Kyle Allan is on the deployment automation team at Riot Games -- maker of the most played PC game in the world: League of Legends. This multiplayer 24/7 game runs at servers all over the world, from the U.S. to Europe, and from Australia to Southeast Asia.
Riot Games was looking for a service to store artifacts and then distribute their code onto various machines in their global datacenters. From his pre-Riot Games life as a Java engineer, Kyle knew Sonatype’s Nexus was powerful for handling JARs. So he decided to explore how to use it for other types of artifacts, including tar, RPM, and WAR files.
Finding success with these other formats, Kyle decided that he could automate non-Java artifact uploads into Nexus using Chef. You can take a look at the Nexus cookbook Kyle wrote using Chef here: https://github.com/RiotGames/nexus-cookbook.
In addition to creating a Chef cookbook, Kyle also uses the Smart Proxy feature within Nexus Pro to synchronize game releases across multiple datacenter around the world. "Our biggest gain from Nexus is the Smart Proxy functionality", states Kyle as he discusses moving large files between data centers that are sometimes 5000 miles apart, while avoiding downtime during deploys for their gamers.
To learn more about using Nexus with Chef, hop onto our video session with Kyle where he gave us a tour of his work.
image credits: http://bit.ly/1GOWpKy, http://bit.ly/1oLlaBA
