Rethinking Your Software Distribution Infrastructure

UPDATE: JFrog’s Private Distribution Network capabilities are constantly being enhanced, and are currently undergoing major improvements. PDN is, as a result, not available for public sale at this time. If you’re interested in exploring PDN capabilities in your own company, please contact your sales representative or email service AT jfrog.com.

Accelerating software distribution is a critical part to enabling enterprise delivery at scale. Throughout the SDLC processes, we’re required to continuously distribute software packages — either to remote development teams as part of CI cycles, to production environments or devices for deployments, or for public downloads by your developers or partners ecosystem.

The key attributes of Distribution workflows create network challenges around bandwidth, resiliency and availability. Distribution processes are network-intensive and extremely complex to accelerate and secure at scale, since they often involve:

1. One to many, fan-out distribution: One source needs to distribute binaries for consumption across large-scale environments or endpoints. For example, this is the case with runtime distribution- where binaries need to be propagated across all nodes for deployment.
2. High concurrency of downloads: A distributed artifact or set of binaries (release Bill of Materials, BOM) needs to be downloaded by thousands of clients at the same time – such as production machines, or when releasing a new driver/software update/SDK, etc. to your user base or developer ecosystem.
3. Hybrid workflows: Distribution workflows often need to execute across mixed environments and network topologies. For example, you may need to distribute from an on-premises development environment to a cloud consumption point- for supporting a “Download Center” use case to share your binaries with the general ecosystem. Or, you may want to distribute from a cloud-based core to an on-premises environment (from WAN to LAN networks) for download by specific customers or even for deployment into air-gapped environments or devices.

Rethinking your software distribution infrastructure

Modern distribution requirements lead organizations to (re)think about their software distribution infrastructure as a critical component of their DevOps stack.

The JFrog DevOps Platform is the only end-to-end solution that bridges the gap between delivery automation processes and network and distribution impediments to delivery at scale.

An industry-unique solution, JFrog Distribution allows you to accelerate governed, secure package distribution across large-scale hybrid topologies and concurrency requirements — overcoming even limited bandwidth and network lag.

Creating your software distribution “fast lane”

JFrog Distribution enables enterprises to easily create their fast, scalable converged software distribution infrastructure to accelerate deployments and concurrent downloads at scale — by combining two components that can be deployed in multi-tier, hybrid topologies:

1. Private Distribution Network (PDN): PDN enables you to set up and manage a fast, secure, massively scalable hybrid distribution network for software updates — across any BYO infrastructure, device fleets, or network topologies (WAN/LAN).
   Private Distribution Network is comprised of a lightweight golang agent that endows any infrastructure or device with two integrated network utilization and acceleration technologies: secure P2P and local-cache software distribution CDN. Users model their topology as cascading groups in a multi-layer software distribution network and trigger GPG-signed distribution transactions- all with a simple as-a-service experience.
2. Distribution Edges: These provide local, low latency, governed consumption points for distributed content with optimized download speed at the edge.
   Distribution Edges enable you to accelerate software distribution across runtime environments, remote development teams (including inbound-only networks), or publishing to external download centers for developer and partner ecosystems – all while supporting high-concurrency downloads, security, and auditability requirements.

We’ve discussed PDN in-depth in the past. Check out this blog post to learn more about Distribution Edges, key use cases and topologies for creating your hybrid software distribution infrastructure.

Learn More

According to IDC, failure to address distribution bottlenecks can be a major risk to businesses. Robust, flexible software distribution infrastructure is one of the four strategic pillars for enterprises to ensure their digital transformation success.

Read this blog post to learn more.