Artifactory and Nexus expensive enterprise artifact management

# Enterprise Artifact Management: The Hidden Tax on Engineering Teams Every month, engineering leads watch their artifact storage bills climb while their teams waste hours wrestling with Artifactory and Nexus—bloated, expensive systems that feel like they're actively fighting you. A software engineer forced into DevOps work captures the reality perfectly: "I keep getting pulled into DevOps no matter how hard I try to escape it," spending nights and weekends building workarounds because the "enterprise solutions" are too costly and complex to run smoothly. Teams resort to hacky workarounds—splitting artifacts across S3 buckets, manually pruning old builds, cobbling together shell scripts—but these band-aids create their own nightmare: inconsistent deployments, lost builds, security blind spots, and the creeping dread that production is one forgotten artifact away from chaos. The real cost isn't the license fee; it's the talented engineer pulled away from shipping features to babysit a system that should just work, and the company footing the bill for both the software and the human wreckage left behind.