By submitting this form, you agree to our 

Edmund, had been promoted to Chief Executive of Elf, Inc. in February, a mere 10 months ago. It had at the time been a great honor, but had almost instantly become a farce. Not only did toy production stop for a number of months, it was now looking like all the toys would remain in storage until such time, Father Christmas would be allowed to deliver them. And who knew when that might be.

The phone rang. Edmund picked up and stoically spoke, “Hallo.”

It was a crazy plan. The elves were to stop all toy production immediately. That was unheard of. Every available toy-making elf had to re-train overnight in software development and related disciplines. That, at least, was possible, elves are extremely adaptable and pick up new information like sponges, and there was a small, but efficient development team that had been building the software for the many electronic toys over the years.

The plan was to build a digital parcel, a package of goodies, for every child who had the means to consume it. Where appropriate it would include video games, e-books, movies, tv boxsets, music, comics, digital trading cards, software, and various digital assets like avatar upgrades and gift cards.

Edmund was horrified at the sheer amount of work involved, this late in the day. He spent hours on a spreadsheet trying to figure out how to achieve this massive undertaking. No matter how often he did the sums, there was no way to build all the packages and the delivery method. They would have to use a third-party to distribute.

He searched for “package distribution” and a few suitable options showed up. After a quick read of each of the offerings feature sets, one stood out, one with enough global infrastructure and scalability to handle such a large distribution all at once.

“This just might work,” he muttered to himself.

Alan Carson

Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer

Elf Storage and Distribution

The Cloudsmith family is something you have likely seen across our content and communications for years. While many brands make that, well, part of their “branding”, for us, it’s genuinely how we feel about our staff, customers, partners, investors, and everyone we meet along the way. In all cheesiness and truth, we believe the Cloudsmith family is real.

While we’re not based in America and, at the moment, only have one American on staff, Thanksgiving is just as meaningful to us as it is to you. And even though we can’t sit around the table this year to share exactly what we’re thankful for, I wanted to share a message of gratitude on our behalf.

You’re a crazy bunch but we love every single one of you. We love being able to help you succeed with DevOps and pipeline building. And it kills us when we fall short with a missing feature or have to type in those fateful words “It’s on the roadmap.” It is. Thank you for choosing us and believing.

We could not be more excited about building upon our partnerships with CircleCI, HashiCorp, Buildkite, and Cloudposse to name a few. Together we’ve built out some super exciting insights and events for the end of 2020 and early 2021 and for that we thank you. If 2020 is anything to go by, 2021 will be a whole other level of awesome. And for that, we’re grateful for these new relationships we built this year. Watch this space.

And last, but not least, our incredible team…

This holiday season, my thoughts turn gratefully to our employees, advisors, and investors who have made our success possible. Working at Cloudsmith isn’t always easy but I am impressed each and every day with your resilience, resolve, and resourcefulness. Thank you. The donuts are in the mail.

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a wild ride for us all but (a vaccinated) 2021 is going to be EPIC!

Alan

PS: Whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving or not, here’s a little song to add to your playlist during this very special (yet bizarre) holiday season:

Giving Thanks on Thanksgiving

Universal Package Tags

A walkthrough of universal Package Tags - tag any package or container within Cloudsmith. Use them to search/filter and organize your software assets.

Dan McKinney

Solutions Engineer

We’re a little late to the party. Fashionably late.

By now the world knows that DockerHub has removed the free, untraceable goodness of anonymous pulls. How dare they? How dare they build a revolutionary technology, open-source it and give it away for free at a substantial cost to themselves. It’s worth calculating what a couple of petabytes of CloudFront bandwidth would cost, even with a substantial discount. It’s mind-blowing. And frankly unsustainable for any company that doesn’t have a multitude of revenue streams.

Why have public when you can have private?

 at the request of a customer about two years ago. At the time, we thought it was unlikely that we’d be picked over AWS ECR (other Cloud provider container registries are available) but we were pleasantly surprised to find that a single pane of glass for all assets is a huge draw for our customers.

We’ve built Cloudsmith to normalize, where possible, the diverse list of formats as much as possible; so that Docker images can sit beside the very dependencies they contain.

The truth is, untraceable, anonymous access is bad for software delivery. It really should be a thing of the past. Organizations must build security into their processes and workflows at the far left, with tools like Snyk, and at the point of deployment or distribution with tools like Cloudsmith.

We believe that building up a provenance trail is vital to monitor and control your risk.

The move from DockerHub, while it might cost you money, is actually a step in the right direction for everyone. Control over public upstreams is vital, and this move shines a light on the problem, and will, for many, force action toward a better, more secure, way of doing things.

