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

If you’re building software at scale, you’re likely overlooking a critical issue: your teams are drowning in a sea of packages from internal libraries open-source dependencies, Docker images and one-off scripts. They’re scattered across cloud buckets, CI pipelines, GitHub releases, and developer laptops, with no clear view of what’s used, what’s safe, or what’s duplicated. This silent chaos undermines security and wastes developer time on redundant work, and only gets worse as you scale. 

The answer is to support your development with centralized package management; a platform-level capability that brings visibility, governance, and efficiency to your software supply chain. When done right, it enables safe reuse, enforces compliance, reduces risk, and makes modern, decentralized development sustainable.  

In this article, I’ll explain why centralizing package management is now urgent and what a proper solution looks like. We’ll also talk about which approaches to avoid, and how teams can start bringing order to chaos without slowing down innovation. 

The Software Industry: Embracing Decentralization but Causing Chaos 

Over the past decade, the software industry has been shifting away from tightly coupled monolithic architectures to a decentralized approach. This is typically characterized by: 

🚀 Polyrepos and Microservices: These have been increasingly adopted to modularize applications and services, promoting agility and scalability. It allows teams to develop, deploy, and update components independently, with minimal coordination across teams. 

🚀 Open-Source Software (OSS) and Mixed Tech Stacks: Widespread adoption of these has democratized development practices. Teams now pull in a variety of libraries, languages, and platforms, tailoring their stacks to fit project needs. This has allowed teams to leverage a wide array of tools and frameworks, choosing the most suitable ones for their needs. 

🚀 A Growing Variety of Tools, Registries, and Build Systems: The proliferation of tools, registries (like Docker registries), and build systems (such as CI/CD pipelines) has offered teams more flexibility in managing their development and deployment workflows. Teams can move fast, but often in different directions. 

The shift towards decentralization has fostered flexibility and innovation within software development teams by allowing for better iteration, tool selection, and scaling of projects. However, at the enterprise level, decentralized practices also introduce several challenges: 

📛 Redundant Work Across Teams: Without centralized coordination, teams may duplicate efforts, leading to inefficiencies and wasted resources. Multiple teams write nearly identical deployment scripts, copying and tweaking GitHub Actions workflows across repos, or building separate dashboards and alerts that don’t align. Over time, this duplication creates maintenance burdens and operational inconsistencies. 

📛 Inconsistent Standards: The lack of unified guidelines can result in disparate implementations across projects, increasing system fragility and maintenance complexity. Configuration files may define the same environment variables in different ways; naming conventions diverge; monitoring and alerting setups become siloed. These mismatches slow teams down and make debugging more difficult. 

📛 Security Gaps and Compliance Risks: Decentralized development can create vulnerabilities, as security and compliance vary between teams or projects. Inconsistencies mean it’s harder to apply patches or enforce controls, especially when no one knows exactly what’s running where. 

📛 Package Drift and Version Sprawl: The diverse use of tools and frameworks can lead to inconsistencies in package versions and dependencies, complicating dependency management and compatibility. Drift doesn’t just affect code. It affects infra tooling, CI setups, and practices. It can evolve into fragmentation that slows onboarding and makes system behavior unpredictable. 

📛 Excessive Docker Images and Ad-Hoc Workflows: The proliferation of Docker images and customized workflows without centralized oversight can lead to a fragmented infrastructure landscape. This hinders scalability and maintainability, resulting in security concerns and operational risks. This could range from failed deployments to downtime caused by misaligned configurations or missing updates. 

As organizations expand, the uncoordinated sprawl typical in decentralized architectures can turn potential innovation into operational chaos. Managing duplication, enforcing alignment, and controlling drift are critical to reap the benefits of decentralization while avoiding its associated risks. This is why, at a certain scale, decentralization alone stops working. To regain control, teams must introduce central coordination.

Centralization is the Natural Response to Chaos 

When decentralization starts to create friction at scale, organizations react with centralized coordination to make it sustainable and repeatable. Their goal is mainly to introduce structure that enables decentralized teams to succeed without stepping on each other’s toes. Here are a few common examples: 

• GitHub: A centralized hub for coordinating globally distributed, decentralized open-source development. It brings version control, collaboration, and governance under one roof, allowing various contributors to work together without sacrificing autonomy. 

• App Stores like the Apple App Store and Google Play allow anyone to build and publish mobile applications. But they also enforce centralized policies around quality, security, and user experience. This makes sure there’s a consistent baseline for users and a level playing field for developers. 

• Kubernetes, GitLab, CI/CD platforms, and issue trackers all play a similar role. They centralize specific aspects of the development lifecycle like deployment, testing, and task tracking without demanding a return to monolithic infrastructure or development practices. 

The key point here is that centralization doesn’t mean reverting back to monoliths or adding more hoops to jump through. It’s about introducing governance, standards, and visibility in a way that supports and scales decentralized innovation. It allows teams to move fast without breaking everything. But while areas like CI/CD and infrastructure have seen meaningful centralization, one piece still lags behind: package management. 

