Once we [migrated to Cloudsmith and] stopped having outages and operational issues, our team was totally free to focus on higher-value tasks instead of maintaining our artifact repository.
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.
When we started off with our self-hosted artifact repository we had 7 microservices which was fine but when we approached the 40 something mark, that’s when things started to fall apart. We now have 100+ microservices in production with Cloudsmith and we’re scaling with ease.
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.
Our self-hosted artifact repository eventually ran out of hard drive space and we couldn’t fix it. We extended the disk the first time that happened. Meanwhile, the entire engineering team was experiencing downtime while our IT guys were struggling to figure this out. And it kept happening again and again; four times in total. The size of the repo, even after deleting data, eventually ended up dwarfing the size of our other backups.
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.
Our primary goal was to eliminate the overhead of managing a self-hosted solution while improving security, scalability, and performance.
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.
The fact that it [Cloudsmith] just works. We no longer waste time managing an artifact repository—Cloudsmith handles it for us, and that’s exactly what we needed.
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.
Cloudsmith’s support team was excellent. They were always responsive and proactive. They made migration seamless and were with us every step of the way, troubleshooting issues in real-time via Slack.
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.
Continuous Integration begins with source code and ends when a tested, versioned artifact is published to Cloudsmith. From there, Continuous Deployment takes over, pulling that exact artifact through QA and into production. And it’s not just our own code: Cloudsmith also serves as the source of our vetted dependencies, giving us a stable, known-good supply of packages and libraries, free from the churn of upstream changes.
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.
Artifact management is a critical but often overlooked component of DevOps. Investing in a cloud-native solution like Cloudsmith has saved us significant operational pain and positioned us well for long-term scalability.
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.
"It was easy to integrate Cloudsmith with our pipelines and we really liked the way they [Cloudsmith] formatted repo’s. We got a lot of velocity from just having it organised the way it was recommended for their product."
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.
"When we first onboarded. I remember asking what is the best way to organise our repo’s? and the [Cloudsmith] team came back with two or three archetypes [repository templates] which gave us different options for how we could structure our repo’s - that was really helpful."
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.
The usability is great, I’m a release manager so I'm in the product at least 5 to 10 times a day and I find it really easy to use; I never struggle to find anything.
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.
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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. They migrated to Cloudsmith to ensure they had a cloud-native solution that integrated seamlessly into their DevOps pipeline. Read about how they eliminated downtime, scaled effortlessly, and freed up their team to focus on an increased number of micro-services.
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