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Podcast.__init__

The Pulp Artifact Repository with Bihan Zhang and Austin Macdonald

Summary

Hosting your own artifact repositories can have a huge impact on the reliability of your production systems. It reduces your reliance on the availability of external services during deployments and ensures that you have access to a consistent set of dependencies with known versions. Many repositories only support one type of package, thereby requiring multiple systems to be maintained, but Pulp is a platform that handles multiple content types and is easily extendable to manage everything you need for running your applications. In this episode maintainers Bihan Zhang and Austin Macdonald explain how the Pulp project works, the exciting new changes coming in version 3, and how you can get it set up to use for your deployments today.

Preface

  • Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
  • When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 200Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
  • To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons.
  • Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email hosts@podcastinit.com)
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
  • Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Austin Macdonald and Bihan Zhang about Pulp, a platform for hosting and managing software package repositories

Interview

  • Introductions
  • How did you get introduced to Python?
  • What is Pulp and how did the project get started?
  • What are the use cases/benefits for hosting your own artifact repository?
  • What is the high level architecture of the platform?
    • Pulp 3 appears to be a fairly substantial change in architecture and design. What will be involved in migrating an existing installation to the new version when it is released?
  • What is involved in adding support for a new type of artifact/package?
  • How does Pulp compare to other artifact repositories?
  • What are the major pieces of work that are required before releasing Pulp 3?
  • What have been some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging aspects of building and maintaining Pulp?
  • What are your plans for the future of Pulp?

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The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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