The Final Boss: Package Management 

Despite major strides in areas like infrastructure, deployment, and developer experience, package management remains one of the last ungoverned frontiers in many organizations. This is a critical layer of the software supply chain that often gets overlooked: 

📛 It’s rarely treated as part of the core platform, unlike CI/CD pipelines or Infrastructure as Code. While other parts of the development lifecycle have become standardized and integrated into platform engineering efforts, package management is often left out of the equation. 

📛 CI systems are often misused as makeshift artifact storage, leading to Docker image sprawl and fragmented workflows. A common confusion is between build artifacts and the OSS packages they contain. Even if artifacts are stored in CI, actual packages are usually still pulled from OSS repositories during builds. This means they remain unmanaged and outside organizational control. 

📛 Package managers (like NuGet or npm) “just work”… until they don’t. It’s important to distinguish between the package manager (the tool) and the package repository (where packages are hosted). Package managers are the default, but without a CMPR, organizations lack visibility and control. This is especially problematic when version conflicts, outages, or breaking changes occur. 

📛 Internal reuse is often treated as optional and ad hoc. Without policies in place, teams try to reinvent the wheel. They duplicate code, introduce inconsistencies, and create hidden security and maintenance burdens. 

A decade ago, teams could power through. But today’s complex, interconnected supply chains make unmanaged package sprawl a serious liability. With OSS adoption rising, deepening dependencies, and growing compliance demands, centralizing package management is no longer optional—it’s urgent.

Why Centralizing Package Management Is Now Urgent 

The stakes for package management have never been higher. Open‑source software (OSS) usage has exploded, rising from around 30% of codebases in 2005 to over 96% in 2023. The average application contains over 500 OSS components, and over 90% of codebases include outdated or vulnerable components. Most modern applications rely on third‑party packages. This means a single compromised or outdated dependency can ripple across the entire software stack and impact everything from application uptime to security posture and regulatory compliance: 

• Dependencies are growing more complex. Applications today include hundreds to thousands of transitive dependencies. Many of these are several layers removed from direct control of the development team. Research suggests that the average JavaScript project contains 42 direct dependencies and 683 transitive dependencies.  

• Compliance pressures are intensifying due to the rise of Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) requirements. Following the 2021 U.S. Executive Order on Cybersecurity, agencies and enterprises alike expect full transparency into what’s inside the software they use. This includes all direct and transitive dependencies. 

• Enterprise-scale reuse is starting to break down. Fragmented tools, inconsistent practices, and lack of visibility make it hard for teams to find, trust, or reuse internal packages. Instead, they resort to duplicating code or relying on public registries with little oversight. 

Without some level of centralization, organizations are flying blind. They lack the visibility and control required to: 

• Trace what’s in their software: From OSS components to internally built packages, understanding what’s been pulled in and where it came from is essential for both security and compliance. 
• Enforce consistent security policies: Without governance, teams may use outdated, vulnerable, or unvetted packages without realizing the risk they’re introducing. 
• Apply licensing rules or approval workflows: Legal and compliance teams need guardrails to ensure that only approved licenses and vetted packages are used in production. 
• Promote effective reuse across teams: Without shared standards, searchable registries, and trusted internal packages, reuse becomes very challenging. This forces teams to start from scratch again and again. 

Package sprawl is no longer just an operational nuisance—it’s a strategic risk. Recognizing the urgency is step one; the next is understanding what real centralization takes, and why quick fixes fall short. 

What Real Centralized Package Management Looks Like 

Centralization isn’t just a case of dumping packages into an S3 bucket or Azure Blob Storage and calling it “centralized”. This may check a box, but it doesn’t solve the real problems. Teams still may not know what’s available, what’s safe to use, or which version is the latest or approved. Without structure, governance, and visibility, this kind of storage quickly turns into a digital junk drawer: insecure, disorganized, and unscalable. 

True centralization in package management needs a purpose-built, universal package manager. This will be designed not just to store artifacts, but to govern them. The goal is to bring order to complexity, enabling teams to move fast and stay compliant. A modern, enterprise-grade solution should offer: 

✅ Proxying and caching of OSS packages to ensure security, reliability, and performance, even when upstream registries are unavailable or compromised. 

✅ Universal format support, allowing teams to store and manage a wide range of assets: language-specific packages, Docker images, build artifacts, scripts, CLI tools, infrastructure templates, and more. 

✅ Organized feeds segmented by package type, environment (dev/test/prod), or origin (external vs. internal), to bring clarity and control to reuse and promotion workflows. 

✅ Hybrid infrastructure and high-availability clusters, so package delivery is fast, resilient, and accessible across regions and environments. 

✅ Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and promotion workflows, enabling secure delegation, quality gates, and structured approval pipelines for moving packages between environments. 

✅ Global replication and load balancing to ensure distributed teams can access what they need without latency, wherever they are. 

