By Nick Roy, Director of Technology and Strategy, InCommon
InCommon’s brand new metadata service went live on Tuesday, July 9th. The production release candidate of the new metadata query service (MDQ) – also known as per-entity metadata – incorporates new features to save significant amounts of memory and start-up time for InCommon participants’ federating software.
Identity Providers and Service Providers no longer have to download and pre-load the entire federation metadata aggregate at system start up. The service is secure, scalable, highly reliable, and has demonstrated excellent performance.
Adoption requires switching to a new set of metadata URLs and keys used to verify metadata integrity. Complete details and instructions are in the documentation on the wiki. You can also view a recording of an InCommon Forum webinar about MDQ (and/or download the slides). For those not ready to make the switch, the current metadata aggregates will remain available.