10 Awesome Benefits of Package / Artifact Management ... and why you need it.

Package / Artifact management's smallest unit of value is storage. Both logical and secure. But it is more than the sum of its parts and provides a solid foundation for building scalable, automated systems and accelerating your SDLC.

Here are ten awesome benefits that any good Package Management system/service will provide:

1. Control: Offer well-defined controls (RBAC) for getting packages in and out and controlling promotions, rollbacks, and deployments.
2. Visibility: Provide you with a world view to see the attributes (i.e., names, versions, types, metadata) across your packages.
3. Universality: Be able to "speak" the native protocol for several packaging technologies together (e.g., Python + Ruby + Maven/Java, etc.), as well as provide APIs for easy/agnostic manipulation.
4. Security: Be built to be secure by default without having to define and set it up (e.g., encrypted-in-transit, at-rest, GPG/RSA signing, sane perms, etc.)
5. Traceability: Provide metadata around the current and previous versions of packages (i.e., source of package, dependencies, environment state, etc.)
6. Auditing: Provide access logs, metrics/statistics, and accountability for uploads and downloads in the system (who/what/where).
7. Speed: Provide ultra-fast and worldwide package distribution as a standard feature, sometimes with "at edge" distribution.
8. Availability: Provide an additional layer in front of public services to ensure you can still get your packages when the public service is down.
9. Collaboration: Be collaborative, allowing you to synchronize workflow and process with colleagues, other teams, and outside collaborators.
10. Cost: Be cheaper than planning it, coding it, maintaining it, upgrading it, and worrying about it yourself so that you can concentrate on your product instead.

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