What Is Package Management?

Package management is the process of handling the many and varied dependencies and artifacts for your servers, applications, and developers. These are the archives, binaries, libraries, tools, scripts, modules, snippets, metadata, assets and even datasets that power your processes, products, and solutions.

A binary package manager centralises these dependencies and artifacts, acting as a glue layer within the DevOps toolchain to provide easier interaction between development, operations, build, and release.

Package management reduces the friction between different functions within DevOps, and the process of delivering from developer to customer is accelerated.

What is Cloudsmith?

A single source of truth for your software assets. All your packages, in any format, are in one location and accessible across the organization. Cloudsmith is package management the way it should be done, supporting modern DevOps practices and accelerating software delivery pipelines.

Our mission is to provide package management that leverages the cloud's best capabilities and specifically build it around customers that want better software dependencies, better software distribution, and better automation of their DevOps pipelines and platforms. We believe that modern infrastructure and applications require modern tooling and that package management is the quintessential modern tool for DevOps.

Control

Cloudsmith provides well-defined controls (such as Role-Based Access Controls) for getting packages in and out, as well as controlling promotions, rollbacks, and deployments; so you can lock down who can do what, where, and when.

Visibility

Cloudsmith provides you with a world view to see the attributes (i.e. names, versions, types, metadata) and state of play across all of your packages, regardless of type/source; so you can see and discover all there is know about the packages you use.

Universality

Cloudsmith "speaks" the native protocol for a large number of packaging technologies (e.g. Python + Ruby + Maven/Java, etc.), as well provide APIs for easy/agnostic manipulation; so you have immediate compatibility with all of your tools.

Security

Cloudsmith is built to be secure by default without having to define and set it up (e.g. encrypted-in-transit, at-rest, automated GPG/RSA signing, sane permissions, etc.); so you can shift security to the left and incorporate it as early as possible.

Provenance

Cloudsmith provides traceability for current and previous versions of packages (i.e. source of package, dependencies, environment state, etc.); so you can know and prove the origin of the software that you use.

Auditability

Cloudsmith provides you with access logs, metrics/statistics, and accountability for uploads and downloads in the system; so that you can ensure the right people are accessing the right things in the right way.

Speed

Cloudsmith provides ultra-fast and worldwide distribution for packages as a standard feature with "at edge" distribution; so that you can get your packages to where they need to go at high-velocity.

Isolation

Cloudsmith provides an additional layer in front of public services to ensure you can still get your packages when the public service is down; so you can remain up and working when they're down.

Collaboration

Cloudsmith allows you to synchronize workflow and process with colleagues, other teams, and outside collaborators; so you can build community and collaboration with colleagues.

Total Cost of Ownership

Cloudsmith is cheaper than planning it, coding it, maintaining it, upgrading it, and worrying about it, yourself; so you can concentrate on building and deploying your awesome products instead.