Amazon announced a new managed software artifact repository service called AWS CodeArtifact. It enables downloading and referencing pre-built libraries of software with a package manager.
CodeArtifact can be used with popular build tools and package managers such as Maven and Gradle (for Java), npm and yarn (for Javascript), and pip and twine (for Python), with more to come, according to AWS.
“Working with a multitude of artifact repositories can present some challenges to organizations that want to carefully control both versions of, and access to, the software dependencies of their applications,” Steve Roberts, a developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a post that contains additional details on the new release. “By using a centralized repository, it becomes easier for organizations to manage access control and version changes, and gives teams confidence that when updating package versions, the new versions have been approved for use by their IT leaders.”
Roberts explained that while larger organizations may use traditional artifact repository software to solve challenges, smaller organizations generally don’t have the resources to maintain it.
CodeArtifact automatically scales and requires no infrastructure installation or maintenance. Since it’s a polyglot artifact repository, it can store artifact, it can store artifact packages of any supported type side-by-side in one location, according to the company.
To publish packages into their repositories, or ingest packages from external repositories, teams can use the package manager tools that their developers are used to.
After giving the repository a name and optional description, CodeArtifact offers the option to connect the repository to several upstream repositories. When requests are made for packages not present in a repository, CodeArtifact will pull the respective packages from these upstream repositories, and cache them into the CodeArtifact repository.
AWS stated that AWS CloudFormation support for CodeArtifact is coming soon.
