AWS CodeArtifact: Great cloud repository manager
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
AWS Code Artifact is a cloud artifact repository. Our team uses it to store build artifacts/ share artifacts and use artifacts generated by different teams. Since it is a cloud based repository, it comes with added benefits. Like there are no setup costs involved. Amazon is responsible for managing the uptime/setup of the repository so there no additional infrastructural costs involved. Amazon also manages the security of the artifacts using IAM and AWS KMS
Pros
- Code Artifact is a cloud based artifact repository so there is no installation required.
- Code Artifact comes with out of the box security. Using RBAC and encryption
- Total cost of usage is less than setting up in-house servers
- It is accessible from any where.. so no additional network setup is required.
Cons
- CodeArtifact does not support packages like debian. It will be nice to see them support that.
- Does not provide security scanning of the packages
- Lacks support for third party CI/CD toolchain like Jenkins
Likelihood to Recommend
We have a small team with limited resources and it worked well for us. Hence I can conclude that AWS Code Artifact are well suited for organizations which have limited resources in terms of hardware and access to administrators for setting up artifact repository in-house. AWS Code Artifact is also suited particularly well for organization(s) which are already using AWS Services/Infrastructure (eg. EC2) . It works quite well with existing AWS services and completes the gap which existed in AWS offering for quite some time. Organizations can move their entire DevOps toolchain and infrastructure to Amazon. It is less appropriate for organization(s) which rely on artifacts like Debian, C/C++, Go etc as AWS does not support those fully.
