Core Concepts

Distr is built around several key concepts that work together to enable flexible software distribution. Understanding these concepts will help you get the most out of the platform.

Distribution Models

Distr supports five distinct deployment models to meet different customer requirements:

Fully Self-Managed: For customers who maintain complete control over their infrastructure, the Distr Artifact Registry for artifact distribution is the main feature used.
Assisted Self-Managed: End customers retain full control over their environment access but delegate application deployment to Distr agents, which simplify initial installation, updates, and ongoing maintenance.
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): Fully vendor-managed deployments within customer-owned environments. Ideal for end customers who want to offload infrastructure and software maintenance to the vendor while keeping deployments within their own environment, for compliance, cost management, or use of pre-contracted cloud resources.
Air-Gapped Environments: For high-security scenarios with physical or logical network isolation, offering secure artifact delivery through whitelisted connections, jump servers or physical media.
Edge Deployments: For vendor-managed deployments to edge locations, IoT devices, or remote hardware.

Key Components

Vendor Portal

The Vendor Portal is the central UI for the Distr control plane. It’s where vendors manage customers, users, applications, and where you’ll find the Artifacts Registry UI. The portal includes monitoring and observability features, integrates with your CI/CD pipelines, and lets you customize the customer portal.

Customer Portal

The Customer Portal is a simplified, white-labeled UI built for end customers. It gives them control over deployments and access to the registry UI.

Distr Registry

Distr Registry is an OCI-compliant artifact registry that stores Docker images, Helm charts, and other OCI artifacts. It tracks artifact usage across customer environments and provides end customers with a private registry containing only the artifacts they’re licensed to use. Unlike other artifact registries, Distr’s includes a UI available in both the vendor and customer portals, making it easy to browse artifacts and inspect versions.

Distr Agents

Distr Agents are lightweight deployment agents that run in the customer’s target environment. They pull configurations from Distr’s control plane (Distr Hub), execute deployment operations locally, and report status back to the vendor and customer portal.

API and Extensibility

Distr provides programmatic access through:

REST API: For integration with external systems
SDK: For embedding Distr functionality in other applications

The API and SDK use the same underlying systems as the web interface, ensuring consistent behavior regardless of access method.