JFrog Boosts DevOps with Universal Artifact Repository
JFrog Artifactory 4.0
With today's release of JFrog Artifactory 4.0, JFrog is targeting DevOps' need to manage all software applications, regardless of the language or technology in which they were created.
The developer's universal artifact repository manager provides clustered and cloud high availability, support for multi-site teams, and supports both development and operations teams, said Adam Frankl, vice president of marketing, in an interview. As organizations increasingly write development apps internally to leverage data, hone their competitive edge, or meet a specific business need, they create thousands of binaries and associated metadata. These separate repositories for each kind of artifact typically are scattered across multiple technologies, making it difficult for developers, operations professionals, and other enterprise professionals to rapidly respond or act, according to JFrog.
Artifactory 4.0 melds together high availability, a secure Docker registry, npm repository, and support for technologies like Maven, Gradle, Nuget, Ym, and PyPl, to manage binaries and metadata, Frankl said.
"We need to have a production, enterprise-quality artifact server for Docker images – a registry," said Carl Quinn, software architect at Riot Games, in a statement. "For Docker, we want something that we can scale out, manage with scripts and APIs, do strong authentication and be robust. The open source Docker registry is okay to get started with, but not something we wanted to go with at production scale. We've now adopted JFrog Artifactory, which is extremely versatile. If it’s not just perfect, we can reconfigure it. We can add plug-ins. We can script it. It’s API-driven, so we can make it do what we want very easily."
The universal artifact repository eliminates silos, allowing all members of an enterprise's development team to access and download materials, regardless of their location, Frankl said. It also allows teams to see when changes were made, by whom, and why, he added.
"When development teams create a build, operations don't really know what's in it," said Frankel. "If someone asks operations, 'Does this build fix the bug that was found last week?' operations doesn't know: They say, 'You've got to ask dev.' The Dev team and the DevOps team have a common language so they know what's going on and that speeds up the process."
JFrog Artifactory 4.0
While many organizations today rely on Docker, that product solely handles Docker images. Since most enterprises use multiple technologies to create applications, they run into problems when they step outside the Docker environment, said Frankl.
"The Docker trusted registry is strictly for Docker images. [What if] you're using Java or using Ruby or some other technology? We serve as the Docker registry but we also serve as the repository for the app that is going into the Docker registry," he noted. "We have years of deployment, which means we have high availability already, security, and integrate with all enterprise systems. Although we have overlapping features with Docker, a lot of people use both Docker and Artifactory."
Typically, a developer downloads the developer's free open source product, said Frankl. Although in the past, sales almost exclusively resulted from DevOps, more organizations today are buying Artifactory Pro or Enterprise editions for their relevant departments, he said.
"Companies that have a DevOps initiative will often bring us in," said Frankl. "[DevOps] is the biggest thing to hit development since agile. There is still a lot of education we're doing in the marketplace. A huge amount of our new customers are picking up Artifactory because they need a Docker registry. In the long-term, though, I don't see us being competition. I think our focus is different. Docker is focused on making sure they have a great registry for Docker images; we are focused on being universal."
