# Component Lifecycle Best Practices

## Staging

### Use staging to separate your developer and production environments

- Clear endpoints for each stage in the pipeline
- Create a release candidate to test or discard before being promoted
- Avoid dependencies on non-production artifacts
- Promotion workflow is driven by CI
- Clean up fast based on artifact lifecycle
- Learn more at [Staging Concepts](https://help.sonatype.com/en/staging-concepts.html "Staging Concepts")

## Tagging

### Use tagging to attach metadata to your components

- Keep build metadata for release artifacts
- Include a link to the application scan report from Nexus Lifecycle
- Include a link to the software bill of materials (SBOM) with your builds

### Use short tag names and attributes to maximize the performance of tag-related operations and storage utilization

- Maintaining tags with attributes of maximum allowable size (20k) could result in poor performance

### Use the Admin - Cleanup tags task to clean up unused tags

- Remove aged or unused tags

### Use a standard naming scheme to avoid duplicating tags

- Prevent naming collisions and interruptions to CI pipeline workflows.