Central is a critical resource for developers. If you develop Java applications and use Maven, Gradle, or Ivy, Central is what has made it easy for you to consume libraries using dependency declarations in your builds. For more than a decade, Central has been a solid, reliable presence supporting the community and making it easier not just for developers to consume software but also for open source projects to distribute software to the public. Before Central, assembling the dependencies and components that went into your project was a pain in the neck; after Central, the process of downloading dependencies became automatic.
Only a few years ago, Central was a single Dell server running in a Contegix datacenter in St. Louis (you can see it here). From 2007 to 2011 the server was used 12 billion times by 14.3 million unique IP addresses, and since then traffic from a world of developers has only continued to increase. Over the years we've invested in both capacity and stability improvements, but today I'm announcing what I consider to be the biggest improvement to date.
Today we announced an agreement with EdgeCast Networks. EdgeCast Networks is a CDN with global reach that we are going to use to both accelerate the delivery and increase the availability of Central. Every Java developer who uses Maven, Gradle, or Ivy (possibly every Java developer in the world) will see immediate improvements in the speed of Central. Index downloads and artifact downloads will be served from one of EdgeCast's 21 points of presence distributed over four continents. Your builds are going to run faster because of Sonatype's agreement with EdgeCast.
In addition to this, Sonatype Nexus Pro customers will now have access to end-to-end Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, bringing a greater level of security to their software development processes.
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