Common Use Cases

This section outlines the primary and supporting use cases for Cloudsmith, detailing the benefits and key features for each:

• Artifact Management for the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
• Software Distribution
• Software Supply Chain Security
• Software Supply Chain Observability

Artifact Management for the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

At its core, Cloudsmith provides a centralized, single source of truth for all your software artifacts. This is fundamental to modern DevOps practices, enabling organizations to store, manage, and control the vast number of packages, containers, and other assets generated throughout the software development lifecycle. By having one place to manage all software assets, teams can streamline their workflows, improve collaboration, and gain crucial visibility over their development processes.

Benefits

• Universal Package Support: Manage all your different package formats in one place, reducing the complexity and toolchain sprawl associated with polyglot development environments.
• Centralized Control and Visibility: Gain a comprehensive overview of all your software assets, making it easier to manage dependencies, track versions, and understand what's in your software.
• Improved Developer Productivity: Developers can easily push and pull artifacts using familiar, native tooling without needing to learn a new set of commands. This reduces friction and speeds up development cycles.
• Reliable and Repeatable Builds: By managing all dependencies and artifacts in a central repository, you ensure that builds are consistent and repeatable, eliminating "works on my machine" issues.
• Scalability: Cloudsmith's cloud-native architecture is designed to scale with your organization's needs, from small teams to large enterprises, without the overhead of managing your own infrastructure.

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Software Distribution

For organizations that need to distribute their software to end-users and customers, Cloudsmith offers a robust and secure platform. It simplifies the complexities of software distribution at scale, ensuring that your customers can access the software they are entitled to quickly and reliably, anywhere in the world.

Benefits

• Global, High-Speed Delivery: Leverage Cloudsmith's global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ensure fast and reliable software distribution to your customers, regardless of their location.
• Secure and Controlled Access: Protect your intellectual property by managing who can download your software through entitlement tokens and fine-grained access controls.
• Simplified Customer Experience: Provide your customers with a seamless and straightforward way to download and install your software.
• Reduced Infrastructure Overhead: Offload the complexities of building and maintaining a global distribution infrastructure to Cloudsmith.
• Usage Insights: Understand how your software is being consumed with detailed analytics on downloads and bandwidth usage.

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Software Supply Chain Security

Ensuring the integrity and security of the software you build and use is paramount. Cloudsmith provides a suite of features designed to help you secure your software supply chain by identifying and mitigating risks from vulnerabilities and non-compliant licenses in your third-party and open-source dependencies.

Benefits

• Reduced Risk of Vulnerabilities: Proactively identify and block packages with known vulnerabilities from entering your software supply chain.
• License Compliance: Automatically scan for and identify the licenses of your dependencies, ensuring compliance with your organization's policies.
• Proactive Threat Mitigation: Quarantine suspicious or non-compliant packages for manual review before they can be used by developers.
• Improved Security Posture: Gain a comprehensive understanding of the security and license profile of all the artifacts in your repositories.
• Automated Policy Enforcement: Define and enforce security and license policies across your entire organization, ensuring consistency and reducing manual overhead.

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Software Supply Chain Observability

Regardless of your primary goal, having deep visibility into your software supply chain is crucial. Cloudsmith's observability features provide the insights you need to understand what's happening across your artifact management and distribution workflows. This allows you to monitor usage, troubleshoot issues, and make data-driven decisions.

Benefits

• Actionable Insights: Gain a clear understanding of how your artifacts are being used, who is accessing them, and where potential bottlenecks exist.
• Proactive Troubleshooting: Identify and diagnose issues quickly with detailed logs and event feeds.
• Informed Decision-Making: Use rich metadata and analytics to make better decisions about your software development and distribution strategies.
• Comprehensive Audit Trail: Maintain a complete record of all activities within your repositories for security and compliance purposes.
• Integration with Existing Tools: Feed observability data into your existing monitoring and analytics platforms for a unified view of your operations.

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