Multi-cloud and microservices are making us redefine the meaning of a "package." Modern applications span languages, operating systems, networks, and machines. To deploy a whole service, you need binaries, configuration files, environment variables, host metadata, and services must be connected and secured at runtime. For a developer, it becomes a best practice to save the entire runtime of a service as deployment configuration in version control. Deployment configurations, combined with powerful workload orchestrators, make it easy to guarantee reproducible runtime, but managing these configurations with version control and open-source dependencies starts to resemble package management. For system operators, ensuring that the computing clusters have relevant software packages installed for successful deployments can also be a challenge, as the application package landscape changes rapidly and manual provisioning slows development.

To make it easier for developers and operators to embrace DevOps, we built a package manager for deployments running on Nomad, a distributed workload orchestrator. This talk will cover a range of topics related to package management and DevOps workflows, including the best practices we learned while building a package manager to guide users on their journey to multi-cloud.