What is our primary use case?
We are using the Nexus Repository Manager Pro as exactly that, as an artifact repository. We tend to store any artifact that our application teams build in the repository solution. We also use it for artifacts that we pull down from open-source libraries that we use and dependencies that come from Maven Central. We use it to proxy a few places, including JCenter. We also use it as a private Docker registry, so we have our Docker images there as well.
We're on version 3.19. We also have Nexus IQ server, which wraps up within it Nexus Firewall.
How has it helped my organization?
We have a lot of legacy applications here and they're all built with Ant scripts and their dependencies come from a shared folder. There's not a lot of "accountability" there. What we get out of using Nexus is that all of our dependencies are in the same place and we can specify a specific version. We no longer have a situation where somebody has pulled down a .jar file and stuck it in this folder and we don't know what the version is or where, exactly, it came from. That's one of the benefits.
Another of the main things we get is what Sonatype calls a "bill of materials." We can go into our Nexus product and say, "Okay, here is our ABC application. What are its dependencies?" And we can be specific down to the version. We know what's in it and, if a vulnerability gets reported, we can look and see if we use that particular component and in which applications, to know if we're vulnerable. If we find we're exposed to that vulnerability we know we need to go and remediate it.
The biggest benefit we get out of it is the overall ease of development. The ability to automate a lot of the build-and-deploy process comes from that.
The data quality helps us solve problems faster, as in the security vulnerability example I just mentioned. In those circumstances, we have to solve that problem. Previously, we wouldn't have seen that vulnerability without a painstaking process. Part of the Nexus product, the IQ Server, will continually scan our components and if a new CVE is reported, we get that update through Nexus IQ. It automatically tells us, "Hey, in this open-source library that you're using, a vulnerability was found, and you use it in these four applications." It immediately tells us we are exposed to risk and in which areas. That happens, not in near real-time, but very quickly, where before, there was a very painstaking process to try to find that out.
A year ago we didn't have DevOps tools. We started building them after I came on. But Nexus definitely integrates very well with our DevOps tools. Sonatype produces plugins for Jenkins to make it seamlessly interact, not only with the repo product, but with the Nexus IQ product that we own as well. When we build our pipelines, we don't have to go through an array of calls. Even their command-line is almost like pipeline APIs that you can call. It makes it very simple to say "Okay, upload to Nexus." Because Jenkins knows what Nexus is and where it is — since it's configured within the Jenkins system — we can just say, "Upload that to Nexus," and it happens behind the scenes very easily. Before, we would have to either have run Maven commands or run Gradle commands via the shell script to get that done. We don't need to do that sort of thing anymore.
The solution has also brought open-source intelligence and policy enforcement across our SDLC. We have defined policies about certain things at various levels, and what risks we're willing to expose ourselves to. If we're going to proxy a library from Maven Central for example, if the Nexus IQ product says it has a security-critical vulnerability or it's "security high" or it's "component unknown," we can set different actions to happen. We allow our developers to pull down pretty much anything. As they pull something down from say, Maven Central, it is scanned. If it says, "This has a critical vulnerability," we will warn the developer with the report that comes out: "This has a security-critical vulnerability. You're allowed to bring it down in development, but when you try to move to QA or staging, that warning about the 'security-critical' component will turn to a failure action." So as we move our artifacts through that process, there are different stages. When someone tries to move that component to our staging environment, it will say, "Oh no, you can't because of the security-critical thing that we've been warning you about. Now we have to fail you." That's where we get policy enforcement. Before, that was a very manual process where we'd have to go out and say, "Okay, this thing has these vulnerabilities, what do we do with it?" It's much more straightforward and the turnaround time is a whole lot faster.
