JFrog Artifactory: Administration

Course Duration: 35 minutes

JFrog Artifactory: Administration

Designing the right solution for supporting your team’s development pipeline is our goal. In this course, you will learn about the internal micro services architecture of Artifactory and basic Artifactory administrative operations.

Automating the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is a valuable asset in enterprise environments where changes occur rapidly and teams must deploy updates as soon as possible. JFrog Artifactory facilitates rapid deployment, replicated binary management, scalability, and cloud distribution. Administrating the JFrog platform requires dedicated knowledgeable staff that knows the importance of the Artifactory service to the health status of the continuous CI/CD tools and processes. This course will get any administrator up to speed with the way Artifactory can be installed and configured that works best for your organization.

We give you a full overview of the Artifactory architecture so that you can deploy the solution faster. Installation from beginning to end including configurations is also included in this course so that administrators can use the course to get the solution. To enable the use of artifact management across multiple sites, we will cover how a multi site setup of Artifactory looks like including the use of replication services and leveraging the various types of repositories.

Artifactory offers a unique active-active high availability for enterprise environments that consider their continuous pipelines as mission critical and would like to either maximize their artifact management up time or be able to horizontally scale it in order to support increased usage. In this course you’ll learn all the clustering administration configurations, installation guidance, and architecture needed for understanding and setting up Artifactory high availability solutions.

In this course we will cover 

• The internal architecture of Artifactory and its administration
• Installation of Artifactory
• The high availability Artifactory offers
• Multiple Artifactory topology options and configurations

Note: this course is designed for Artifactory on-premise administration and not for Artifactory Cloud users, we recommend that you take the course topics applicable to your JFrog subscription. 

Who should take this Artifactory course?

Infrastructure and operations teams who are new to JFrog Artifactory and intend to perform administrative and maintenance tasks related to Artifactory. Administrators who must configure either new installations of Artifactory or an existing setup can benefit from taking this course. Operations teams that must support Artifactory maintenance and its supporting infrastructure will also benefit from learning how to work with configurations and installation guidance for DevOps training.

Course Completion

In order to complete the course, you must answer at least 70% of the quiz questions correctly.

Additional Artifactory courses available on JFrog Academy:

JFrog Artifactory: Overview (2020+)
JFrog Artifactory: Advanced Administration (2020+)
JFrog Artifactory: Build Tools Integration (2020+)

Artifactory is a multi-layered system that enables interaction with users and machines on one end and databases and repositories on the other. In the middle, we have caching and a virtual filesystem.Let's look a little closer at these layers. The top layer of Artifactory is the user interaction layer, which is over HTTP or HTTPS. Interactions with this layer might occur in three ways. The first interactive option is the web UI. The second option is a WebDAV interface option. With WebDAV, you can use an Artifactory repository as a storage mount point on your file system. The third option is a REST API interface. Most interactions with Artifactory will use the REST API because the typical user is not a human, but a machine. These three types of user interactions are important considerations for Artifactory administrators. Deciding how Artifactory will function in a fully automated world plays an important role when you design your development lifecycle. Below the user interaction layer, is an optional caching layer. Using a cache can accelerate very large repositories, reducing the load of the backend network and storage. The cache executes on the local disk before writing to NFS. Below the caching layer is a Virtual File System. This is the magic of Artifactory. The Virtual File System contains checksum-based file storage that virtually accesses the file store, while all logical metadata is stored in the database. We'll explain the magic of this system in a moment. The last layer of Artifactory is the layer that connects to the database and the outside world. Artifactory ships with a Derby database, which you can replace with any standard SQL database. Some of the common options are MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or PostgreSQL. Artifactory fully supports these databases with a relational JDBC connector, and continually tests them for both performance and functionality. DBAs should select a database of their preference because a happy DBA is a happy database. Besides connecting to the database on this layer, Artifactory has an HTTP connector to the external world. This is how Artifactory accesses remote repositories. It also uses a two-way connection with JFrog Bintray that pulls data from JCenter and pushes it to Bintray via Distribution repositories.