JFrog Artifactory Reviews

We use Artifactory for all of our software development. We're an electric car company, and we're headquartered in China, but we've got an R&D software development office in San Jose. All of our software development teams use Artifactory for storing all their artifacts, binaries, and things like that for the software that they're developing for the electric vehicles that we manufacture and sell in China and Europe.

We are using the Enterprise X version. It's self-hosted and on-prem. It's not on the cloud.

It's very good for end-to-end binary management. It's a very good solution. I've worked at companies where software developers were just storing all of their releases, merge requests, and everything in a file structure or file storage. It's difficult to keep track of that. You can't tag metadata to that, and you can't see information, such as dates of when things were uploaded. Artifactory having all those capabilities makes it very useful for the developers to track the index and be able to sort and find all of their data, especially for keeping archives of all of the releases and things.

It's one of the core tools that our engineers rely on every day, not just our engineers in the US office in San Jose but also our engineers in China. We're a global company. Our software teams are globally distributed. So, there's constant sharing of software source code, artifacts, and binaries across the countries. We have Artifactory instances deployed both in the US and in China. It's, if not the most valuable, the second most valuable tool behind our source code repository for the engineers to use on a day-to-day basis.

We've had it since the beginning days when we started as a company in 2016. It has certainly not been a hindrance to our software development and accelerating the developers to be able to do their work. They aren't spending time trying to keep track of all their data in terms of where it's stored and how to store it. So, it enables our engineers and our developers.

We've been able to utilize some of the APIs to build custom interfaces and dashboards for self-service on permission management and user and group permission management. We did that, and then later, Artifactory or JFrog came out with a user group manager interface, but we had built one ourselves initially utilizing the APIs. Now, we're building on top of those same APIs to set up a self-service data retention dashboard for the users or for the developers so that they can set and manage their own data retention policies and then self-manage their own storage usage and growth.

Previously, we were developing products without built-in security tools, and Artifactory lets us bake in that security process. We purchased the enterprise edition, which gives us three instances we use in different environments to better deliver our software. 

We run one instance in a sensitive area that's siloed off, one on our corporate infrastructure, and another on a public Cloud. It could be a customer using something out in the open or on Edge. Artifactory allows us to securely deploy our software.

We're a growing company that has been doing things in an archaic way. Artifactory has helped us modernize, and that's something that we can't do without. Our development operations are fully automated at each step from the daily development to the security scans that happen. It sped up our development, reducing a month-long process to a couple of days

The integration between Frog Xray and Artifactory is a pleasant surprise. When our developers push through code, we ensure it's secure, and it's all automated. 

Artifactory's support for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments is critical because we deploy to a wide array of environments, including those setups.
When we did the trial, we created multiple types of package registries that support different file types and tested each one. We were thrilled with the results. We were also pleased with the overall flexibility Artifactory provides in terms of storage and database option.

We have integrated Artifactory with Jira, allowing us to create Jira tickets for our security team to review when we identify vulnerabilities. There was a lot of overhead at first, but it paid off because we have full insight into what our code looks like from a security and a developer standpoint.

We use it for development purposes, more specifically for continuous integration to push artifacts for deployment. JFrog is in the middle of both my CI and CD integration.

It plays a major role in my environment for continuous integration and continuous deployment. It is our only storage for artifacts, which includes all compiled and customized images.

It allows us to have everything accessible from a common location. It is user-friendly and secure.

It is user-friendly. It is playing a major role in creating new software. It has been very helpful in placing the bundles and doing the deployment. It plays a great role in pipeline technology. Without it, doing the same would be a lot more complicated. We wouldn't be able to achieve the required speed for on-time delivery of the new software.

Any AI project is a combination of multiple programming scripts or multiple programming bundles that need to be coordinated at a single point, either by the repository point or by the version control point. For version control, we have Git for saving multiple programming scripts into a single point. For the bundle point or placing the bundles in a single point, JFrog is used. It provides the proper bundle that the script demands.

We usually use it to store our artifacts, version them, and use them in production. We use it in CI/CD pipelines. All our R&D uses it as do all our development teams that need to release software. It doesn't matter what, they use it.

JFrog Artifactory is very essential to us. Without it, we could not use the artifacts, the products that our developers are writing. We would need to maintain a lot of different artifactory repositories in a lot of places. It would be more difficult. You definitely need some kind of artifactory solution. It doesn't necessarily need to be JFrog, but in my opinion, it's better to use it because it's a good, centralized solution. I haven't found any good competitors.

The way to explain to C-suite executives why they should continue to invest in JFrog is that it saves a lot of time and a lot of mundane work that would be required to maintain many solutions that JFrog gives you in one solution. 

We don't have to maintain a lot of repositories. We get the same outcome with JFrog with less maintenance. With the SaaS solution, we don't even need to maintain the installation, the server, or whatever infrastructure is around it. There is less involvement in artifactory management.

We don't need to use all kinds of artifactories like Docker Hub or different PyPI repositories for Python. Everything is there and we don't need to pay different companies for all these solutions or to maintain them.

It gives us a good workflow in terms of how we create software because we use it for all of our artifact types. It's good that it's centralized and it helps us in our CI/CD flows, to release software. You don't need to create different scripts or automations to upload different kinds of artifacts to different vendors or repositories. It simplifies our workflow.

The main use case was to store the artifacts, store the binaries, basically. And then we used it as a container registry as well.

One of my tasks was to get X-ray running. I got the product running and tested it, but users never really started using it. So, from the user perspective, I don't really know how much they used X-ray.

What I can say about X-ray is that it did what Artifactory advertised. So, from that point of view, in my opinion, it worked fine, but we never really got to use it too deeply. We never got enough requests from our customers, the developers, or the security management team to implement some checks or block downloads from Artifactory, even when the software is too old or has some vulnerabilities.

That was a disappointment for me because I worked on the installation and management of X-ray for a couple of months. But that's not something that X-ray is responsible for.

For me, Artifactory was just a system that I needed to maintain, install, update, and back up.

HPE used JFrog for a lot of things, but my team was building OVAs for VMware. Once the build process was complete, we would upload it to JFrog. There was some other process that would pull it down from JFrog and copy it to AWS for customers to access it. However, I don't think the customers downloaded it from JFrog. They downloaded it from AWS, but it was essentially just a version control for binary bits—artifacts that we created from our build process.

It's an enterprise product that acts like an enterprise product. In other words, it's not a product where they focus on user experience. I wasn't an administrator, so I primarily worked with the command line tool to upload and download parts of the product. I was not impressed with that because it wasn't well documented. It was challenging to figure out how to get things to work.

I don't know what alternative they could have used. JFrog was there when I joined the company, and that's what I had to use. I could envision an easier way to do it. The command line interface needs better documentation. When there are error messages, it should tell you precisely what failed. 

They also need to provide better examples of how to do various things. They've got a lot of documentation, but it never seems to be the thing that you need when you're trying to figure something out. They document it, but they don't give good examples. Furthermore, the upload performance is awful.

Our primary use case is for storing the artifacts, dockery majors, or any kind of builds that are created as part of the CI process. Mainly the CI/CD pipelines are what we are using it for.

The most valuable feature I have found is the JFrog CLI. I think I am not so sure if my client has used the CLI with Nexus or if there are any CLI available with Nexus, but if I specifically talk about JFrog, I think that is a good thing. I can upload or download the files even without a CI/CD pipeline directly with the help of an access token or maybe with the authentication mode.