✅ Full traceability for internal packages, including infrastructure tools, shared libraries, and custom CLIs—so you always know what’s in use, where, and by whom. 

Centralized package management demands more than simple storage. It requires governance, visibility, and control. While a universal package manager lays the foundation, without the right approach, centralization can backfire. Understanding common pitfalls helps avoid these unintended consequences.

Anti-Patterns: What Not to Do 

Now that we’ve covered what centralization should be, it’s important to be clear about what it isn’t. Many common approaches create a false sense of control but break down under real-world conditions. Especially when it comes to governance, traceability, auditability, and scale: 

❌ Cloud Buckets (e.g., S3, Azure Blob Storage): While convenient for raw file storage, cloud object storage is not purpose-built for packages: 

• Lack of native awareness of package structure, metadata, or formats means files become opaque and unmanageable, making it difficult for developers to find, verify, or trust artifacts. 
• Without built-in support for versioning, dependency resolution, or immutability, teams face increased risk of using incorrect or incompatible package versions, leading to build failures and runtime errors. 
• No indexing, search, access control, or policy enforcement results in uncontrolled sprawl, exposing organizations to security vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, and significant operational overhead. 

In practice, it becomes a dumping ground: opaque, unstructured, and operationally expensive. Files are unsearchable, untracked, and unmanaged—slowing developer velocity, increasing security workload, and introducing serious compliance blind spots. 

❌ Raw OSS Repositories (e.g., NuGet.Server, BaGet, Verdaccio, Gem in a Box): Lightweight and useful for prototyping, but they fragment quickly in larger organizations: 

• Teams deploying isolated, ad hoc instances with no federation or discovery, causing duplication of effort and lack of shared knowledge. 
• No centralized visibility, auditing, or policy enforcement, making it impossible to maintain consistent security standards or enforce license compliance. 
• Difficulty coordinating security reviews and dependency policies across scattered instances, increasing organizational risk and operational complexity. 

They solve local needs but introduce organizational drift, leading to duplicated effort, inconsistent standards, and systemic risk. 

❌ CI/CD Systems or GitHub Releases: CI pipelines and GitHub releases are designed to ship code, not to manage long-lived artifacts: 

• Artifacts often lack retention policies and immutability, so they can be accidentally deleted or overwritten, leading to broken builds, lost work, and unpredictable failures. What’s more, when build artifacts are used, they typically include raw open-source packages pulled directly from external sources, which means there’s still no centralized control over OSS package management. 
• There is no reliable versioning, making it difficult to audit changes, roll back to previous versions, or ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements. 
• Dependency relationships are not tracked, causing incompatible updates and hidden risks that increase downtime and operational disruptions. 

These setups may feel productive early on, but over time they degrade into brittle, inauditable systems that frustrate developers, increase operational risk, and leave businesses exposed to downtime and compliance violations. 

Without clear controls, centralization can create more problems than it solves. Real value comes when centralization is paired with practical governance, bringing order, security, and clarity to package management. 

The Next Step: Pair Centralization With Governance 

Of course, centralization alone isn’t enough. To truly unlock its value, it must be paired with practical, enforceable governance. Governance often gets a bad reputation, creating images of bureaucratic bottlenecks and slow-moving approval chains. But in a modern software supply chain, governance doesn’t mean red tape. It means control and much-needed package governance, including: 

💡 Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Ensure that only the right people can publish, promote, or consume packages, reducing the risk of accidental or malicious changes. 

💡 Promotion Workflows and Naming Conventions: Clearly define how packages move from development to production, and use consistent naming to distinguish environments, components, and stability levels. 

💡 License and Vulnerability Policies: Automatically enforce which OSS licenses are acceptable, and block packages that contain known security issues—before they reach production. 

💡 Review and Approval Processes: Introduce human oversight where needed, whether for sensitive packages, third-party components, or shared internal tools. 

A package manager like ProGet supports these out of the box. It helps organizations to bring structure, safety, and visibility, without slowing teams down.

Decentralized by Design, Governed by Necessity 

Software development is more decentralized than ever, but to succeed at scale it must be intentionally coordinated. Modern practices like microservices, polyrepos, open-source reuse, DevOps, and platform engineering all rely on shared standards, discoverability, and security to work across teams without descending into chaos. 

Yet package management remains one of the last ungoverned layers of the software supply chain. Too often, it’s treated as an afterthought. It’s fragmented, unmanaged, and vulnerable. With centralized package management using a package manager like ProGet, organizations can turn this overlooked weak spot into a foundation for resilience, velocity, and scale.

We covered a lot today, so make sure to save this page for future reference! Even better, check out our upcoming package management guide “Package Management at Scale.” It’s packed with info, including everything on this page, and detailed looks at the pillars of centralization, package distribution, and curation, as well as a rubric by which you can evaluate your team’s maturity. Download your free copy today!

Not sure where to start? Our experts can help. Book a free 15-minute guided assessment to get personalized insight into your package management practices, and clear next steps for reducing risk.