Automating open-source governance and minimizing risk is exactly what Nexus is for. Our company is very security conscious because we're governed by a number of things including the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which is very stringent in terms of what we can and cannot have, and the level of security for data and information that we maintain. What Nexus does is it allows us to look at the level of risk that we have in an application that we have written and that we expose to the companies that subscribe to us. It's based on the components that we have in the application and what their vulnerabilities are. We can see that very clearly for any application we have. Suppose, all of a sudden, that a Zero-day vulnerability — which is really bad — is found in JAXB today. We can immediately look for that version in Nexus. We can see: Do we have that? Yes, we do. Are we using it? Yes, we are. What applications are we using it in? We can see it's in this and that application and we can turn one of our teams to it and get them to address it right away.
I don't know exactly how much time it has saved us in releasing secure apps to market, but it's considerable. I would estimate it saves us weeks to a month, or more, depending upon the scope of a project.
And it has definitely increased developer productivity. They spend a lot less time looking for components or libraries that they can download. There was a very manual process to go through, before Nexus, if they wanted to use a particular open-source library. They had to submit a request and it had to go through a bunch of reviews to make sure that it didn't have vulnerabilities in it, and then they could get a "yes" or "no" answer. That took a lot of time. Whereas now, we allow them to download it and start working with it while other teams — like our enterprise security team — look at the vulnerabilities associated with it. That team will say, "Yeah, we can live with that," or "No, you have to mitigate that," or "No, you can't use this at all." We find that out very much earlier in the process now.
It allows us to shift gears or shift directions. If we find a component that's so flawed that we don't even want to bring it into the organization from a security standpoint, we can pivot and say, "Okay, we'll use this other component. It doesn't do everything we needed, but it's much more solid."
What is most valuable?
I won't say there aren't a ton of features, but primarily we use it as an artifact repository. Some of the more profound features include the REST APIs. We tend to make use of those a lot. They also have a plugin for our CI/CD; we use Jenkins to do continuous integration, and it makes our pipeline build a lot more streamlined. It integrates with Jenkins very well.
The default policies and the policy engine provide the flexibility we need. The default policy was good enough for us. We didn't really mess with it. We left it alone because the default policy engine pretty much works for our use cases.
The integrations into developer tooling work just fine. We primarily use Gradle to build our applications. We just point the URL to what we call our "public repository group" in Nexus. It's a front for everything, so it can see all of the other underlying repositories. Our developers, in their Gradle builds, just point them to this public repository and they can pull down any dependency that they need. It doesn't really integrate with our IDE. It's just simply that we use Gradle and it makes it very straightforward.
Nexus blocks undesirable open-source components from entering our development lifecycle because of the IQ policy actions. We define what sort of level of risk we're willing to take. For example for "security-critical," we could just fail them across the board; we don't want anything that has a security-critical. That's something we define as a CVE security number of nine or 10. If it has a known vulnerability of nine or 10 we could even stop it from coming down from Maven Central; it's quarantined because it has a problem that we don't want to even introduce into our network. We've also created our own policy that we call an "architecture blacklist," which means we don't want certain components to be used from an architectural standpoint. For example, we don't want anybody to build anything with Struts 1. We put it on the architecture blacklist. If a component comes in and it has that tag, it fails immediately.
What needs improvement?
Some of the APIs are just REST APIs and I would like to see more of the functionality in the plugin side of the world. For example, with the RESTful API I can actually delete or move an artifact from one Nexus repository to another. I can't do that with the pipeline API, as of yet. I'd like to see a bit more functionality on that side.
For how long have I used the solution?
I, personally, have used Nexus for a number of years. I have been with my current company, MIB, for just over a year. We brought it in just over a year ago right after I started.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I've had no trouble with it. We're currently running it even on a single server and we don't have many problems with it. It seems very easy to move into what we call a high-availability mode. Upgrades to a new version are done within a 30-minute timeframe, so we can easily schedule them.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Even though we don't employ it in a high-availability mode, looking at the documentation, it's very easy to scale out. You can put up multiple servers and point them at the same shared file system. Sonatype also has a cloud offering if you want to go completely hands-off. But it seems to scale very well. We haven't had to scale it yet, but it seems very straightforward to do so.
How are customer service and support?
We talk with John Burke, our rep at Sonatype. He was originally our sales rep and now he's their regional sales director and we have a new sales rep. But we still keep in very close contact with John.
