We happily use containers as a way of scaling out microservices so we use Nexus Repository for the management of containers, as a kind of repository. That's about 50 percent of what we use it for. The other side is that it is used for application and development artifacts. We use it to track artifacts in a repository so we can deploy software code. It's not a code library because we GitLab as well. It's more for the compartmentalized aspect that fits in and we can redeploy those on-demand.
The way we deploy it is private cloud, ultimately. We have an internal cloud infrastructure that we operate and the Nexus platform sits inside it. We are looking at ideas around integrating this into AWS right now, because we are doing a huge kind of transformation project to move a lot of our on-prem services into public cloud. We're looking at that whole "bridge" between the cloud and on-prem and how we deal with that. That's something of a stepping-stone before we can take everything back into the cloud. I think Nexus Repository will eventually end up there.
The key benefit we get from it is speed to delivery. It has improved our overall time to get new applications out with new code. That's true whether from a platform perspective, where we are quickly deploying up-to-date Docker containers, or whether we are looking to deploy new code out to deliver a new application. That whole release cycle is vastly improved. The way we've automated a lot of our processing, particularly with us being very much a cloud-centric organization, it helps with our ability to deliver code and then scale out as we need to.
Initially, we did a deal with Sonatype to get a small number going to see what the general, intangible benefits were. The developers were certainly happy with the way our product was working. And then there was fact that we had more control of it, being on a computer on somebody's desk, that it was more centrally managed. I do have a really strong feeling that if we took it away, overall productivity would drop off. How much? I don't know but it certainly would drop off. We would probably lose people as well, since they like the tool.
We did a survey, a tool-chain analysis across the whole company, because we've got many different tools doing all sorts of similar things. At the top of the chart, in terms of people loving them, across the business — in particular the developers — were GitLab and Nexus. Nexus Repository is seen as a key, useful, strategic tool that we use here.