Artifact management and versioning

Artifact management plays a pivotal role in a DevOps environment. The artifact-management solution provides a single source of truth for all things deployable. In addition to that, it provides a way for the automation system to shrink-wrap a build or potential release candidate and ensure it doesn't get tampered with after the initial build. In many ways, an artifact-management system is to binaries what source control is to source code.

In the software industry, there are many options for artifact management. Some of these are free to use and others require the purchase of a specific tool. Some of the more popular options include:

• Artifactory (http://www.jfrog.com)
• Nexus (https://www.sonatype.com/)
• Apache Archiva (https://archiva.apache.org/index.cgi)
• NuGet (https://www.nuget.org/)

Now that we have a basic understanding of artifact management, let's take a look at how an artifact repository fits into the general workflow of a DevOps-oriented environment. A diagram depicting this solution's place within a DevOps-oriented environment is provided next: