The PEER software and the REEP service were developed to provide a single point of registry for SAML entities. In most current identity federations, the federation runs its own registry locally and expects each entity to be able to prepare and deposit entity metadata with that registry. For some entities this is challenging, particularly where the entity is a member of multiple federations and is then required to maintain and keep up-to-date information on each of those entities in multiple places. The MET tool can be used to highlight this. The entity https://met.refeds.org/met/entity/http%253A%252F%252Fshibboleth.ebscohost.com/ is in 24 different federations and the metadata maintained at each is different.
PEER Software
The PEER software is intended to provide a lightweight registry service that relies on domain validation only to assess whether a service can register any given entity. The software is available for general use and can be "skinned" for different service appearance. The software is currently available on Github and is maintained by Emergya under contract with REFEDS. Documentation on how to use the service is available.
REEP Service
The REEP Service is an instance of PEER managed by REFEDS for use by the REFEDS community as a testbed for the concept of using an external registry for federations. It runs under the current lightweight policy.