Overview
From JFrog Artifactory 7.18.3, the JFrog Platform enables you to create Federated repositories which allow mirroring of artifacts and their metadata with other repositories of a Federated type located on remote JFrog Deployments (JPDs) in a multisite environment. The Federated repository functions similarly to a local repository on the JPD, but is grouped together logically with other Federated members located on other JPDs, to create a Federation.
A Federation is a collection of repositories of Federated type in different JPDs that are automatically configured for full bi-directional mirroring. Once you have created a Federation, changes made to artifacts on one member of the Federation will be replicated asynchronously to the other federated members. The Federated repository configuration is also aligned across all members in the Federation.
Federated repositories provide Enterprise organizations running software in more than one geographical site with a single source of truth for the binaries, as if they were one seamless unit, and support the following use cases:
- Distributed Development teams
- Remote Production environment
- Disaster Recovery (DR) sites
Available JFrog subscription levels:
Self-Hosted/ Cloud
Federated Topology
Federated repositories are easy to set up and support bi-directional synchronisation of local repositories without the need to set up complex topologies. These types of repositories are based on bidirectional replication, whereby artifact metadata is replicated constantly separately from the binary content.
As displayed in the following example, setting up mirroring across three sites using the traditional Replication feature, would have required setting up quite a complex mesh topology consisting of setting up multiple virtual repositories with a local repository and 3 remote repositories, whereas Federated repositories inherently support mirroring removing the need to create the mesh topology.
Get Started
To start working with Federated repositories, you will first need to set up cross-instance authentication (Circle-of-Trust) between the JPDs to allow the Platform Administrator to perform a set of CRUD (Create, Remove, Update and Delete) actions on the repositories based on their predefined set of permissions. All the actions performed on one of the Federated repositories will automatically be synchronized and reflected on all of the Federated members, including not just the repository content, but also certain configuration changes. For example, if Federated repository A in "JPD A" and Federated repository B in "JPD B" are members of the same Federation, deploying a file to Federated Repository A in "JPD A", will trigger a copy the file action to the Federated Repository B in "JPD B". Similarly, deploying a file to Federated Repository B in "JPD B", will trigger a copy the file action to the Federated Repository A in "JPD A". The configuration changes are also synchronized based on the latest update (e.g. latest update to the configuration is propagated to all members of Federation).
To start creating your first Federated repository, click here.