VMware Professional Services writes custom code for hundreds of customers every year. After automating the CI/CD pipeline all the way to final customer delivery, we discovered we still had a big, manual step at the end of the delivery process. We would manually upload builds and documentation to an FTP server, create an account for the customer, and then try to assist them through the process of retrieving their builds. This process was slow, painful, and error-prone.
Our current automated solution is a cloud hosted Artifactory instance hosted by JFrog. Our automated process uses the Artifactory REST API to create a new repository and new user accounts for customers. One the repository exists, new builds can be published and retrieved by our customers, some of whom tie their own CI/CD pipelines to our output builds.
This represents cross-company automated CI/CD pipelines, which is an amazing solution that allows companies to collaborate with external contractors while still maintaining the security of their internal environments.
Perhaps the best part of it is the solution isn’t particularly complex or difficult to understand. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Artifactory and REST APIs can understand the techniques presented in this talk and adapt them for their own usage quite easily.
