This article is part of our series on NuGet at Scale, also available as a chapter in our free, downloadable eBook

Using NuGet in your development starts out easy, a few projects, a small team, grabbing packages from NuGet.org. But as your org grows, things slowly get messy. More teams, more repos, more tools, all adding to the chaos. Before you know it, you’re dealing with version conflicts, missing packages, and no one really knows who’s in charge of licenses or security. The problem isn’t NuGet itself, it’s the lack of structure around it. And honestly, most teams don’t realize it’s a problem until everything starts breaking. 

It comes down to a lack of governance. Tossing in another CLI, script, or policy won’t fix it if everyone’s making random decisions that don’t scale. New projects keep adding tools and dependencies, and suddenly managing NuGet feels like a total guessing game with no clear owner. The real fix? Take a centralized, opinionated approach. Curated feeds for internal and external packages, automated approvals, security and license checks, and consistent rules. All built in from the start and made to scale. 

In this article, we’re diving into why NuGet tends to fall apart as things scale. We’ll look at the sneaky problems that even “best practices” don’t catch and what it really takes to get things under control. From handling transitive dependencies to sketchy licenses, we’ll show how a solid, central package strategy can give you way more than control. 

What Does “At Scale” Mean and Why is it Challenging? 

As teams and apps grow, NuGet gets harder. Not because anyone’s doing anything wrong, but because growth introduces hidden complexity that traditional tooling can’t handle. 

🔥 Too Many Projects → Too Many Tools: When you’ve got tons of projects, it’s easy for the same package to show up in all kinds of versions. Plus, every new project brings its own tools, scripts, and random conventions. That version sprawl turns into a compatibility mess and makes updates way harder. 

🔥 Too Many People → Too Little Visibility: The more devs and teams you have, the easier it is for random packages to slip in. Without a central way to track things, no one really knows what’s being used, where it’s from, or if it’s even safe. Governance becomes a total guessing game. 

🔥 Too Many Updates → Too Little Control: New package versions are constantly dropping. When developers install packages ad hoc, especially via CLI, it bypasses any shared standards.  Even a small update can break builds or introduce vulnerabilities. 

🔥 Security & Compliance → Invisible Risk: Security teams often don’t have great visibility into what packages are being used, or where. That makes it tough to manage risk, enforce license policies, or build a clean SBOM when you need one. 

🔥 Environment Issues → No Guarantees: Just because a package works in dev doesn’t mean it’ll behave the same in staging or production. Without tight control, these inconsistencies lead to bugs that are hard to trace. 

🔥 Pipeline Problems → Fragile by Default: Relying on NuGet.org for every restore creates a single point of failure. If it’s slow or down, your builds are blocked. And when every pipeline is configured differently, diagnosing issues gets even harder. 

This isn’t edge-case stuff, it’s what scaling actually looks like. But it’s not just about the number of packages. It’s the sprawl of tools, behaviors, and assumptions that multiplies the risk: 

• Who’s using which package? 
• In which project? 
• At what version? 
• Under what license? 
• With what upstream dependencies? 
• And when do those need to change? 

If you’re still trying to manage all this with tribal knowledge or scattered tools, it’s already way out of hand. You need something built to handle the complexity, not hide it behind even more tools.

Why NuGet Gets Especially Tricky at Scale 

We’ve talked about how things get messy as you scale—but the thing is, NuGet was built for simplicity, not scale. It works fine for one team, but once you add more people, projects, and processes, stuff starts breaking in sneaky (and frustrating) ways. You might not notice it on a small team or a single app, but once your org grows? That’s when the real problems begin. 

Transitive Dependencies Sneak In: NuGet automatically resolves transitive dependencies. That’s convenient, until one of those indirect packages introduces a vulnerability, license conflict, or breaks your build. And since no one explicitly adds them, they often bypass reviews and policy checks altogether. 

• 💡 Solution: Use packages.lock.json to lock down exact versions so you know exactly what’s being used. 
• ⛔ But at scale: You now have hundreds of lockfiles across dozens of repos. A single policy or package update requires coordinating updates across all of them. Keeping them aligned becomes its own full-time job. 

Inconsistent Restore Behavior Across Projects: Different project types (.NET Framework, .NET Core, SDK-style projects) restore dependencies differently. That inconsistency causes hard-to-debug issues across environments. 

• 💡 Solution: Standardize on SDK-style projects and isolate restore steps in CI/CD pipelines. 
• ⛔ But at scale: That might work for one team, but alignment across CI pipelines becomes political, not just technical. 

Too Many Ways to Manage Versions: NuGet supports packages.config, PackageReference, global.json, and Directory.Packages.props. In large orgs, teams often mix and match. NuGet gives teams options, maybe too many. And when every team picks a different pattern, consistency becomes impossible. 

• 💡 Solution: Use PackageReference + Directory.Packages.props for centralized version management. 
• ⛔ But at scale: Migrating legacy projects takes time. And enforcing consistency across hundreds of repos? That requires tooling, documentation, and cultural alignment. 

Unlisted Packages Still Get Restored: NuGet.org doesn’t delete packages, it unlists them. If your builds rely on a specific version that later gets unlisted, your CI may break without warning. 

• 💡 Solution: Cache packages in a private NuGet feed. 
• ⛔ But at scale: Some teams stash packages in siloed repos or ad-hoc folders. That’s brittle and non-reproducible. Without a central feed, you can’t guarantee stability. 

Missing or Incomplete License Metadata: Many NuGet packages don’t include reliable license data. That makes audits a nightmare and opens you to legal risk. 

• 💡 Solution: Automate license scanning with tools like ProGet, and block packages with unacceptable licenses (like GPL). 
• ⛔ But at scale: Relying on manual review or leaving it to developers doesn’t scale. You need policy enforcement and automation built into your approval workflow. 

Vulnerability Scanning Doesn’t Tell the Full Story: Running dotnet list package --vulnerable is a good start, but it often lacks context. You get a list of issues but no prioritization or remediation guidance. 

• 💡 Solution: Integrate vulnerability scanning into a centralized repository like ProGet, where packages are scanned and classified automatically. 
• ⛔ But at scale: Without a central hub, the same vulnerability might appear in five different feeds, or go unpatched in forgotten projects. You need visibility and enforcement. 

NuGet.org Isn’t Always Reliable: NuGet.org is a shared public resource. Outages, throttling, or rate limits can bring your CI/CD pipelines to a halt, especially when multiple builds are happening simultaneously. 

• 💡 Solution: Cache your dependencies in a local repository. 
• ⛔ But at scale: If every team is caching their own packages separately, you miss out on de-duplication, visibility, and policy enforcement. You need a central caching proxy. 

Publishing Internal Packages Is Messy: Internal NuGet packages often lack versioning standards, changelogs, or clear promotion processes. Teams publish directly to shared feeds or drop packages into folders. 

• 💡 Solution: Treat internal packages like products. Add metadata, automate builds and promotion. 
• ⛔ But at scale: Without a structured promotion pipeline (e.g., Dev → Test → Prod), internal packages become just another source of chaos and unreproducible builds. 

Debugging NuGet Packages Is Frustrating: Packages rarely include debugging symbols. That makes it nearly impossible to step into third-party or internal code when debugging issues. 

• 💡 Solution: Use .snupkg symbol packages and include source files during packaging. 
• ⛔ But at scale: Developers don’t consistently generate symbols. You need an enforced, automated publishing workflow, backed by a central repository that stores binaries and symbols. 

Keeping NuGet in Control at Scale 

You can’t fix these problems by just adding more tools or scripts. What you really need is a shift in how you manage packages. Think of how your organization moved from ad hoc CI scripts to standardized pipelines with GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps. That change wasn’t just about automation, it gave you control and visibility. The same approach applies to NuGet: a centralized repo that’s more than storage, with built-in governance and automation to make package management actually work at scale. 

✅ Central Package Feed: Use a private repository like ProGet to act as the single source of truth. Proxy NuGet.org, cache what you need, and prevent direct internet restores in production. 

✅ Approval Workflow: Automatically block unvetted packages from being restored in CI builds, deployed to production, or accessed by developers. Let developers request packages, but require security/license review before promotion into the “approved” feed. 

✅ Promotion Pipelines: Move packages through environments just like you do with application builds. This ensures consistency and reproducibility across your lifecycle. 

✅ Security and License Controls: Automate scanning for known vulnerabilities and enforce license policies (e.g., block GPL, allow MIT). Catch issues before they reach production. Treat Internal Packages Like Products. Automate versioning, changelogs, and publication with CI tools like BuildMaster. Store both binaries and symbols to improve debugging and traceability. 

✅ Make Everything Visible: Generate SBOMs, show who’s using which packages, and give your dev and security teams dashboards to track usage, risk, and compliance. 

NuGet at Scale, Without the Pain 

As your organization scales, NuGet isn’t a problem, it just wasn’t built for the scale and complexity modern teams deal with. Without structure, every team makes it work a different way—and that’s what breaks things. When every team does things a little differently, and packages flow freely with no oversight, it’s only a matter of time before you hit broken builds, mystery bugs, or a surprise audit that no one’s ready for. 

You don’t need more effort. You need a foundation. With ProGet as your centralized package repository, you get consistency, visibility, and control across your entire org. Fast builds, fewer surprises, and a NuGet setup that actually scales with your organization. 

Don’t let this article slip away, save it for future reference! It’s a chapter in our eBook, “NuGet at Scale”. By downloading the eBook, you’ll not only have this valuable information at your fingertips but also gain more insight on versioning, CI/CD pipelines, and more! Download your free copy today!