A key factor in good package management is organization. How you organize and structure your repositories will help you to unlock the efficiencies and promises of modern DevOps processes. There are, of course, a multitude of ways you can organize packages. You can group by version numbers, formats, architectures, filetype and more.
GitLab CI/CD is a tool that is built into GitLab. It allows you to create automated tasks that you can use to form a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery / Deployment process. You configure GitLab CI/CD by adding a yaml file (called `.gitlab-ci.yml`) to your source repository. This file creates a pipeline, which will then run when a code change is pushed to the repository. Pipelines are made up of a series of stages, and each stage can each contain a number of jobs or scripts.
Puppet is a Continuous Configuration Automation tool that’s you can use to automate the configuration of your entire infrastructure. You can use it to manage the configuration of anywhere from a few, to thousands of servers or devices. Puppet consists of two main components: The Puppet Server The Puppet server is where you create and store your configurations and define which nodes specific configurations will be applied to.
Ansible is an open source continuous configuration automation (CCA) tool. You can use it to automate the management of the configuration of host systems. For example: installing and configuring applications, services, security policies; or to perform a wide variety of other administration and configuration tasks.
What software assets does your organization use? What sounds like a simple question is anything but. If we include every package and dependency that ends up in the code we produce then for most development teams the truthful answer is ‘we don’t know’. As we’ve said enough times already, that really isn’t good enough anymore. And that’s one of the core motivations behind Cloudsmith.
At Cloudsmith, you will often hear us refer to our mantra of “Automate Everything”. It a quest that we never deviate from, and we believe that anything that can be automated, should be automated. With that in mind, we would like to show you how simple it is to integrate a Cloudsmith repository with your Buildkite pipeline, and automate the pushing of your build artifacts into your own private repository for further CI/CD steps or even as a source for your global distribution needs.
One reason for building a ‘single source of truth’ for software assets is that it gives the organization control over who can use what when. The ‘wild West’ of public repositories gives no control at all and can lead to a situation in which packages and dependencies of dubious provenance are integrated into builds without a second thought. Within the Cloudsmith world, we want to have the maximum security and control possible.
