Scarf Gateway is a service that provides a central access point to your containers and packages, no matter where you host them. It sits in front of your current registry or download host and seamlessly redirects your download traffic to it, empowering you with valuable usage data that your current provider is not sharing. Scarf delivers better observability into how your software is used, putting your project’s distribution and data back in your control.
Whether you distribute containers, scripts, packages or binaries, Scarf Gateway sits in front of whatever you're currently using. It provides a stable download URL that redirects to any registry or host you'd like. Connect your own custom URL, and you’re never locked into a particular host provider, or even to Scarf itself, ever again. You gain access to valuable data insights provided by Scarf, and your users gain a more reliable dependency that is never impacted by registry migrations.
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The Scarf Gateway is the missing admin dashboard for our container hosting, making it easy to understand how quickly new versions of Linkerd are being adopted and which components are being deployed—data that the container registries have and don't share with us otherwise. It's awesome that Scarf can get this information into the hands of project maintainers without compromising the privacy of our users.
-Oliver Gould, Co-Founder & CTO Buoyant
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“Vectorized has been using Scarf to understand how Redpanda is being adopted, and most importantly, how to prioritize engineering efforts for the product. Turns out the world loves Redpanda + Kubernetes more than we thought!”
-Alexander Gallego CEO, Founder, Vectorized
“It’s important for us to understand who is using [our OSS web framework] IHP. Before using Scarf we’ve mostly relied on the data set of existing customers. . . . It only took us a couple of minutes to integrate the Scarf Gateway. With Scarf, we now understand much more about the new users starting their journey into IHP. . . . Now we’re regularly using the numbers in our marketing meeting."
-Marc Sholten Founder, digitally induced
First, create an account on Scarf, if you haven’t already done so. Once you’ve registered, you’ll be prompted to create a new package. If you’re already using Scarf, you’ll be able to click “New Package” in the navigation bar. Scarf gateway currently supports two package types: Docker, and Files.
Hosting packages on your custom domain via Scarf has no impact on your existing users; your domain adds a new path for users to download your package. You can encourage end-users to switch their pull commands over to your new domain, but they can continue pulling directly from your registry provider with no negative impact.
Should you decide to switch registries later on, current users will have to update their pull commands to either your custom domain or to the new registry URL. If they go straight to the registry, they would need to update every time you decide to switch registries. If they use your custom domain, they will never need to update it again.
Generally, no. Your package continues to be hosted on your current registry. Scarf Gateway is simply a thin layer on top. Since the gateway acts as a static entry point to your containers, you will always have the freedom to host your container on any registry you choose.
For enterprise customers, Scarf Gateway can cache your artifacts to improve global performance and even keep your artifacts online in the event of an outage from your origin hosting provider. Contact sales@scarf.sh to learn more.
No. The Scarf Gateway does not store any personally identifiable information.
Scarf looks up IP address metadata, but the raw IP addresses are discarded and never exposed. IP metadata may contain:
• Coarse-grained location
• Company information, cloud providers, etc.
Additionally, Scarf sees metadata about the client and artifacts being downloaded such as:
• Container tags/versions
• Client container runtime information
• Basic device/OS information
We’d love your input to help us prioritize support for additional package types. Java, Python, and others are planned.
Scarf Gateway is free to use! To gain access to additional features like our developer API, raw data export, integrations, availability & support SLA's contact our sales team.
Scarf Gateway is managed by the Scarf team. We plan an open-source release of the Gateway for self-hosting when it's out of beta and into general availability.
Real news and infrequent announcements about what we’re up to at Scarf: product releases, tool updates, open betas, job opportunities, and more.
