With ProGet, five°degrees Manages Hundreds of Packages and Dozens of Clients Daily

five°degrees chose ProGet to manage both their internal NuGet packages and their clients’ NuGet feeds. Although they use ProGet’s features narrowly, they use ProGet to manage hundreds of packages every day.

five°degrees is a use-case how easy it is to onboard ProGet with almost no outside assistance and with zero additional staff. Their ProGet configuration also shows how a multi-client configuration can still be totally secure.

Key Technologies:

ProGet Basic | SQL

Key ProGet Features:

NuGet feeds | Security and access controls | Connectors | Retention rules | ProGet API

Customer Profile

Working in the banking and financial industry, five°degrees has to prioritize security without compromising on speed. Their mission is “to provide banks and financial service providers with a way to bridge the gap between the old and the new world by adopting digitization and automation.”

The Need

five°degrees uses .NET development and relies daily on NuGet packages. And they must support all internal teams and all their clients. five°degrees needed a private NuGet server that would keep their clients separate and would simplify the package-sharing process.

When they began using NuGet packages in late 2015, five°degrees had no budget for new tools. They had to assess solutions that would meet their needs – for free.

After evaluation, ProGet emerged as the best choice due to:
– Flexible configurations (five°degrees now combines ProGet Free & Basic to do their work)
– Mature private repository
– Robust feature set, even in free forever version
– Fast indexing speeds
– Feed separation
– Simple NuGet distribution
– Smooth onboarding using current staff

Onboarding ProGet

Do-it-yourself

Other solutions may take months to fully onboard, even with the help of a consultant. But five°degrees implemented ProGet with minimal difficulty, no ticket-worthy problems, and completely without Inedo experts’ intervention. As a do-it-yourself team, five°degrees used ProGet’s simple UI and Inedo’s clear documentation to overcome challenges independently.

In their five years using ProGet, five°degrees has had to contact Inedo support less than once a year for help. They required no specialized staff or professional services to onboard ProGet, and they even perform upgrades independently, thanks to Inedo documentation and the Inedo Hub.

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Easy QA, Even to External Clients

five°degrees onboarded ProGet not just internally but also to their clients. Clients set up proxies within their own ProGet instance, allowing five°degrees to use connectors to share packages with clients securely.

By using an internal development environment build feed in ProGet (connected with build tools like TeamCity, Azure DevOps, and OctopusDeploy) and using package promotion, the five°degrees development and release teams create and test NuGet packages, for both internal and client use, totally separate from production instances. After validation, packages are promoted to production or to clients in just seconds with ProGet.

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Security and Access Controls

ProGet lets five°degrees create a near-custom configuration between five°degrees and their clients without compromising security. They can enforce strict separation between users and feeds in under a minute, allowing clients to access only what they need and no more.

In addition, ProGet’s LDAP/AD integration makes makes managing staff access to the internal development feeds quick and easy by using existing teams and roles.

Improvement Facts

– Fast, regular, and independent ProGet updates by using the Inedo Hub and Upgrade Notes
– Daily database releases as NuGet packages
– Daily management of 30-50 feeds and hundreds of packages/components
– Organized internal feeds by configuring retention rules
– Two to three years of release products/packages kept organized and accessible to clients

Next Steps

five°degrees is continuously working to improve its deployment pipelines and automation by leveraging ProGet’s features. Examples of features and benefits they have been evaluating include:
– how ProGet’s webhooks can increase efficiency
– how vulnerability scanning and blocking can increase efficiency and quality
– whether containerized development, a top feature in ProGet 5.3, will work for them to simplify deployments.

“We’ve been very happy. I think the biggest win on our side is that distribution became simpler for us and deployment on the client side therefore became easier. Our teams just need to publish, and the package is available to all clients that should have access to it on the spot.”

—James Devine, Head IT, QA & Release Management