:
  • Secure P2P: gRPC-based, secure, enterprise-grade, proprietary P2P protocol for improving download speed, resiliency, and network utilization when handling large volume of concurrency.
  • CDN: lightweight local cache across both clouds (WAN) and private, local networks (LAN). This provides a secure, fully controlled, private CDN to accelerate downloads with local, short-term cache and eager warm-up.
• An easy rollout across large scale environments/devices – turning any infrastructure into  a Private Distribution Node.
• Users model their topology and deploy Distribution Groups in a multi-layer, cascading network that serves as content cache and network optimization.
• When distributing software to certain nodes or groups, the distributed binaries cascade in a hierarchical fashion to all parent layers. Each layer can be located closer to the consumer, enabling enterprises to design the hierarchy according to the “best network path” (instead of a long network ‘hop’). Groups can point to other groups, providing resiliency and easy management at scale.
• The management admin in the JFog Platform provides a low-touch management experience, enabling network topology modeling, triggering and tracking distribution transactions, RBAC, security scanning, and more.
• Simple, as-a-service user experience, with usage-based pricing.
• Work how you like: via GUI, CLI or API.

See it in Action!

Here’s a quick demo by Yoav Landman, JFrog’s co-founder and CTO, sharing how PDN works in the JFrog DevOps Platform.

As background: When we want to push a secure distribution to PDN nodes, we first create a Release Bundle – that can be created dynamically, on-the-fly, or be persistent. This mechanism creates an immutable, secured, certified BOM that provides atomicity and trust to the release. Once a distribution is triggered, the content of the Release Bundle will be propagated and validated on all distribution groups and their nodes. We also allow users to close the bundles for downloads until all content is available on the endpoints.

In this demo, imagine a topology with a central HQ where the JFrog Platform is operating, with various PDN groups on infrastructure in different remote locations, like in the diagram below: America, EMEA, APAC, and even sub-groups for different countries/states in different regions: such as NY, CA, Japan, London, and more.

Now, let’s play the demo to take it from here:

Key Benefits of Private Distribution Network:

• Speed – Accelerate distribution across large-scale, hybrid, complex environments and devices:
  • Speed up deployments at scale – with a click of a button, enterprises can distribute software to any of the distribution groups across thousands of endpoints and complex topology across environments.
  • 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, P2P protocol is used to achieve content High Availability.
• Scale – Release software updates across massive footprints, using converged infrastructure that overcomes network constraints and download spikes.
• Hybrid – One-click distribution across mixed infrastructure footprints: on-prem datacenters, cloud/multi-cloud, edges, IoT, and embedded devices.
• Resiliency – Ensure content HA and improve network utilization and resiliency, even when dealing with inbound-only firewalls or limited-connectivity
• Trust – Ensure security, compliance, and governance with trusted distribution: Immutable distributed releases, validation of distributed transactions and package integrity, out-of-the-box security and compliance scanning, RBAC, traceability, and more.
• Simple! Simplify operations with low-touch management, low TCO, and pay-per-use, flexible pricing.
• DevOps-native – Distribution processes are native to your DevOps processes, tightly integrated with your CI/CD, binary management, and security policies.

JFrog’s Private Distribution Network is currently available as a private beta, and will be generally available in 2022.

Request an invite to the PDN private beta.

PDN and JFrog Distribution are part of the JFrog DevOps Platform

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. It is the only solution to address the paradigm of Software Distribution and solve for the new challenges of modern delivery at scale.

Try the JFrog Platform and JFrog Distribution for yourself!