By consolidating fragmented tools into a unified repository, Thrivent secured a scalable partner for its CI/CD workflows that provides proactive support and transparent costs.
Profile
Fortune 500 financial services company
900+ developers
2.4 million clients
Industry
Financial services
Cloudsmith Solution
Migrated to a fully managed, cloud-native artifact platform
Implemented high-concurrency pipelines
Consolidated fragmented tools into a unified repository with multi-format support and edge-enabled distribution
Results
49M+ monthly downloads
Fully-managed infrastructure
Predictable pricing
Company description
Thrivent is a Fortune 500 financial services company with over 7,000 employees and financial advisors serving 2.4 million clients in the U.S. Their development teams build critical internal and customer-facing applications across a monorepo of over 200 applications and libraries, using Python, Java, TypeScript, and Helm. With high expectations for security, reliability, and speed, Thrivent needed a scalable, modern artifact management solution that could support both their current and future development needs.
Cloudsmith just works - whether it’s failover, automation, or support. It’s the first platform we’ve used that feels like a true partner in how we build and operate software.
Michael Boldischar
Software Engineering Manager, Thrivent
The challenge
Fragmented artifact ecosystem created reliability and security risk
Thrivent relied on a single, on-premise artifact server provided by their previous vendor, hosted in their data center, to manage its artifacts. Workflows across a large monorepo containing over 200 applications and libraries meant that when this on-premise artifact server became unavailable, their ability to build or deploy critical customer-facing applications encountered frequent bottlenecks. An unreliable legacy server led to slow build times, making it difficult to maintain development velocity and reliability.
Legacy infrastructure couldn’t handle scale or concurrency
Even after updating their existing platform, Thrivent’s engineering teams continued to face technical limitations. A single legacy server inconsistently delivered packages to geographically distributed teams, further impacting build reliability. Being unable to split repositories, combined with outdated tooling, made it challenging to scale development pipelines or implement consistent CI/CD practices. High-volume artifact operations caused repeated bottlenecks, and a lack of automation around artifact retention or cleanup, left teams to manage storage and package organization manually.
The biggest operational win from moving to a fully managed platform was removing the burden of self-hosting and gaining far better control over artifact lifecycle and retention.
Mike Nigl
Senior Platform Engineer, Thrivent
The solution
Fully-managed and scalable platform
Thrivent’s teams no longer needed to maintain databases, optimize edge nodes, or manage complex on-premise infrastructure. Cloudsmith’s high-concurrency architecture eliminated the bottlenecks that previously slowed Thrivent’s pipelines. Builds that previously stalled due to database constraints now run consistently at scale, even during peak CI/CD demand. Teams now scale repositories dynamically, support 900+ developers, and handle hundreds of millions of package downloads annually. All this occurs while maintaining low-latency access across critical business applications.
Our previous system was unreliable and required daily restarts. It's substantially nicer not to have to maintain that. Disaster recovery exercises are also much simpler now - we don’t have to manage the infrastructure ourselves anymore.
Engineering Productivity Team, Thrivent
Cloudsmith is also central to Thrivent’s business continuity strategy. Built-in resilience and failover “just work,” providing confidence that artifact access remains available even during disruption. These improvements to Thrivent’s artifact management environment freed engineers to focus on delivering features instead of firefighting infrastructure constraints.
Cloudsmith changed how we think about resilience. Business Continuity Plan failover just works. There’s no drama, no manual intervention - when something happens, the platform keeps moving and our teams keep shipping.
Michael Boldischar
Software Engineering Manager, Thrivent
Streamlined CI/CD workflows and automation
Integration with GitHub Actions and Terraform allows Thrivent to seamlessly integrate with their CI/CD pipelines, create and automate developer golden paths while enforcing policies, and authenticate using short-lived ephemeral tokens.
In theory, other platforms might support ‘as-code’ workflows. In practice, we only made them real once we moved to Cloudsmith. That’s when it actually started working for us - at scale, in production, and without friction.
Michael Boldischar
Software Engineering Manager, Thrivent
Structured repositories organized by application, team, and environment reduce dependency conflicts and bottlenecks, while fine-grained access controls ensure that developers have the right permissions without manual oversight. Observability dashboards and logging provide insights into build performance and policy enforcement, helping teams detect issues early and maintain continuous delivery velocity.
Multi-format, organized artifact management
By consolidating artifact sprawl in their previous legacy solution, into structured, multi-format repositories, a feature unavailable with other artifact management platforms, Thrivent simplified artifact management across Python, Java, TypesScript, and Helm. Retention policies controlled storage usage, while caching and edge distribution reduce build times and accelerate artifact delivery. With Cloudsmith, developers focus on building value rather than troubleshooting dependency conflicts or managing complex storage and retrieval workflows, which improves development velocity and reduces operational errors.
Using the same interface across npm, Docker, Python, and other package types has lowered the learning curve and improved collaboration.
Mike Nigl
Senior Platform Engineer, Thrivent
Transparent costs and proactive support
With Cloudsmith’s predictable pricing and no hidden fees, Thrivent eliminated uncertainty around data transfer and storage costs. Compared with their previous vendor, where support responsiveness and cost transparency created friction, Cloudsmith provides proactive, engineer-led guidance.
Support has been excellent. We raised an issue to add Node 24 support to the Cloudsmith CLI, and the update was released within a couple of days.
Mike Nigl
Senior Platform Engineer, Thrivent
Thrivent describes Cloudsmith support as best-in-industry - offering unlimited access to engineers through live support sessions. Now, developers resolve issues rapidly and continue delivering production-critical applications without waiting on external support. This minimizes downtime and reduces operational overhead.
Cloudsmith support is probably best-in-industry. We don’t get everything we ask for immediately - but no other company would give us unlimited time with engineers to help us solve real problems. That level of partnership is rare.
Michael Boldischar
Software Engineering Manager, Thrivent
Results
Faster, more reliable software delivery
Thrivent deploys artifacts at enterprise scale with consistently high uptime, thanks to high-concurrency pipelines, structured repositories, and edge caching capabilities in Cloudsmith. Since implementing Cloudsmith, artifact-management-related incidents have decreased by 62%. Streamlined CI/CD workflows lead to faster builds, predictable, and auditable production deployments. Cloudsmith allows Thrivent teams to focus on delivering business value rather than troubleshooting infrastructure.
Switching to Cloudsmith gave us a centralized platform with far better discoverability than our previous fragmented tools.
Mike Nigl
Senior Platform Engineer, Thrivent
Reduced operational and infrastructure overhead
The cloud-native platform removed the burden of managing databases, edge nodes, and monolithic repositories. Thrivent significantly reduced infrastructure costs and the time developers spent maintaining legacy systems. At the same time, Cloudsmith enables Thrivent’s engineering teams to scale in lock-step with growing package volume and application complexity.
We’ve eliminated the operational overhead of self-hosting and now have much better control over artifact lifecycles and retention.
Mike Nigl
Senior Platform Engineer, Thrivent
Scalable, future-ready artifact management
Structured, multi-format repositories and edge-enabled distribution ensure Thrivent can support growing development teams, increasing artifact volumes, and future expansion. Developers experience consistent, low-latency access to artifacts, while the Cloudsmith platform maintains high availability and governance, enabling Thrivent to innovate confidently at scale with 49 million monthly downloads and industry leading uptime.
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