Sonatype also has a concept, a position called a success engineer. We have regular meetings every two weeks with a representative from Sonatype. We talk about our implementation, where we are, where we want to go, and how we can get to the point that we need to be at. We are still very engaged with them.
Technical support is great. But because we also have this customer success engineer, a lot of times if we have questions on how something works, we can ask him. While he's not a technical expert, he's a very good end-user person. He can say, if we need to change how a policy works or we want to do this or that, "Well here, you go in here and you do that." We get some ongoing customer support from that customer success engineer.
We have only set up two technical support tickets with them and they've been pretty good about them. I have nothing bad to say about the technical support. They've stepped up when we have needed them to.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We weren't using anything prior to this.
How was the initial setup?
Having set it up myself in previous companies, I know there are ways to set it up that are easy. You can just drop a .war file into a Tomcat container and you're set up. You then just have some configuration to deal with.
We didn't do that. We set it up as a process on a host server and set it up with specific memory and a very specific file system for it. We had help with that from Sonatype. We had a Professional Services person here who set that up with us.
We were done in one day. From downloading the executable, to running it, to installing it, to having it set up and configured, it was done in a day, but again, we had Professional Services here for that day.
Our strategy was to implement the repository first. But we also added Nexus IQ. Sonatype has best practices for this and, while we were close to what they offered, we weren't exactly it. So both of those servers are on the same physical hardware. Sonatype recommends separating Repository and IQ Server on different servers, but we didn't do that. Our implementation isn't fast enough to really warrant that. We're a smaller shop so we don't really need that vastness of setup.
What about the implementation team?
The person who came out to help us actually runs Sonatype's customer service center. We keep in very close contact with them.
What was our ROI?
In the productivity, and the turnaround time of producing new applications and updating old applications, the return on investment is that it takes much less time to add features or produce a new product out to our subscribers than it did before. That allows us, obviously, to start billing for those services sooner. Without Nexus, it would take a considerably greater amount of time. Our return on investment is based upon how many applications we bring out and the turnaround time of the development team.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not involved in the financial aspects, but I don't think it's overly expensive. We use the professional version. There's an open-source version that would cost us next to nothing, but we do use the professional version.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did look at Artifactory and one other solution when we were doing our due diligence before picking a product. We did a proof of concept for Artifactory, but we ended up choosing this one.
What other advice do I have?
Nexus Repository is a very specific product. It does very specific things. It's an artifact repository. I would suggest, if you're starting out, to start out with the open-source version and see if it meets your day-to-day needs. If it does, as you start to use it your development teams come to rely on it and it becomes one of those things that if it were to go down, all of your development would stop. So it mandates you to look at the professional version so that you get some backend support from Sonatype in the case that something should happen to it.
Our company, as a whole, has about 150 employees, but not everybody uses it. There's a group repository that's open and anyone can go to it. You can pull down anything you want, anonymously. You don't even have to log in. But there are very few people — four Nexus admins — who can upload stuff. And on our continuous integration server, Jenkins, those four are the only users who can upload anything or push anything into the repository. Our developers don't push anything into the repository. They build some stuff, they check it into Source Control, and then the continuous integration engine sees that, picks it up, builds it, takes the artifacts, and puts them into Nexus. The lion's share of the users who use it are pulling stuff down from it to their desktops and into their IDEs. There are about 25 of those users. They use it to pull dependencies and other things and then they check it into a source code repo and Jenkins takes over from there and does the building and the deploying, etc.
For maintenance and deployment, we usually have a staff of two, although we currently have only one. I will back-fill that as needed. But there's really no maintenance that we have to do to, other than updating to newer versions from time to time.
I would rate it at about a nine out of 10. A perfect 10 comes from what I mentioned earlier. I would like to see a little bit more functionality from the CI plugin aspect. I'd like to be able to do more of what I can do with the REST APIs, in the plugin, so I could automate some of those tasks. But that's the only negative thing I have to say about it.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
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