[hinkley]

There are tools for doing this, but it's a matter of cost and complexity to deal with them.

Artifactory seems to have a pretty big chunk of this vertical. It supports a few different repository protocols, so it serves as a bit of a one-stop shop that survives technology changes.

[908B64B197]

If you are fetching multiple GB of images over the network it kinda make sense.

[Someone]

Way more than “kinda”. If you have a continuous integration pipeline that checks out projects from scratch (as it should), every build fetches all dependencies, transitively.

Even ignoring download costs, a local cache (one of the functions of an artifactory) helps speed up those downloads and,with it, your builds. It probably also helps against getting blacklisted by code repositories.

An artifactory also automatically backs up any libraries you use. That protects against them disappearing from the internet.

[hinkley]

I think the first wave of artifactory customers was also populated by companies with limited network connectivity. It’s nuts to run a Rails or J2EE project if your company is using a pair of 1MB modems for all traffic, even if the dependencies are relatively small. Branch offices are similarly hamstrung. That was part of Perforce’s customer base as well, since they could run a local proxy for source code.

As you get into CI/CD you start to notice that your upstream repo is occasionally down, because it’s getting in the way of some deadline.