Most modern software today has moved aggressively into using third-party open source dependencies to reduce duplication and accelerate development by using pre-existing code.

Developers are building and deploying to production with greater frequency. Elite organizations are deploying to production multiple times per day. All the while we continue to distribute our applications even wider with the adoption of micro-services, and global deployments. This consistent churn and increasing code complexity create the perfect storm that makes finding problems even harder. How do you know the changes just committed actually deployed? How do you know the changes worked?

Long release cycles are no longer viable in the world of software development. The promise of DevOps has been to materially shrink time to value. Like most meaningful transitions, this one hasn’t always been a simple flip of a switch. For many organizations, development teams have become complex and unwieldy. So, the custodians of DevOps have found it difficult to achieve broader adoption of DevOps principles across engineering teams.

In the annual roadmap keynote of our SwampUP 2020 conference, JFrog CTO and co-founder Yoav Landman, CPO Dror Bereznitsky and VP of Engineering Avi Cavale delivered a landmark message: If you’re not focused on binaries and distributing them to the edge, you’re risking the future of your business. Under the theme DevOps, Fast Forward, JFrog’s annual user conference showcased how the impact of the global pandemic has accelerated companies’ digital transformation plans.

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.

DevOps teams rely on Artifactory as the bread and butter tool of universal binary repo managers, but observing its operations can be challenging. With multiple high availability nodes and unification with Xray as the JFrog DevOps Platform, that operations data is spread out across logs for each service in the JFrog Platform deployment. Operations teams need a view into valuable data insights that can only be gained through real time data mining and observation of the platform.

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.

If you’re looking to deploy your services to Kubernetes, Helm works great. However, once you start deploying to multiple environments, developing code as a team, or automating in a CI/CD pipeline, you start to run into limitations with Helm. Codefresh Pipelines using Helmfile has the power and flexibility to address these issues and many others. It’s also one of the best ways to organize your Helm code and values.

Operations teams need to automate deployment of applications, and Helm is the industry-standard solution for deploying to Kubernetes. Like many software vendors, we provide Helm charts for installing Artifactory and other JFrog DevOps platform products, designed for the standard/recommended configurations most teams will need. These templates provide customers a limited set of configuration options.

Your team is practicing DevOps and you’re delivering some flavor of Continuous Delivery. You’re deploying anywhere from three times a week to twenty times a day. You are moving fast! At that speed, how do you know if you are moving things in the right direction? Hopefully, your team has defined some key SLIs that define your application’s health.