At Cloudsmith we love playing video games, everything from Super Meat Boy to Halo, Fortnite to Candy Crush. We’ve got a big Pac Man money box sitting on the office shelf. Steve Collins, of Havok fame, is on our Board of Directors. Quite simply, gaming is in our DNA.
When we started Cloudsmith we made a list of customers we’d love to work with someday and there were numerous games studios on the list. It was a proud moment for the team when the first games company signed up to distribute its software globally. Since then more major studios have followed suit. It’s truly exciting to be a part of the deployment and delivery process for companies we really admire.
We pay homage to a few video game greats with our pop culture banners in our documentation; see Alpine, Go, Composer, and Terraform. Can you guess the games on which each is based?
Cloudsmith can solve many problems for games companies, but what is most unique about a games company is that they are the software companies that can make use of all three of our primary use cases:
Development
The beating heart of any games company is its Intellectual Property. Now, of course, this consists of game characters, themes, and franchises, but it also consists of a lot of proprietary code, libraries and packages, game engine components, and sound and graphic assets. Protecting this IP, while also granting globally distributed internal development teams easy access so that they can work with it is a major challenge. Cloudsmith private repositories allow a games company to centrally manage its software assets, provide secure access for development teams worldwide, and also deliver performant global availability.
Deployment
A games company requires a lot of infrastructure to operate effectively. Significant resources are required to facilitate both internal development teams and any customer-facing environments for matchmaking and multiplayer services. This may take the shape of on-prem servers or cloud-based environments, but building and managing this infrastructure is a complex task. Even when automated through tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and others, it still requires that these tools have a central source-of-truth for the packages and modules that they require. The universal package support offered by Cloudsmith means that it is easier for internal DevOps teams to manage these builds and deployments.
Distribution
Games companies often need distribution of software assets and packages for a few different use cases, like distribution of software assets to licensed customers or distribution of packages and libraries to 3rd party development partners. To do this, they require fine-grained control over access, and visibility into download activity and usage. Cloudsmith’s extremely flexible Entitlement Token system allows the creation of unique, read-only access tokens that grant access to specific packages or assets. These tokens can have multiple restrictions attached, such as limiting access to specific packages, for a specific timeframe, from specific locations, and even a maximum number of downloads or bandwidth use. Any read activity on the repository is attributed and associated with an Entitlement Token and therefore users can be precisely monitored and analyzed.
As an example, we’re solving two use-cases for one such customer:
- Supporting the management of Debian deployments to their IT infrastructure, including isolating public packages through our recently launched Upstream Proxy & Caching feature,
- Enabling the distribution of private core dependencies to their partners, which utilizes our Entitlement token system.
As we mentioned, we love playing video games, and being part of the deployment and delivery process for companies that create them is something we’ll be forever excited about. Whether it’s development, deployment, distribution, or the full trifecta, Cloudsmith is here to help support and solve many of the problems games companies face all in one platform.
Don’t just take our word for it though - start a free trial and check it out for yourself!
