The Dynamic Federations system allows to expose via HTTP and WebDAV a very fast dynamic namespace, built on the fly by merging and caching (in memory) metadata items taken from a number of (remote) endpoints.

Dynafed is developed to be performant, scalable and resilient with respect to sites that can go offline. HTTP and WebDAV clients can browse the Dynamic Federation as if it were a unique partially cached name space, which is able to redirect them to the right host when they ask for a file replica. Dynafed also supports writing.

Distributed data are presented as a unique repository.  

Dynafed natively supports HTTP, WebDAV, S3 and MS Azure endpoints. The preferred data management choice for Dynafed is to work with algorithmic, prefix-based file path translations across sites. This gives the best flexibility to the data management model, together with very quick user interaction and high performance. If needed, Dynafed can also contact an external service of file name/path translation.

Dynafed is a TRL8 service as regional federator, while its global federation capabilities are still at TRL6.

It will be used to implement the following functionality: