Artifactory: A Great DevOps Tool That Will Help You Release At The Speed Of Light

When it comes to DevOps, releasing fast is very important. Today, we will see how Artifactory is going to help companies release fast and efficient.

The explosion of binaries happened over time. Every company is a software company, with the ever-growing technology stack and advancements, binaries will also grow for various business needs. Hence, binaries are very important in the software development life cycle. It all started with the evolutionary software methodologies like Agile, CI/CD practice, DevOps approach along with Microservices and tools like Docker and Kubernetes where the build artifacts played a vital role for developers. Most of the time, the focus was, how the software is produced, and how it is handled way further in the development cycle.

What Is a Binary Repository Manager?

A collection of binary software artifacts and metadata stored in a way that can be used by clients, package managers, and CI servers to retrieve/store binaries during the development and build process.

Whether you’re an ambitious startup or a software giant, the same rules apply — release fast or die. Every company is looking for faster updates, faster features, faster security fixes, etc. — Easier said than done when you’re developing the world’s most complex code across a variety of languages, with teams and contractors scattered across the globe. That’s why companies we all rely on, like Verizon, Cisco, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter rely on JFrog Artifactory, the world’s first and only universal artifact repository.

But you don’t have to be Amazon or Google to understand that when development teams get larger and more dispersed, sharing libraries and third-party components can start to get messy. Without a universal repository, chaos is just waiting to happen. Everyone picks their own versions; they use artifacts from different sources, testing problems arise, and pretty soon, all hell breaks loose, slowing down your next release.

You might ask, is not version control system not enough for this? The answer is a big No.

You know why? The difference table below should help you self understand.

Why Artifactory?

JFrog Artifactory brings much-needed order by centralizing the way binaries are controlled, stored, and managed throughout your software release cycle. And because it’s universal, it’s easy to integrate fully with widely used build tools, coding languages, and technologies. Artifactory offers high availability and multi push replication and tags libraries with searchable metadata so you can extract powerful insights that increase product speed, security, and quality. And Artifactory now comes built-in with Mission Control, offering real-time centralized control of all your artifactory instances anywhere in the world.

Want to release even faster? Simply integrate Artifactory with JFrog Bintray, the world’s only universal distribution platform, and you can develop distribute and scale up faster than ever before in any language with full automation.

How Artifactory Works?

Let’s say that you’re building this brand new software application, and you want to use third-party libraries from the web. So now, you need to wait for them to download, and that takes time, lots of time. Now Jill, who’s sitting right next to you, needs the same libraries. So she’ll do the same thing, so she’ll wait and wait. Same goes for Jo, Ellen, Brian, Bob, Lisa, Juan, Debbie, — actually your entire development team.

The next day, Brian wants to share a library that he created that needs to be incorporated into your project, so we send it to you. And after you’re done, you forward it to Ellen, who forwards it to Bob, who sends it to Lisa, who passes it on to Juan, now your project grows, the team grows, and it becomes more complicated and cumbersome to share these libraries. That’s before you even start using an automatic build server.

So now you decide to use your version control system to store your libraries, which slows it down and blows it up. So as an alternative, you put your libraries on a shared file system. But can you really manage it? Can you track if someone added or deleted libraries from it?

Just when you think the project is finally a go, you find out that your build is broken and your project crashes. Now imagine you had a tool that allows you to proxy host and manage all libraries automatically. Cool, isn’t it? That is exactly what Artifactory does.

Instead of you searching the web, Artifactory will do it for you. It’ll also fetch the latest versions of the libraries, share them among your team members with security control, analyze the third-party open-source licenses, and even clean up unused libraries and outdated modules, and that’s not all. Artifactory will tag you libraries with searchable metadata, integrate with existing security infrastructure such as LDAP, and even let you create your own extensions.

Artifactory is a generic binary repository manager that perfectly integrates with your continuous integration environment with a simple UI that you can easily manage. You don’t want to run it locally? No problem. You can even have it in the cloud. There’s no wonder that our over 1 million users are already hooked.

Artifactory is everywhere  —  Banks and Finance, Telecom, High-tech, Academia, Government, Healthcare, Biomed, and more. So now, you can finally take control of your project, build it smarter and easier, save time and money, and create higher quality software. JFrog Artifactory. Once you leap forward, you won’t go back.

Know more in-depth about Artifactory here - 'Introduction to Artifactory'

Also published at https://dzone.com/articles/devops-release-fast-with-artifactory