Building a Global CI/CD Infrastructure

Why Cisco Chose JFrog Artifactory as its

Universal Artifact Repository Manager

Prathibha Ayyappan
Software Engineer, Build Management Services, Cisco

Cisco, 30,000 Network Engineers in Every Corner of the World

Founded in 1984, Cisco is the world’s largest networking company. Its wide variety @
of hardware and software products and services are used by all market segments
in every industry, from corporate enterprises through small businesses and start- From 0 to
ups to mass-market consumers. Of its over 70,000 employees, 30,000 are
engineers spread out in development centers around the globe
4500 Engineers

Cisco’s Build Management Services Team provides CI/CD tools and services to the
company’s engineers. The team was tasked with creating a common CI/CD
Globally Distributed
environment which could serve the company’s complete development workforce.
However, in the spirit of Cisco’s policy of operational freedom, the company would
not force anyone to come on board.
10M Daily Downloads

The service had to be so good as to attract development teams to join

willingly and eagerly.
With 0 Downtime
In 1 Year
Why Cisco Chose JFrog Artifactory
In the initial stages of the project in 2014, Cisco conducted a stringent evaluation process, and eventually selected
Artifactory over its competitors. The main reason was Artifactory’s universal nature, supporting all major build
tools, CI servers and packaging formats. As a company strongly based in embedded software using RPMs for its
networking hardware, Cisco especially needed Artifactory’s extensive support for YUM repositories.

Cisco selected Artifactory, largely because of its universal support for build tools, CI servers and
packaging technologies, and especially, its support for YUM repositories.

The Evolution of a Global CI/CD Service

The initial rollout of the CI/CD service included a standalone installation of Artifactory Pro operating from the
company’s Raleigh-Durham (RTP) site. To provide better performance at Cisco’s main engineering site, the
service’s primary installation was migrated to San Jose (SJC) data center. Thanks to Artifactory’s replication
capabilities, setting up in San Jose as the main site, failing over to the original location in RDP as its DR site was easy.

Migrating the main site to San Jose was a breeze thanks to Artifactory’s replication capabilities

However, Cisco’s international sites were still not getting optimal performance, so the team set up additional
installations, again using Artifactory’s replication and read through caches to synchronize all repositories with the
main installation at San Jose. At this point all customers were happy and getting excellent performance from their
CI/CD pipeline...until there was an outage. The outage itself was not a problem; customers continued to get
service, however, once the outage had been fixed, it took hours to restore the main site since Artifactory was
already being heavily used and bandwidth was limited. This made it clear that having only one master node was an
unacceptable single point-of-failure and outages that required cross-country replication in order to recover from
could not be tolerated.
 By setting up Artifactory in a High Availability configuration, the team knew that they could provide
a robust, reliable and highly performant service to all its customers in the US and around the globe.

To remove the threat of outages, Artifactory on the main site in San Jose was set up in a High Availability
configuration. With the promise of up to five-nines availability, Cisco’s Build Management Services Team knew that
they could provide a robust, reliable and highly performant service to all its customers in the US and in its remote
sites around the globe. But there was still one problem. Between the US and international sites and setting up the
repositories and replication and proxy relationships between them, the complex manual configuration process
meant that it could take anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes to provision a repository to a development team. As the
project’s popularity grew, the lengthy and error-prone manual provisioning process became a bottleneck. So the
team built an app that automated the complete provisioning process. Relying heavily on Artifactory’s REST API, the
app created repositories, users, permission targets, replication relationships and anything else that was needed to
provision a repository to a customer. This automation reduced provisioning time to an average of about 2 minutes
which constituted a 98% reduction in time, and an automated error-free process.

Within One Year

4500 98% 1800

Engineers reduction in time man-hours saved
actively using the system to taken to provision repositories thanks to automation through
manage their builds and artifacts for any packaging format Artifactory’s REST API

Summary

Why Cisco Selected Artifactory:

Universal support for build tools, CI servers and packaging formats, especially YUM

Extensive replication capabilities

Rich REST API for automation

Artifactory Universal Repository Manager was selected by Cisco for its CI/CD infrastructure serving the company’s
30,000 strong engineering workforce. Artifactory’s support for all major packaging formats, and in particular, YUM
repositories, made it a natural choice for Cisco whose engineers are strongly based in RPMs for their embedded
software. The infrastructure evolved through several stages until it reached its current architecture with four sites
connected by replication relationships and virtual and remote repositories. To meet the growing demand by
different teams around the globe to use the infrastructure, the team used Artifactory’s REST API to dramatically
reduce provisioning time by 98% through automation. It became clear that Artifactory was the right choice for
Cisco. Within a year, over 4500 engineers were using the system to manage their builds and artifacts. Thanks to
automation using Artifactory’s REST API, over 1800 hours of manual work in provisioning repositories was saved,
with the projected savings in man-hours for the following year reaching 4400.