Software supply chains are complex and increasingly fragile. For enterprise teams, managing an ecosystem of open-source packages, container images, and AI/ML models is no longer just a storage problem, it is a delivery and governance challenge.
Cloudsmith processes petabytes of artifact data every month for global enterprises. To meet these demands, we didn't just move our platform to the cloud. We built a genuinely cloud-native platform from day zero, using AWS to ensure that every artifact is fast, available, and trustworthy.
Many legacy artifact management tools were designed for a different era. Cloud-hosted is different from cloud-native. Cloud-hosted solutions typically begin as on-premise software that vendors retrofit to run on cloud servers. This architecture doesn’t eliminate operational maintenance; it shifts it from managing physical hardware to managing patching, upgrading, and complex high-availability configurations.
Cloudsmith is different. By building natively on AWS, we provide a platform that abstracts away infrastructure headaches.
That elasticity matters beyond traditional binary packages, too. As AI/ML models become standard supply chain assets, the architecture has to handle their size (often measured in gigabytes) without a separate delivery strategy.
With AWS, Cloudsmith takes advantage of what the cloud makes possible: elastic compute, global reach, and the ability to serve large enterprise customers without the operational overhead of managing infrastructure.
The edge is where that global reach becomes tangible for our customers. These are the AWS services we use to deliver global performance and reliability.
Amazon CloudFront is the backbone of how we distribute artifacts. With over 600 points of presence worldwide, CloudFront allows us to serve packages from as close to the requester as possible. Whether a developer pulls a dependency from their local machine or an automated build system fetches a container image at 2am, an edge location near them serves the request. That proximity is what makes the performance difference our customers depend on.
CloudFront edge functions extend that further. Authentication and intelligent routing are not afterthoughts in Cloudsmith; they're core to how the platform works. Cloudsmith needs to authenticate and correctly route every incoming request before serving the artifact. CloudFront edge functions enable that logic to run at the edge itself, not at a central registry on the other side of the world. The processing happens where the request is. The result is that every millisecond we would otherwise spend routing back to origin is recovered at the edge, and across the volume of requests we handle – tens of millions per day – those milliseconds add up to faster and more reliable builds for customers.
AWS WAF protects the perimeter of the Cloudsmith platform. While the software supply chain is a high-value target for malicious actors, WAF allows us to block common web exploits and automated bots before they ever reach our API. By leveraging AWS Managed Rules, we ensure our defenses are updated in real-time against emerging threats. This allows us to maintain a high-availability environment where the platform remains performant and accessible only to legitimate users, ensuring the infrastructure behind your artifacts is as secure as the artifacts themselves.
Together, these three AWS services give Cloudsmith the global reach, edge processing capability, and security posture to serve enterprise customers at scale – reliably, and with the performance they need.
Catch the full conversation: VP of Engineering Ronan O'Dulaing sat down with AWS to discuss how Cloudsmith uses AWS to power its cloud-native artifact management platform.
Cloud providers offer their own basic artifact registries, but they focus on identity and access management rather than comprehensive supply chain governance.
Cloudsmith provides a unified control plane that goes beyond simple storage. Unlike basic registries or package managers embedded in developer platforms, Cloudsmith delivers:
AI has changed the requirements for artifact management. ML models are significantly larger than traditional software packages, often reaching multi-gigabyte sizes.
Our AWS-backed architecture allows us to adapt. We parallelize metadata fetching and artifact pulls to ensure reliable delivery of massive models. Because we leverage AWS's global reach, these large files still benefit from the same low-latency edge delivery as a standard Python package.
Reliability and performance are the baseline expectations for modern software delivery. By building a genuinely cloud-native platform on AWS, Cloudsmith ensures that your delivery pipelines are predictable, resilient, and secure.
You don't have to manage clusters, configure regions, or worry about manual replication. You simply get a fast, governed, and reliable software supply chain–globally, and at scale.
See how Cloudsmith handles your specific tech stack. Book a demo today.
