Content and Metadata Federation Improves Performance and Security for Multisite Teams Using Git and P4D

Key Points:
•   New architecture enables global teams to access and manage revisions of shared content at LAN speed using Perforce, Git or both
•   Organisations can selectively promote content to different sites, reducing both bandwidth usage and wait times across WANs, while improving security
•   Multi-tier model enables offloading and processing from the master versioning service, enabling better throughput from existing hardware

WOKINGHAM, UK. (July 15, 2014) – Perforce Software today announced a new federated architecture for the company’s version management engine, P4D, significantly reducing workflow latency across the development pipeline. Remote services, or Edge services, allow organisations to deploy full-scale versioning services closer to distributed teams to provide LAN-speed access to their source code, art files, documents and other assets they version in Perforce.
Edge services are fully functional versioning engines that can process routine versioning commands without interacting with a master. To keep global development synchronised and efficient, code submits are still committed to the master, but all other commands are entirely local. By storing metadata and content in a local environment, the new technology reduces data transfer and bandwidth usage between remote sites or remote sites and a master, significantly speeding up developer workflows.
The new federation capabilities in P4D also enable seamless replication of Git masters across a WAN without any additional administrative effort or investments. Multisite Git teams operating behind a firewall can avoid the bottleneck of a central master and create a more reliable distributed environment.
The new architecture allows organisations to selectively limit content promoted to different sites. Remote teams do not have to manage data that they do not require. This reduces WAN usage across the organisation, shrinks hardware requirements for remote sites, and improves overall operational efficiency. Content filtering also enables an organisation to limit visibility into critical chunks of code, when security is a concern. This is particularly important to organisations leveraging third-party development or those collaborating with multiple partners.
Edge services can offload routine operations from the master versioning service. Continuous build, test and integration transactions can be spread across multiple Edge services, while the master can be focused on serving user commits. This division of workload enables large organisations to scale their development infrastructure with ease, while running the system on inexpensive hardware to further reduce infrastructure costs.
Tests have shown that a simple arrangement of a single master coupled with five Edge services on commodity hardware can serve more than 3.5 million continuous commits/day.
“Increased latency can greatly affect the productivity of distributed teams, hindering their ability to collaborate and innovate,” said Murtaza Amiji, director of product management at Perforce. “A multi-tiered architecture helps remove most versioning processes from the latency risks inherent in global networks, leading to quick and efficient workflows regardless of location.”
Edge services and the Parallel Sync simultaneous file-transfer feature, also announced today, are available immediately in the latest release of P4D.