Cloudsmith: Your Offsite DevOps Team

Cloudsmith can help reduce the amount of resources you need to devote to package management and DevOps, whilst delivering a better service to your teams than ever before.

Here’s how and why.

Package management is right at the heart of DevOps. Packages are both inputs and outputs in the DevOps process, and indeed many individual packages are both. Effectively, packages are the currency that engineers work in.

Based on that understanding, most DevOps organizations now understand that packages need to be ‘managed’. We don’t want to rely on the wild west of the public repository during development and build, and in most cases we don’t want to publish in public either. We need control:

• Control over which packages the organization uses
• Control over who has access to those packages
• Control over the availability and security of packages used

But the question then becomes: who, or what, should manage those packages? We believe that Cloudsmith is the right answer to that question. Here’s why.

If you decide to build and manage your own private repositories, that’s a lot of work. It isn’t just a repository, it is the enterprise features around control as outlined above, but more importantly again ensuring that repository is available to processes and engineers - wherever they are.

That requires extensive infrastructure and, inevitably, employees to manage it. Availability and scalability are non-trivial responsibilities. They cost money.

A second option is to buy a commercial package management solution and install it on-premises. This helps address the first issue but does little to nothing about the second. Your own team still has responsibility for storing packages, managing repositories, scaling to meet demand, and integrating with other DevOps processes.

When it comes to supporting distributed teams, it doesn’t help at all.

In other words, both approaches mean extensive internal resources committed to storing, controlling and distributing software packages. Resources and focus that distracts from the core competence of the organization.

Cloudsmith: Part Of Your Team

There is a third alternative: an offsite team dedicated to package management. That’s us.

Cloudsmith doesn’t just provide private repositories. We manage them. We’re a cloud-native package management service, and with that comes certain advantages:

• Set-up is fast and easy. It takes minutes, rather than weeks. You don’t have to install anything, and you can be sharing packages via private repositories in minutes.
• We handle availability, scalability, and lots of other things ending in ‘ility’. You don’t have to think about this, or put resources behind it - because our global delivery infrastructure is already optimized to ensure these things just happen.
• For team members and processes anywhere in the world (or in the cloud), access to packages, and integration into builds, is fast. You don’t have to spend time and effort replicating repositories in multiple locations: we have that covered.

But there’s more to it again. Cloudsmith isn’t just about great product. We are truly a part of your team: on hand when you need us to ensure package management and DevOps is running smoothly.

We don’t have a customer success or support team because we do things differently. Our engineering team work directly with customers, so you get access to the people building the product and determining the roadmap. No other organization on the planet has a better understanding of package management, and we are at your service.

In fact customers on our Ultra tier share dedicated Slack channels, for real-time management of the service. It’s like we’re in the building (except we are probably more responsive).

Effectively we provided a managed service: helping deliver smarter package management, accelerated DevOps, and all with less requirement for internal staff and resources within your organization.

If an offsite DevOps team sounds like something you’d be interested in, drop us a line or sign up. You’ll be up and running in minutes.

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