DockerHub vs Cloudsmith Private Docker Registry

Entitlement Tokens

A walkthrough of Entitlement Tokens; how to create, restrict, and permission with the use of tokens using a Maven example.

Our distinguished competition took a puzzling position of “Imagine there’s no versions”.

At Cloudsmith we think that’s crazy. Software versions are what makes software development possible. They make deployment possible. They make distribution possible. How else can you understand and navigate complex dependency trees or be sure your code will interact with a third party’s? Hint - you can’t!

You must care about versions. And updates. It’s the only way to know you are on the latest build; the one with the security fixes and new features. But it’s not about the end-user. It’s about you. How else can you label or tag the push of a new build that’s been verified?

Not a single one of our customers has ever asked us how to architect, build, and deploy versionless software.

The revolution against versions hasn’t begun - and never will. Versions are here to stay. There is an explosion in the amount of open-source software that all software relies upon, and the only way to manage the chaos is with versioning.

 containers are filled with versioned software. You need to know what’s in each and every layer.

Now more than ever, engineers, like you, and like us, need better tools to track, manage, and understand all software pulled into your stack. Cloudsmith was built to tackle this problem, providing a single source of truth across every format you use; providing isolation from public upstreams, and allowing you to interrogate the provenance of any package with insight into security and licensing. These are vital for everyone going forward.

But more than that, there are three key reasons why versions are so important:

More bluntly - “Knowing what is where”. The dependency tree for any piece of modern software can be vast. You need proper visibility on what packages, libraries and components make up this tree because without it you really are running blind, in more ways than one. Without versions, you don’t have this visibility, and you’re missing the details of the “what”.

Once you know “What is where” you need to explore “When did something change?”. You should be able to trace back when a particular package or library was updated, modified or even rolled back. Without versions, you can’t do any of this - it’s like a financial audit without figures: it’s lacking the very detail that it requires to be effective.

And finally, you need to know “Will this actually work?” You can see what you have, you know when things changed, and now you can determine if the sum of these will, in effect, “make” or “break”. Without versions, you can’t tell. You can’t plan, implement or react effectively. You’re adrift in a sea of unknowns. Breaking changes are real, we have all seen them. This is one of the most important reasons why versions matter.

While we admire the sentiment of imagining a world with no software versions; it’s just not realistic. We fundamentally believe in the opposite; and will continue to build a platform that gives you a more profound understanding of versions; not one that muddies the very clarity you need to develop better, faster, more maintainable products.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Versioning

Provisioning Cloudsmith with the Terraform Provider

A quick demonstration of how to use the Cloudsmith Terraform Provider to provision a private repository and some entitlement tokens.

Getting Started with LuaRocks and Cloudsmith

A short demo of how to get started with LuaRocks modules and Cloudsmith, including uploading a LuaRocks module to a private Cloudsmith repository and then downloading and installing it.

https://help.cloudsmith.io/docs/luarocks-repository

At Cloudsmith we love playing video games, everything from Super Meat Boy to Halo, Fortnite to Candy Crush. We’ve got a big Pac Man money box sitting on the office shelf. Steve Collins, of Havok fame, is on our Board of Directors. Quite simply, gaming is in our DNA.

When we started Cloudsmith we made a list of customers we’d love to work with someday and there were numerous games studios on the list. It was a proud moment for the team when the first games company signed up to distribute its software globally. Since then more major studios have followed suit. It’s truly exciting to be a part of the deployment and delivery process for companies we really admire.

We pay homage to a few video game greats with our pop culture banners in our documentation; see 

. Can you guess the games on which each is based?

Cloudsmith can solve many problems for games companies, but what is most unique about a games company is that they are the software companies that can make use of all three of our primary use cases:

The beating heart of any games company is its Intellectual Property. Now, of course, this consists of game characters, themes, and franchises, but it also consists of a lot of proprietary code, libraries and packages, game engine components, and sound and graphic assets. Protecting this IP, while also granting globally distributed internal development teams easy access so that they can work with it is a major challenge. Cloudsmith private repositories allow a games company to centrally manage its software assets, provide secure access for development teams worldwide, and also deliver performant global availability.

A games company requires a lot of infrastructure to operate effectively. Significant resources are required to facilitate both internal development teams and any customer-facing environments for matchmaking and multiplayer services. This may take the shape of on-prem servers or cloud-based environments, but building and managing this infrastructure is a complex task. Even when automated through tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and others, it still requires that these tools have a central source-of-truth for the packages and modules that they require. The universal package support offered by Cloudsmith means that it is easier for internal DevOps teams to manage these builds and deployments.

