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Sonatype Nexus Repository 3.30: Microsoft Azure Blob Storage support for expanded cloud deployments

We are excited to announce Azure Blob Storage support with Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro available in 3.30 release! Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro users can now manage and deploy their critical infrastructure on Microsoft's Azure Cloud Platform. As cloud-native architecture continues to impact DevOps teams with container orchestration and management, immutable infrastructure, and faster application development, Sonatype Nexus Repository delivers secure, cloud-based storage for all your components and artifact binaries. Organizations of all sizes are turning to Sonatype to scale their traditional on-premise infrastructure to the cloud.

Key highlights for Azure Blob Storage support in Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro:

  • Faster speeds for development teams accessing artifacts
  • Expanded cloud native storage
  • On-prem to cloud infrastructure deployments
  • Scalability with unlimited storage capacity
  • Modern DevOps workflow with native support for Azure Managed Identity
  • Disaster Recovery and redundancy capabilities
  • Azure Public Cloud + Azure Gov Cloud support
  • Enhanced security and authentication across development teams

Whether your teams have a business mandate to move all infrastructure to Microsoft Azure or it's the beginning of your journey for storing and managing your development pipelines in the cloud, we are excited to see the continued growth of Sonatype Nexus Repository customers gaining the benefits of native support for Azure Blob Storage!

How to create blob stores on Azure Cloud Storage using Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro

In the latest release, Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro provides built-in support of reading and writing to Azure Blob Storage. An Azure Blob Store saves blobs as objects within a storage account container on Microsoft Azure. Binaries are stored as Block Blobs to provide the best performance and storage flexibility. For a walk through of how to create blob stores using Azure Cloud Storage, check out the demo video below.

Requirements:

  • Azure Blob Storage is only recommended for Sonatype Nexus Repository installations hosted in Azure.
  • The Azure Blob Store should be in the same Azure region as the Sonatype Nexus Repo installation. Using different regions will result in unacceptably slow performance.

Benefits of native blob store support on Azure

Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro users can now use native blob store support on Azure to easily store and manage components and build artifacts in Azure Cloud Storage. Our customers range from small development shops to enterprise DevOps teams with thousands of deployments daily pushing limits on disk space and storage.

Digital transformations from on-premise to the cloud can bring challenges of secure authentication and security and achieving faster access to artifacts and component accessibility for global teams. Unlike other repository managers in the market, Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro provides customers the following benefits to overcome these challenges while delivering expanded cloud platform deployments in Azure Cloud Storage:

Faster access to components and artifacts for increased development speeds - Sonatype Nexus Repository customers are seeing up to 25% faster speeds when receiving files from Azure Blob Storage. Some organizations are planning to deploy Sonatype Nexus Repository in two different regions and need to continue to meet fast deployments and speed-to-market.

Enterprise scalability with unlimited storage capacity - By leveraging Azure Blob Storage, and specifically General-purpose V2 Storage Account Type, up to 500TB of storage is available per Storage Account.

DevOps-friendly workflows - Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro can natively take advantage of the Managed Identity of Azure to authenticate and authorize access without persisting any username/password in Sonatype Nexus Repository Manager. This decouples the specific Azure Storage Account security settings from the Sonatype Nexus Repository instance, increasing the security while supporting modern DevOps practices.

Disaster Recovery support - Leveraging Azure’s Storage Account Redundancy options, Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro customers can persist their binaries in multiple locations (ZRS, GRS, GZRS) to facilitate better disaster recovery practices.

Azure Public Cloud + Azure Gov Cloud support - Azure Blob Storage can be accessed using a set of Azure Endpoints. In the public cloud, <account>.azure.core.windows.net can be used. For customers using the private Azure Gov Cloud, a different endpoint host is provided by Azure (blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net) to make the files stored in these private accounts more secure.

Easy-to-Use Configuration UI - Administrators can configure Azure Blob Stores via a consistent and intuitive user interface.

Enhanced security and authentication across development teams - Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro stores Account Name/Account Key in the configuration database, making it more difficult for unauthorized access.

We are excited for Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro users and the expanded cloud support for deploying infrastructure on Azure Cloud Storage. For more information, please reach out to our Nexus Repository product teams on our Sonatype Community and check out the additional documentation resources below.

Azure Blob Storage
Sonatype Nexus Repository Storage Guide

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Written by Brent Kostak

Brent is the Director of Product Marketing connecting developers and DevOps communities to Sonatype Nexus tools and technologies.