May 2022 Summaries

Cloudsmith was founded in 2016 with a mission to solve problems of scale and complexity for software organizations through Cloud-native Artifact Management, providing easy end-to-end visibility and control of assets, data, and dependencies from source to delivery. The company aimed to elevate the use of Artifact Management beyond its traditional meaning of "making a package" to a holistic process called Continuous Packaging (CP), which bridges the gap between CI/CD pipelines. To achieve this vision, Cloudsmith had to overcome significant challenges, including scaling the business, finding product/market fit, and optimizing pricing. The company has undergone multiple iterations of fundraising, product evolution, and pricing adjustments to align with its target market and mission. With a focus on delivering value to customers, Cloudsmith is now poised to continue growing and solving problems in the Software Supply Chain.

The changes to Cloudsmith's pricing plans aim to build a better product by enabling security at the core of the software supply chain, evolving the platform into an Artifact Management solution, and providing more value across all plans. The new pricing model increases costs for paid plans but moves significant features down or adds them to enable secure artifact management, scalable usage-based storage and bandwidth, and service accounts. Organizations can review their subscription page to see the vital differences between the updated plans, with some options offering increased free storage and bandwidth, removing hard limits, and introducing active user and token limitations that won't be enforced until October 2022. The changes are intended to facilitate organizational growth without moving up plans, delivering values at the proper levels for internal developers/deployers or external distributors. Cloudsmith supports open-source organizations and those on Legacy plans with customized quotes and offers volume-based discounts and Enterprise-tier support as add-ons.

Conda is a multi-platform open-source package management system that helps create, find, and install packages you need for Python and R programming languages or any other language. It is an environment manager that allows users to easily set up and switch between different versions of Python without affecting their usual environment. Conda packages are typically compressed tarball files or .conda files that contain system-level libraries, Python modules, executable programs, metadata, and more. These packages can be stored in channels, such as the default Anaconda repository, and users can install them using the conda install command. Conda is widely used by data scientists and developers working with large-scale data analysis and machine learning applications, offering a versatile package manager suitable for various uses, including isolation of environments to manage package version conflicts.

In 2022, most tech stacks are cloud-based, but many software packages remain on-premise or in-house. Ciara Carey's Conf42 Cloud-Native Keynote explores the benefits of being truly cloud-native, including why enterprises are making the move and a case study from the banking sector. The keynote also discusses how being cloud-native helped Cloudsmith succeed and provides guidance for getting started with setting up a pipeline within the cloud-native ecosystem.