The Rise of Continuous Packaging

Chapter 1. DevOps and the Cloud Native Supply Chain

Cloud native technologies and techniques make it possible to build and host horizontally scalable applications across environments, including public, private, and hybrid clouds. This capability provides greater flexibility in deployment than traditional on-premises software, enabling companies to grow organically with less friction. The key is cloud native architecture.

Unlike traditional monolithic application codebases, modern cloud native software development builds applications as collections of microservices, often managed by a service mesh. The microservices are usually hosted in containers orchestrated with a tool such as Kubernetes. This approach modularizes development, allowing multiple contributors and teams to continuously integrate, deliver, and deploy changes concurrently using a DevOps-based software supply chain.

The Importance of Package Management

A package is a logical grouping of files containing software along with metadata about the software and its dependencies. Package management is the process of handling the dependencies that go into building your software, the end products you build, and other artifacts, tools, assets, and datasets involved in the pipeline. Regardless of the architecture of your software development pipeline, package management is important. Package management involves finding and managing all necessary dependencies, checking them for vulnerabilities, removing packages that are no ...