The New England Center for Children

The New England Center for Children® (NECC®) is a globally recognized autism education center and research institute. NECC’s educational software system, Autism Curriculum Encyclopedia® (ACE®), is designed to support evidence-based learning for individuals with autism.

Through ACE®, the NECC provides teachers and therapists with data-driven tools to enhance individualized instruction and track progress effectively. The platform supports all of their teaching staff in the US and abroad and is at the core of the services they provide to clients. In 2021, NECC celebrated reaching over 10,000 learners through ACE®, so now more than ever they recognize the crucial need to deliver their curriculum in an efficient, smooth and engaging way, with no outages.

As NECC continued to add more microservices to the ACE® platform and scale their operations, the development team faced significant challenges with their previous self-hosted, artifact repository.

Faced with scalability issues like slow artifact retrieval, indexing delays, storage bloat, maintenance of back-ups, and multi-day outages, NECC sought a cloud-native solution.

For years, NECC relied on its self-hosted artifact repository. While it initially met their needs, they ran into trouble as they continued to scale their cloud infrastructure with an eye towards AWS. They recognised that migrating to a cloud-native artifact management solution would enable them to keep up with the demands of their expanding infrastructure and growing number of microservices.

NECC knew they needed a solution that would scale with their needs and ease their operational burden. Moving to the cloud was the next logical step, but they needed an artifact management system that would integrate seamlessly into their DevOps pipeline.

The backups for the artifact repository forced NECC’s hard drives to run out of space. Fixing it meant manually extending disks and lengthy delays for the Engineering teams as IT struggled to resolve the problems. This happened multiple times and incurred days of downtime. This disruption was unacceptable and the NECC team knew they had to find a more efficient, scalable solution.

As part of their requirements, they decided to look for a Cloud-native artifact management platform that would integrate seamlessly with their CI/CD pipelines and keep their software supply chain secure.

In April 2024, NECC migrated to Cloudsmith’s fully-managed artifact management platform with built-in pipeline integration and the move took just one month. Cloudsmith provided the seamless, scalable, and secure artifact management system they needed, accelerating their DevOps processes and improving productivity across their global teams.

NECC needed to migrate to an artifact management platform that aligned perfectly with their DevOps philosophy. This required supporting their globally distributed engineering team and their commitment to secure, reproducible software delivery. What was once an afterthought, managing artifacts, soon became a first-class component of their development pipeline.

NECC’s DevOps pipeline was designed to produce one build per commit, and that exact binary is what moves through QA and ultimately into production. They didn’t rebuild for each stage – by design, which gave them strong traceability and confidence that what they tested is exactly what they ship. Cloudsmith’s platform, set up as a single source of truth, enabled them to continue this model of traceability.

No more outages. Invisible scaling. Quick retrieval. The operational stability of Cloudsmith allowed NECC to focus on development rather than managing a broken artifact system.

Cloudsmith's fast artifact retrieval, global distribution points (over 600 points of presence globally), and caching ensured builds were faster and more reliable—even for teams located in South America.

Cloudsmith’s stable infrastructure ended the cycle of outages and downtime that had plagued NECC’s DevOps pipeline. The IT team was freed from the constant firefighting associated with maintaining a slow, self-hosted solution.

Cloudsmith’s impact extended beyond just artifact management. As NECC continued to scale their cloud infrastructure on AWS, they began utilizing Cloudsmith's built-in dependency proxying and vulnerability scanning, SSO integration, and enterprise-grade security practices to further enhance their DevSecOps posture. By integrating these tools with existing systems like Snyk, NECC was able to strengthen security and maintain compliance.

Transitioning to Cloudsmith has ensured that NECC has one powerful, single solution to manage all their software assets, eliminating the need for multiple tools and complex configurations. Cloudsmith’s native support for Docker, Python, Maven, and NPM allowed NECC to quickly integrate their artifact management into existing build and CI/CD pipelines, streamlining the entire development process.

Finally, Cloudsmith’s intuitive UI transformed the way NECC’s teams interacted with their artifact management system, something that often gets taken for granted. Gone were the days of the NECC team wrestling with complex, unintuitive interfaces. With Cloudsmith, the NECC team was able to easily get started and discover new features without a steep learning curve.

Whether it was managing repositories or leveraging advanced integrations, the simple and user-friendly design allowed NECC’s engineers and release managers to pick up new workflows quickly and confidently.

Cloudsmith helped NECC move beyond the operational strain of operating a self-hosted artifact repository, providing a cloud-native solution that’s fast, scalable, secure, and easy to use. The result? Faster builds, zero downtime, improved performance, and a smoother, scalable DevOps process. This migration to Cloudsmith empowered NECC to focus on what truly matters—delivering exceptional services for children with autism—without worrying about the technical challenges of managing a self-hosted artifact repository.

As they continue to close their cloud infrastructure on AWS, they’d also like to leverage Cloudsmith’s security scanning tools to augment what they are already doing with Snyk and other tools to strengthen their DevSecOps posture.

Ready for a smoother DevOps experience? Just like NECC, you can streamline your workflows, eliminate downtime, and scale with ease. Book a demo now and let Cloudsmith do the heavy lifting, so your team can focus on what truly matters.