Games companies often need distribution of software assets and packages for a few different use cases, like distribution of software assets to licensed customers or distribution of packages and libraries to 3rd party development partners. To do this, they require fine-grained control over access, and visibility into download activity and usage. Cloudsmith’s extremely flexible Entitlement Token system allows the creation of unique, read-only access tokens that grant access to specific packages or assets. These tokens can have multiple restrictions attached, such as limiting access to specific packages, for a specific timeframe, from specific locations, and even a maximum number of downloads or bandwidth use. Any read activity on the repository is attributed and associated with an Entitlement Token and therefore users can be precisely monitored and analyzed.

As an example, we’re solving two use-cases for one such customer:

Supporting the management of Debian deployments to their IT infrastructure, including isolating public packages through our recently launched Upstream Proxy & Caching feature,

Enabling the distribution of private core dependencies to their partners, which utilizes our Entitlement token system.

As we mentioned, we love playing video games, and being part of the deployment and delivery process for companies that create them is something we’ll be forever excited about. Whether it’s 

, or the full trifecta, Cloudsmith is here to help support and solve many of the problems games companies face all in one platform.

Don’t just take our word for it though - 

Games are in our DNA

Getting Started with Maven and Cloudsmith

A short demo of how to get started with Maven packages and Cloudsmith, including deploying a Maven package to Cloudsmith and then downloading it as a dependency.

https://help.cloudsmith.io/docs/cran-repository

The following is a true story. It doesn’t have a happy ending.

Horrors lurk beneath the trap door, for there is always something down there, in the dark, waiting to come out...

The Thing Upstairs glares across the conference table, already knowing the horrible truth, “What license does it have?”

Berk confidently replies, “GPL version 3.”

Berk is an experienced software developer at a well-known consultancy firm, TrapDoor Inc. He’s worked his way up the ranks, paid his dues, and has been given his first solo project.

A customer has asked TrapDoor Inc. to architect and build a software tool. The problem specification is well-defined, but the solution design, architecture, and implementation details can all be decided by Berk.

The high-level design gets approved, and Berk gets to work. The agreement with the customer is to release often and early as they too are a software consultancy and can run tests internally and externally on their customers’ sites.

After about five weeks of development, the first alpha is released.

A week after that, the third iteration is released to much fanfare. Good, steady progress is being made.

Only then does The Thing Upstairs stir and decide to code review Berk’s solution. The findings are shocking. Berk’s solution relies heavily on an open-source project with a copyleft GPL v3.0 license.

Copyleft is the practice of granting the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works created from that property.

Berk has spent seven weeks writing logic that is attached to the original license, not fit for commercial handover, and now likely being run illegally on customer sites, without the proper license or attribution.

Worst of all, the original source code for the dependency was copied into a TrapDoor Inc. repository and modified with Berk having explicitly deleted the license file.

Little could be done without a page-one, clean-room rewrite, using a dependency with a more permissive license. But we’ll never know. This story doesn’t have a happy ending. Trust was lost. The six-figure project was canceled. The customer refused to pay.

All because Berk didn’t think licensing was important.

DevOps Horror Stories: Software License to Kill

In keeping with our vision of offering a universal feature set across all the package formats we support, we are delighted to announce that we are now offering configurable upstream proxying and caching support for 

As we touched upon when announcing the same for Debian and 

 packages, there are a lot of reasons why this is a really 

, so instead of going over those again, let’s jump straight into how you can set this up in you Cloudsmith repository.

We don’t think that we could have made this much easier to configure (but, of course, we would love to hear 

In your Cloudsmith repository, you’ll see a menu item called “Upstream Proxying”. This is where we will configure our upstreams. Simply click the “Create Upstreams” button and select “RedHat” to create a new RedHat upstream:

You will then see the “Create RedHat Upstream” form:

You just need to add a Name for the upstream, the upstream URL, and a priority weighting – If you have multiple upstreams this will determine the order in which they are used.

We can choose to fetch and cache any requested package (instead of just fetching them), and to verify the SSL certificates provided by the upstream. Then, we select the individual distribution for this upstream.

Optionally - we can also add a GPG key, if required, for package signing, authentication headers for private repositories that require authentication and also some arbitrary headers if you wish to send something custom along with your request.

And that’s it, we have now added a new Redhat upstream to our Cloudsmith repository.

So now, the next request for a package that isn’t present in this repository will be passed through to the upstream and the package fetched it if it is available there. If you also enabled “fetch and cache”, the package will be cached in your Cloudsmith repo for any future requests.

By adding Redhat upstream proxying and caching, we are moving forwards towards our goal of being the most universal package management solution for your development, deployment and distribution workflows. We would love you to join us on this journey, and we are very excited about the platform we have built, the service that we provide, and where we are going to next. Sign up for free today, and experience Cloudsmith for yourself!

Cloudsmith Blog