📦 Artifact Management (Nexus / Artifactory) – Explained Simply

In modern DevOps, artifact management is as important as CI/CD.

Tools like Sonatype Nexus and JFrog Artifactory act as a central repository for build outputs.

🔹 What is an Artifact?

An artifact is a build output produced by CI:

• JAR / WAR files
• Docker images
• ZIP / TAR files
• Helm charts
• NPM / Maven / Python packages

➡ Once built, artifacts should be stored, versioned, and reused — not rebuilt every time.

🔹 What is Artifact Management?

Artifact Management is the practice of:

• Storing build artifacts centrally
• Versioning them (v1.0.0, v1.0.1…)
• Promoting them across environments (DEV → QA → PROD)
• Securing them with access control