JFrog Grid

A JFrog Grid creates and maintains a multisite workspace with uniform JFrog Project, Lifecycle, and Access Control settings.

Platform and Project Federation

The Grid syncs all the major entities that define your Projects and SDLC process. The result is a “Federated platform” that supports users in multiple sites with a uniform platform of record.

The Grid and its globally synced workspace form the basis for JFrog’s further multisite integration features, which will eventually sync most SDLC, Security, and Governance entities into a globally meshed management layer.

Why JFrog Grid

Project settings embody your organization's structure and business policies: your local and global roles, resource permissions, security settings, and lifecycle stages define user access and resource permissions over the SDLC.

In multisite JFrog subscriptions, these project and lifecycle settings must be consistent across all your sites:

• To support collaboration across sites
• To ensure uniform application of security and access policies
• To support resilience and recovery scenarios between sites.

Automated sync enables the multisite workspace.

The JFrog Grid resolves and automates many of the challenging tasks Admins face in creating and maintaining the multisite workspace. Automated sync relieves the Admin burden and eliminates configuration drift.

The JFrog Grid provides a consistent management layer of Project and Lifecycle settings. This frees users with large-scale deployments to:

• Extend their deployments with additional sites.
• Use JFrog’s powerful Project and Lifecycle tools to define and manage Security, Distribution, and Governance functions over the SDLC.

What the JFrog Grid Synchronizes

The JFrog Grid automatically syncs project and access controls across all its member sites. All sites in the Grid share one uniform layer of service configurations and policies, including:

• Projects, Members, Roles
• Global & Project Stages
• Users & Groups, Permission Targets
• Access Tokens

These settings become Global Entities maintained by the Grid. Changes on any site of the Grid are synced to all member sites.

Use Cases

The Grid maintains consistency across all its sites, with uniform workflow, identity, access, and governance settings. This supports applications that require a single coherent Projects/access model.

• Collaboration - users can access their projects on different sites of the Grid, and receive the same working environment. Security and access control are determined by a uniform set of policies. Changes are fully synced across sites.

• Failover - The Grid ensures that its entities are fully synced between the active site and dormant site.

• CI/CD - Sites dedicated to specific stages in the SDLC process/business functions share one set of project, user, and application settings.

Automated sync drastically reduces the Admin overhead of the multisite deployment, freeing users with large-scale deployments to:

• Extend their deployments with additional sites.

• Use JFrog’s powerful Project and Lifecycle tools to define and manage Security, Distribution, and Governance functions over the SDLC.

What the JFrog Grid Synchronizes

The JFrog Grid automatically syncs project and access controls across all its member sites, including:

• Projects, Members, Roles
• Global & Project Stages
• Users & Groups, Permission Targets
• Access Tokens

These settings become Global Entities maintained by the Grid. Changes on any site of the Grid are synced to all member sites.

How Grid works

A JFrog Grid can be defined within your existing SaaS subscription architecture. Select the member sites to include in the Grid. The Grid immediately begins to sync Global Entities between the sites of the Grid.

The JFrog Grid topology is a mesh of peers. Updates to Global Entities on any site are synced between all sites. Star topologies are not supported.

Federated services and the JFrog Grid

Some federated services complement the Grid by syncing additional data types. For example, these federation services continue to operate normally on sites that are added to a Grid:

• Federated repositories
• Curation Federation

Access Federation or JFrog Grid? JFrog Grid syncs all the entity types that can be handled by an Access Federation. There are differences between the services:

• The Grid and its global federations - such as Project Federation - form the basis for JFrog’s continued cross-site integration. The JFrog Grid is built on the new, highly scalable Platform Federation (PFED) service infrastructure. Access Federation uses existing JFrog services to provide 1st-generation multisite syncing.
• The JFrog Grid is a comprehensive federated workspace, not a standalone service. The Grid syncs all entities to create a uniform multisite Project Federation. In this model, you do not select specific entities to sync, so filtering or mapping options of Access Federation are not supported. Similarly, the Grid implements a mesh of peers to create one workspace, and star or chained topologies are not supported.
• The JPD Platform UI provides a dedicated Grid management dashboard to monitor sync events between member sites, including drill-down to individual sync events.

You can preserve Access Federations between sites that are not included in a Grid. See Plan the Grid.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Self-managed sites join a Grid?

Currently only SaaS endpoints are supported. Upcoming releases will support inclusion of Self-managed sites in Grids in Hybrid deployments.

Can Edge nodes join a Grid?

No. Edge nodes have limited functionality do not use or support the Project-related entities synced by the Grid. To sync Access entities on Edge nodes, use the Access Federation service.

Will additional entities be synced?

The Grid's meshed management layer is the starting point for further multisite integration. Planned releases will add the following entities:

• Lifecycles
• Curation - the Grid will sync the entities currently handled by the standalone Curation Federation service.
• Repositories - instead of individual Federated Repositories, the Grid will provision and sync repositories across sites.

How do I manually re-sync if a Grid site goes offline?

The Grid is based on the next-generation PFED federation service, and is designed to minimize manual recovery interventions.

Peer-to-peer entity federation interactions are handled by the PFED service on each site, and continue on other sites when one site is offline. Service messaging uses retry mechanisms, queuing, and self-inventory to identify failures and recover when a site comes back online. There is no need for Admins to schedule manual sync scripts.

The Grid is configured on the main site of the SaaS deployment. This site has no special role in syncing Global Entities, and is not a single point of failure for federation operations.